Jonathan Steinberg, Bismarck: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 592 pp., $34.95.

[amazon 0199782520 full]ON AUGUST 4, 1898, the German Jewish theater critic Alfred Kerr wrote a dispatch about the death of Otto von Bismarck. Ever since the impetuous young Kaiser Wilhelm II had abruptly dismissed Bismarck in March 1890—an episode famously depicted by Punch magazine as “dropping the pilot”—the aggrieved squire had immured himself at Friedrichsruh, his Pomeranian country estate near Hamburg. Now Kerr, who three decades later would flee Nazi Germany for England, expressed the sense of loss and unease pervading the German empire Bismarck had forged under Prussian leadership:

On Sunday morning you knew that he was dead. A newspaper hangs on the wall, you take it down and want to turn the first page in an unconcerned manner and read the news of his departure. A shiver and tremor possess you—even if you don’t want them to. In this second you experience, even if a sense of hatred against him was the basic impulse, how deeply you resentfully loved him. A piece of Germany has sunk into the streams of world events for all eternity. Travel safely.¹

It should not be surprising that Bismarck would have evoked such conflicting emotions. From the outset of his career, he was a figure of contradictions as gargantuan as his appetite: a conservative who introduced universal suffrage; an East Elbian landholder who helped launch an industrial revolution; a diplomat who never served in the military but strode around in a yellow cuirassier uniform; an empire builder who forswore further imperial projects; a foe of socialism who introduced the social-welfare state; and a crybaby who unsentimentally destroyed the career of anyone who threatened to cross him. He ended up a grumpy old man, but it was Bismarck’s drive and magnetism, more than anything else, which allowed him—a chancellor who had no real basis of power other than his hold on King William—to reshape the destiny of Prussia and Europe.

At the start of the nineteenth century, the notion that Prussia would emerge as a great power in Europe would have seemed quite fanciful. Where France had progressively united its provinces since the Middle Ages, Germany had followed the opposite path. The House of Hohenzollern launched its first real bid for power under Frederick the Great, who helped trigger the Seven Years’ War in 1756 after snatching Silesia from Holy Roman Empress Maria Theresa over a decade earlier. But Napoléon almost put the dynasty out of business, forcing Frederick William III and Queen Louise to flee eastward. Under the 1807 Treaty of Tilsit, Prussia lost almost half of its territory. It was the War of Liberation, or the “Prussian Rising,” as it was known—a vast upsurge of patriotism that included, to the discomfiture of the Prussian armed forces, free corps—that led to the reconstitution of Prussia and Napoléon’s final defeat. Overnight, the question of a German national identity enjoyed a rebirth.

Bismarck was at the core of debates about what Prussia and Germany were supposed to epitomize. For some he personified the noble hero who, in a mere decade, created the empire that Germans had been longing for ever since the days of Frederick Barbarossa (legend has it that the sleeping kaiser lies resting in the mountains of Kyffhäuser with his knights, waiting to reunite Germany after the ravens stop flying around him). For others, such as Theodor Fontane, the novelist who chronicled Prussian society, the new empire was not an unalloyed triumph. It destroyed the ancient and valorous virtues of Preussentum: stern abstinence and self-effacement were replaced by braggadocio and preening; landowners by nouveau riche industrialists. There was good reason for apprehension. The modern parallel to the brash Wilhelm II succeeding his cautious father in 1888 would be George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush.

In retirement Bismarck achieved a public popularity that he never really enjoyed in office. Political parties began to invoke his name. Monuments were built in his honor. By the early twentieth century, his role as national icon was so entrenched that the city of Hamburg erected a colossal statue of a bareheaded Bismarck holding a sword. As the historian Thomas Nipperdey observed, the monument was supposed to function as a form of “political protest” directed “against pathos and prestige, exhibitionism and a craving for renown.” If so, the rebuke failed. Kaiser Wilhelm II plunged Germany into the abyss of World War I. And though by November 1918 the last German emperor may have fled to Holland (where he devoted himself to cultivating roses), the myth of Prussia was alive and well—ready for exploitation by the Nazis. The newly appointed chancellor Adolf Hitler met World War I hero and president Paul von Hindenburg in a public ceremony on March 21, 1933 (at the Garrison Church, where Frederick the Great was buried) that symbolized the fusion of Nazism with ancient Prussian military traditions. Two days later, the Reichstag gathered in the Kroll Opera House, surrounded by baying storm troopers, to approve the Enabling Act, legally snuffing out the Weimar Republic and vouchsafing the Austrian corporal dictatorial powers. Soon the Nazis disseminated pictures displaying the profiles of Frederick the Great, Bismarck and Hitler, suggesting an unbroken tradition between Prussia and the National Socialists. In reality, the Third Reich and the old aristocracy despised each other; Hitler simply outwitted his adversaries, using them for his own ends, then killed many of the Prussian blue bloods after they staged a failed assassination plot called Operation Valkyrie on July 20, 1944. After World War II, the cult of Prussia came to an official end. In the Communist East, it was depicted as the culprit for everything bad in German history. And in the West, the Allied Control Council declared that “the Prussian state, which from early days has been a bearer of militarism and reaction in Germany, has ceased to exist,” and officially abolished it.

But when Germany reunified in 1990, these questions of whether there was something innately perfidious in Germany’s past that prompted it to elevate the state above the citizen and predisposed it to totalitarian dictatorship once more bubbled to the surface. The old Adam of German nationalism was again descried by some overly anxious pundits and European politicians. British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, for example, summoned several leading historians to Chequers to discuss whether or not the Germans suffered from nasty, enduring national characteristics. In his memoir, Five Germanys I Have Known, Fritz Stern recounts that Thatcher was firmly stuck in the past: she saw the Germans as “dangerous by tradition and character. . . . At the end, thanking us, the prime minister clapped her hands in a schoolgirl gesture, mischievously promising us, ‘I’ll be so nice to the Germans! I’ll be so nice to the Germans!’”²

IF THE Iron Lady saw the specter of a military feudal order returning to power in a new Greater Germany intent on bullying its neighbors, she couldn’t have had it more wrong. It is one of the many merits of Jonathan Steinberg’s new biography of Bismarck that it reminds us of the immense distance that the Federal Republic has traveled from the days of the Iron Chancellor. Bismarck has been the subject of many biographies, including a sympathetic one by A. J. P. Taylor, but none has succeeded in capturing his remarkable personality and career as vividly as Steinberg’s. He has drawn on a wide range of documents and memoirs penned by Bismarck’s contemporaries, including the discerning Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Spitzemberg, to reproduce not simply the statesman but also his milieu. Indeed, more than any other previous scholar, Steinberg pays close attention to Bismarck’s personality, concluding “it was Bismarck’s tragedy—and Germany’s—that he never learned how to be a proper Christian, had no understanding of the virtue of humility, and still less about the interaction of his sick body and sick soul.” What Bismarck did understand was provoking feuds and quarrels that led to wars that served what he perceived as Prussia’s true national interests.

Bismarck was born into the landed Junker class on April 1, 1815. The “von” was critical to his career. As Bismarck’s lifelong friend John Lothrop Motley, a Boston aristocrat who went on to become a well-known historian and ambassador to Vienna, wrote to his parents in 1833: “one can very properly divide the Germans into two classes: the Vons and the non Vons.” Not until the Nazis, who carried out what the American historian David Schoenbaum has correctly called a “social revolution,” were these class distinctions largely effaced.

Steinberg imaginatively speculates that Bismarck was able to serve William I for decades because he was a sort of surrogate son. “By an uncanny set of circumstances,” he writes:

Bismarck ended up in a kind of permanent parental triangle with his sovereigns, not just once but twice. He saw William I of Prussia as a kindly but weak man and his Queen and later Empress Augusta as an all-powerful, devious, and malevolent figure.

It was his own family history all over again. Bismarck’s relations with his parents were troubled. He loved his father, Ferdinand, but viewed him as an ineffectual weakling; his domineering mother, Wilhelmine, he resented for her emotional detachment. “As a small child I hated her; later I successfully deceived her with falsehoods,” he wrote. It is tempting to trace Bismarck’s later emotional turbulence—gluttony, rage, despair and exhilaration—back directly to his childhood, a temptation that Steinberg does not resist. But he makes a very strong case that Bismarck’s personality was decisively shaped at an early age, both for good and ill.

How otherwise, Steinberg observes, to explain the fact that Motley, who first met Bismarck at the University of Göttingen, turned the seventeen-year-old freshman into a character called Otto von Rabenmark in his 1839 novel Morton’s Hope? Rabenmark is “gifted with talents and acquirements immeasurably beyond his years” and makes a name for himself by insulting the members of the dueling fraternity. In a country where the Schmiss, the dueling scar, is the highest honor a university student can display, daring and conflict are Rabenmark’s watchwords. He announces:

After I had cut off the senior’s nose, sliced off the con-senior’s upper lip, moustachios and all, besides bestowing less severe marks of affection on the others, the whole club in admiration of my prowess and desiring to secure the services of so valorous a combatant voted me in by acclamation . . . I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life. You see I am a very rational sort of person now and you would hardly take me for the crazy mountebank you met in the street half-an hour ago. But then I see that this is the way to obtain superiority. I determined at once on arriving at the university, that to obtain mastery over my competitors, who were all, extravagant, savage, eccentric, I had to be ten times as extravagant and savage as any one else.

Hyperbole? Not at all. Steinberg does not mention it, but Mark Twain, who witnessed several ferociously bloody duels in Heidelberg, noted in A Tramp Abroad that “a corps student told me it was of record that Prince Bismarck fought thirty-two of these duels in a single summer term when he was in college. So he fought twenty-nine after his badge had given him the right to retire from the field.”

For all his ambition, Bismarck went nowhere for many years. In 1845 his father’s death meant he had to move to remote Schönhausen to run the family estate. Bismarck, known as the “mad Junker” for his antics, which included firing pistols through the windows at his guests, was bored to tears. He ended up wedding the dour Johanna Friederike Charlotte Dorothea Eleonore von Puttkamer, but his true love was politics. The thirty-two-year-old country squire’s first post was to serve as a member of the Prussian parliament: “Johanna von Puttkamer,” Steinberg writes, “lost her husband’s full attention even before they had formally been married.”

BISMARCK MAY not have had much of a career, but he built close relations with prominent conservatives who were intent on protecting the patrimonial interests of the Junkers. Many of these conservatives believed in a rigorous branch of Lutheranism known as Pietism, which stressed an inward and direct relationship with God. As Steinberg notes:

When the Crown Prince Frederick William came to the throne in 1840, he brought Bismarck’s new friends to power with him and, when the unrest leading to the revolutions of 1848 broke out, his neo-Pietist friends would make Bismarck famous.

This was the circle that would launch his career. And thus his great enemy at the outset was liberalism. He knew that the way to make a name for himself was to denounce it in the most vociferous terms possible. In his maiden speech before the Prussian United Diet of 1847, Bismarck committed the ultimate heresy, at least for pious liberals, by mocking the notion that the War of Liberation had anything in common with the demand for freedom or a constitution. In essence, he was saying that it was nothing more than a bunch of sentimental claptrap. The truth was that the Prussian army had always been very uneasy about the existence of the free corps that had fought against Napoléon and the idealism they embodied. Now he declared,

It does the national honour a poor service . . . if one assumes that the mistreatment and humiliation which the foreign power holders imposed on Prussia were not enough on its own to bring their blood to boiling point and to let all other feelings be drowned out by hatred of the foreigner.

This was vintage Bismarck—contempt for parliament and liberalism. Paranoid, restless and scheming, he constantly searched for real and imaginary enemies who might be trying to stymie or topple him. It was a blood sport, little different from the duels he had fought as a student.

Bismarck’s first opportunity to shine came during the 1848 revolution. Friedrich Wilhelm IV, who veered between truculence and obsequiousness—and between the hawks and the doves—lifted press censorship and assented to a constitution after he learned that Klemens von Metternich had fled Vienna to save his skin. Bismarck was horrified. He told a friend that the king had “an unsteady character . . . if one grabbed him, one came away with a handful of slime.” Bismarck wanted to stage a counterrevolution. The military demurred. What ended up happening was more insidious: Bismarck’s conservative allies established a secret shadow government known as the “camarilla” that sought, at every turn, to vitiate liberal triumphs. At the very same time, the National Assembly in Frankfurt, which was made up of liberal groupings from the farrago of German states and principalities, adopted a constitution. But Friedrich IV spurned its offer of a German imperial crown and tried to create his own confederation called the Erfurt Union. It failed. Friedrich capitulated to Austria in November 1850 and signed the Agreement of Olmütz. Known as the “humiliation of Olmütz,” the pact signified Prussia’s abandonment of any pretension to lead the German states. Instead, Prussia docilely returned to the German Confederation headed by Austria, which had originally been established at the Congress of Vienna in 1815.

In one of his classic realpolitik statements, Bismarck suggested that nationalist grousing about Olmütz was jejune. In retreating, Prussia had made the right move:

Why do great states fight wars today? The only sound basis for a large state is egoism and not romanticism; this is what necessarily distinguishes a large state from a small one. It is not worthy for a large state to fight a war that is not in its own interests. . . . The honour of Prussia does not in my view consist of playing Don Quixote to every offended parliamentary bigwig in Germany who feels his local constitution is in jeopardy.

Now that Prussia had knuckled under to Austria, it needed to send an envoy to Frankfurt, where the German Confederation was based. Bismarck was named Prussian envoy to the federal diet in Frankfurt. His diplomatic path—which would also take him to St. Petersburg, where he became a popular figure among the nobility—had begun.

It was this intersection between domestic and foreign policy that vaulted Bismarck to the twin posts of minister-president and foreign minister of Prussia in 1862. His close friend Albrecht von Roon, the minister of war, had insisted upon expanding the size of the army. King William faced a conundrum: he wanted to implement sweeping reforms that included incorporating the free militias that had fought during the War of Liberation, but the new parliament was balking at paying for them. “That Prussia could easily afford such costs,” writes Steinberg, “had not yet entirely penetrated the consciousness of the tax-paying classes.” The crown and parliament were at an impasse. Roon hammered home the message that only Bismarck could surmount the stalemate, which he did. In his first speech—the famous “blood and iron” one—as minister-president, Bismarck flung down the gauntlet toward Austria, stating that Prussia’s borders were unfavorable for its continued existence. German liberals, who composed the majority of the parliament, were aghast. But Bismarck simply bypassed them. He produced military victories that forced the parliament, in the end, to indemnify the state retroactively. By then, the liberals, who harbored more than a dose of nationalism, were exultant over German unification. But Bismarck’s contempt for parliament meant that the institutions of the state relied on him to function properly.

Consistent with his proclivity for seeking out new alliances, Bismarck was soon to cut his ties with the conservatives. He was a realist par excellence. Before him, politicians, more often than not, at least made a show of following high-minded principles and predicated their partnerships on the basis of religious or political affinities. Not Bismarck. He said such thinking was humbug:

The system of solidarity of the conservative interests of all countries is a dangerous fiction . . . We arrive at a point where we make the whole unhistorical, godless and lawless sovereignty swindle of the German princes into the darling of the Prussian Conservative Party.

To the dismay of pious, conservative Christians, Bismarck, in other words, was perfectly prepared to ally himself with the parvenu emperor Napoléon III to challenge Austrian predominance in Europe. He was equally capable of turning on France. Only when Germany was united in 1871 did Bismarck declare that Prussia was a “satiated” power and that he feared the “nightmare of a coalition” directed against his shiny new creation.

BISMARCK’S STRATEGY was as cunning as it was simple: he saw that nationalism, the great force of the nineteenth century, did not have to be opposed to monarchy. Instead, it could be harnessed and manipulated. He was in many ways a populist conservative, which proved to be anathema to his early backers. He did not want to cede nationalism to the liberals, who championed freedom and democracy. Instead, he wanted to hijack it. His first move was to provoke war in 1864 with Denmark over the northern province of Schleswig-Holstein, which remains part of Germany today. By annexing the territory he was able to stir up nationalist feeling and set the stage for conflict with Austria, which had troops stationed in the region. England watched the march toward war with consternation: Lord Clarendon, the British foreign secretary, wrote, “In the name of all that is rational, decent and humane, what can be the justification of war on the part of Prussia?” One of Bismarck’s early patrons, Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach, a Pietist and lawyer, visited Bismarck in 1866 and concluded, Steinberg writes, that the minister-president had “abandoned any semblance of the rigorous Christian morality which the two brothers Gerlach and many others thought they had discerned in the young Bismarck.” But the Gerlachs (Ludwig and his army-general brother, Leopold) were political dinosaurs; the fastidious Leopold had once reproved Bismarck for visiting Paris, as though a visit to that cosmopolitan city would corrupt him.

Bismarck was on a roll. He concluded a treaty with Italy, which stipulated that it would attack Austria in the event of a Prussian conflict with the empire. To stir up even more trouble for Vienna, he called for universal suffrage. The idea was that the Hapsburg empire, which contained numerous national groups, would be confronted with competing demands for freedom that it could not satisfy. Once again, orthodox Prussians were horrified. But Bismarck believed that even if the parliament was directly elected, he could emasculate it—later on, as the Social Democrats became a mass party, he wanted to repeal universal suffrage. But on the eve of war with Austria in 1866, he told his ambassador in Paris, “In the decisive moment the masses stand by the Monarchy, without distinction whether it has a liberal or conservative direction at that moment.” Liberals and nationalists were happy because Bismarck had defeated the retrograde, Catholic Austrian empire.

Bismarck’s third and final war came against France in 1870. The cause was trivial; the consequences immense. Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern was supposed to become the next Spanish king. The French lashed themselves into a frenzy of indignation. War ensued. Prussia, expert at using trains to deploy its troops quickly, prevailed. Yet it soon found itself bogged down in partisan warfare as French irregulars picked off its forces. Then there was the fall of Napoléon III and the rise of the Paris Commune. Eventually, Prussia bombarded Paris with siege guns. The liberally minded Crown Prince Frederick, married to Queen Victoria’s eldest daughter, confided to his war diary:

What good to us is all power, all martial glory and renown, if hatred and mistrust meet us at every turn, if every step we advance in our development is a subject for suspicion and grudging? Bismarck has made us great and powerful but he has robbed us of our friends, the sympathies of the world, and—our conscience.

Bismarck was at the height of his power. Steinberg’s verdict is unequivocal:

These nine years, and this ‘revolution’, constitute the greatest diplomatic and political achievement by any leader in the last two centuries, for Bismarck accomplished all this without commanding a single soldier, without dominating a vast parliamentary majority, without the support of a mass movement, without any previous experience of government, and in the face of national revulsion at his name and his reputation. This achievement . . . rested on several sets of conflicting characteristics among which brutal, disarming honesty mingled with the wiles and deceits of a confidence man. He played his parts with perfect self-confidence yet mixed them with rage, anxiety, illness, hypochondria, and irrationality.

The German Constitution of 1871 retained Prussian particularism, and so Bismarck rode roughshod over parliament, persecuted his foes, and tried to maintain stability inside and outside the new Reich. His friend Ludwig Bamberger once observed about the Iron Chancellor’s self-confidence, “Prince Bismarck believes firmly and deeply in a God who has the remarkable faculty of always agreeing with him.” Emperor William put it more concisely: “it’s hard to be Kaiser under Bismarck.”

BUT THE speak-softly-and-carry-a-big-stick approach Bismarck wielded in the realm of foreign policy was nowhere to be found when it came to domestic politics. Imagine a Teutonic version of Dick Cheney in power for several decades and you may start to get a sense of what Bismarck meant for his colleagues, for Germany and for its neighbors. To combat his foes, Bismarck found himself resorting to increasingly extreme measures—the Kulturkampf against Catholicism, the battle against the rise of the Social Democrats and the refusal to say anything to counter the contumely heaped upon Jews. It is this last phenomenon that Steinberg brilliantly chronicles. Bismarck was anything but immune to the anti-Semitism that permeated his class, which objected to the rise of Jews in the arts, journalism, banking, finance and industry. The young Kaiser Wilhelm, as the historian John C. G. Röhl has shown, also was a rabid anti-Semite. Steinberg acutely states that anti-Semitism “represented a revulsion of a deeply conservative society against liberalism.” Liberals were well represented in parliament and often opposed Bismarck—and were often Jewish. His hatred of opposition meant that he hated the Jews, to the extent that, in a shameful episode, he actually refused to accept a telegram from the U.S. Congress on the death of the German-Jewish liberal politician and jurist Eduard Lasker hailing his devotion to freedom; in addition, he forbade five cabinet ministers from attending Lasker’s funeral at the Oranienburg Synagogue (which has been newly restored) in Berlin. With his customary capacity for invective, Bismarck referred to the parliament itself as the “Guest House of the Dead Jew.”

In focusing on Bismarck’s unfortunate behavior, Steinberg draws another parallel between Wilhelmine Germany and the Nazi era. He essentially revives an older line of historical inquiry, one which suggested that the traits of absolutism and obedience inculcated in the German population made it susceptible to Nazism. According to Steinberg:

[Bismarck] transmitted an authoritarian, Prussian, semi-absolute monarchy with its cult of force and reverence for the absolute ruler to the twentieth century. Hitler fished it out of the chaos of the Great Depression of 1929–33. He took Bismarck’s office, Chancellor, on 30 January 1933. Once again a “genius” ruled Germany.

So was Bismarck really at fault? Perhaps the earliest such line of argument came during World War I, long before Hitler had even come to power. In a fascinating debate between two estranged brothers, the fissures of German society were exposed. In 1914, Heinrich Mann completed his satirical novel pillorying autocratic rule and nationalism, The Loyal Subject, but could not publish it until November 1918. Its protagonist is Diederich Hessling, the owner of a small factory in Netzig who tyrannizes his workers and could not be more obsequious toward higher authority. Hessling, who noisily trumpets his patriotism and twirls his mustache in imitation of the kaiser, is supposed to epitomize the corruption, servility and empty bombast of the Wilhelmine era. Meanwhile, at war’s end, Thomas Mann wrote Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, a series of murky lucubrations about the power of creative irrationalism and Germany’s need for an authoritarian and anti-Western government, which he later repudiated. As the productions of the two brothers indicate, the notion that there were peculiarly Germanic traits that issued in the Nazi regime is not so easy to wish away. One, Heinrich, was decrying what he saw as the German penchant for power worship; the other, Thomas, was explicitly hailing an anti-Western, antiliberal mode of thought as precisely the feature that signified German greatness (though he would later view the work with a measure of embarrassment).

Steinberg’s is thus a profoundly sobering book that is difficult to read without a mounting sense of apprehension about Bismarck’s accomplishments and legacy. But he may go too far. The danger is of adopting a teleological approach in which later events get read backward into history. Can Nazism really be laid at Prussia’s doorstep? Did Wilhelmine Germany follow a Sonderweg, a special path to modernity that condemned it to launching a genocidal war? As Henry Kissinger observed in his discussion of Steinberg’s work in the New York Times, Bismarck was, at bottom, a cautious conservative who wanted to conserve, not expand, the German Reich. Hitler, by contrast, was a nihilist. The genocidal racism that Hitler espoused was of a different order than Bismarck’s anti-Semitism. Hitler was probably closer to the kind of Napoleonic revolutionary spirit that Bismarck was trying to contain and smother—the impulse to gamble and overthrow the European order. Instead, the Iron Chancellor wished to integrate Prussia into Europe, not unify central Europe—let alone the whole continent—under German hegemony. His successors at the Wilhelmstrasse were not as modest. In entering the Kaiserreich into World War I, his epigones shattered the empire that he had painstakingly erected.

Nevertheless, any system that rested on one man was likely headed for collapse. There was Bismarck, but no such thing as Bismarckianism. Instead of exemplifying a coherent school of foreign policy, he represented an ad hoc approach, based on equal parts wily operator and profound thinker. It was enough to create but not sustain imperial Germany. “The ultimate and terrible irony of Bismarck’s career,” says Steinberg, “lay in his powerlessness.” He was always dependent on the royals for his authority. The wider point is surely that a patriarchal monarchy had itself become almost impossible to reconcile with the resurgent national movements that Bismarck had once attempted to co-opt. The ineptitude of these regimes was exposed by the demands of modern warfare. It was no accident that the Romanov, Hapsburg and Hohenzollern dynasties all crumbled under the stresses of World War I—only to be supplanted by totalitarian regimes.

Were Bismarck to survey today’s Germany, he would doubtless be taken aback to see that it was shorn of East Prussia, Pomerania and Silesia. But perhaps he would not find it odd that Germany has once again become the most powerful country in the heart of Europe, dictating from Berlin not its military but, rather, its economic future. The most that remains of Berlin’s Prussian heritage is an equestrian statue of Frederick the Great, “old Fritz” as he was known, on Unter den Linden. Bismarck has largely vanished from the memories of most Germans. Perhaps that is just as well. He himself asked that the epitaph on his grave should simply read, “A faithful German servant of Kaiser Wilhelm I.”

Jacob Heilbrunn is a senior editor at The National Interest.

¹ Alfred Kerr, Wo Liegt Berlin?: Briefe aus der Reichshauptstadt (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1998), 407.

² Fritz Stern, Five Germanys I Have Known (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2006), 469.

Pullquote: Imagine a Teutonic version of Dick Cheney in power for several decades and you may start to get a sense of what Bismarck meant for his colleagues, for Germany and for its neighbors.Image: Essay Types: Book Review