BISMARCK - PRUSSIA, GERMANY, AND EUROPE

Perhaps nothing is more indicative of an epoch than the way in which it comes to terms with its great personalities. It must certainly come to terms with them if it wants to emerge from their shadow and have a future. When Bismarck stepped off the political stage in 1890, he left with extreme reluctance an arena in which he had played such a major role until the last moment. Yet in public, where his departure had initially been welcomed with obvious relief even among his closest party associates, he shortly thereafter became a monument to himself, indeed, a veritable myth.

A process of archaizing his person set in, of carrying him off to a remote heroic age that was much closer to the realm of Germanic legend, to the characters of a Richard Wagner or a Felix Dahn, than to the world of the late nineteenth century. This process was expressed directly in allegorical paintings and, later, primarily in memorials to the "Iron Chancellor." Such monuments appeared by the hundreds in the subsequent two decades, culminating in the one erected in Hamburg in 1906 by Hugo Lederer, who modeled it on the figure of Roland, a legendary Carolingian hero famous for his strength, courage, and chivalrous spirit. But literature and contemporary journalism reflected this process of archaization in many ways, too. In the words of Max Weber, one of the shrewdest observers of the political and social developments and currents of his time, it simultaneneously reinforced the "cold aura of historical transitoriness" that increasingly enveloped Bismarck's person. Describing the scene of the former chancellor's final visit in Berlin, he wrote that it was "as if the Sachsenwald were opening its depths like a modern Kyfflhäuser." In mood and perspective, that view corresponded exactly to what Theodor Fontane called the propensity for "breaking totally with the old" and simultaneously "wanting to restore the ancient." In the anachronistic images of the Germanic warrior, the person and everything connected with his action were both "eliminated" and "preserved" as it were. As Karl Scheffler astutely noted in 1919:

One must not be mistaken about thc attempts to raise the figure to thc realm of the superhuman, to force it into the sphere of the enigmatically heroic, and to speak about it in terms of "Germanic valiance," of "Siegfried" or "Hagen." All this spoke more agamst than for a living relationship.

For a long time it was all-too difficult to break the spell of such mythologizing and monumentalizing and gain critical perspective on Bismarck. The inclination to cast him as a diabolical being has often been only the reverse of glorification and monumentalization, and both extremes suffered from the tendency to ignore the context of the real world, to archaize and inflate things out of all proportion. Whether demonized or deified, the gigantic figure was opposed by a race of dwarfs.

One of the goals of this exhibition is to bring Bismarck back into the nineteenth century so to speak, an epoch whose conditions, constraints, and entanglements granted even the cleverest and most influential person only a relatively limited degree of latitude. Another goal is to examine those conditions, constraints, and entanglements themselves, drawing on them to shed light on the man and his impact, and, conversely, to take a look at the overall picture as reflected by his path through life.

In this approach, vanished and now-obscure vestiges of the past repeatedly appear and blend in vexing, disturbing, and thought-provoking ways with elements that are still current, even relevant. The maps of a quite different Europe mirror the conflict that is simmering to this day between a traditional world of states and the modern idea of nationhood. Behind the struggles of rapidly changing social groups appear the modern parties and interest groups. The history of the European revolution of 1848-49 discloses structures and interrelated conditions as well as moods, symbols, and hopes not unfamiliar to contemporaries of 1989 from their direct experience of the present. The German Confederation, which for one and a half decades provided the framework within which Bismarck shaped foreign policy and which decisively influenced his thoughts on the "German Question," has again appeared on the horizon these days as a perspective and conceptual framework. Like a microcosm, the North German Confederation, that short-lived prelude to the German Empire founded in 1871, dramatically highlights all the problems that arise from the tie between states of different political, economic, and social orders. Conversely, that which has vanished and sunk into history - Prussia, the monarchy, the nobility as the strata providing political and social leadership exposes in its eclipse, in its demise, achievements as well as problems and shortcomings of modern society. In short, there emerges a laboratory in which some of the ingredients that were mixed are no longer familiar to us, while others are still well known, a laboratory in which some of the concoctions that were produced blew up in the faces of the following generations.

In the process many, even most, of those involved became sorcerer's apprentices, and this phase of history offers precious little material for a heroic epic. What it does offer is a rich panorama, both literally and figuratively, of a period whose wealth of political, social, economic, intellectual, and artistic possibilities and admittedly in many ways dangerous, even destructive, yet also productive polarities and contradictions remained hidden behind the cliches of the subsequent epoch, which sought to overcome that period and believed it had done so.

Following on similar attempts in past years, the idea of this exhibition is thus to rediscover a century - by focusing on one of its representative figures, his path and achievements in life, and the special problems that continue to arise in the attempt. They are both connoted and denoted by the key words Prussia, Germany, and Europe.

Prussia, among many other things, stands for the effort that culminated, as it were, in Bismarck: the effort to bind, even force, heterogeneous elements together. The traditional social order of the estates dominated by the aristocracy was to be combined with the rationality underlying the modern form of the state; the old ways of life, with optimal economic efficacy; the preservation of the political and social status quo, with the mobilization of all the resources of power politics; Potsdam, with Cologne; Eastern Pomerania, with the Ruhr; the Guards officer, with the steel worker. Germany circumscribed far more than a territorial question and an issue of political power. It is the key word for a catalogue of political, social, economic, intellectual, and cultural expectations and hopes that ranged all the way to pure utopia, national chiliasms with vanishing points in distant pasts or in an equally distant future. "Germany's rebirth," "Germany's revival" -these slogans at the Hambach rally of 1832 hung over all discussions of the "German Question," raised the level of expectations, and imbued the related discussions with something strangely broad and nebulous. Alluding to this aspect in 1848, Bismarck spoke of "German reveries" that menaced the entire existing order both at home and abroad. Later, when he sought an alliance with the "German people," he expressed himself with more restraint. But he never entirely abandoned his assessment that dangers, too, lurked in the expectations evoked by the word "Germany."

The counterweights that Bismarck tried to bring to bear were called Prussia and Europe. What he primarily had in mind was the Europe of the Great Powers as rebalanced at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the year of his birth. But Europe also meant far more, and Bismarck, for all his skepticism about the hackneyed use of the term, thoroughly realized that and took it into account. The word conveyed the major governmental, economic, and social developments and developmental trends common to the individual nations: the social change sweeping the whole continent, the economic revolution of the epoch, the state's predominant role in many areas of life within the individual political communities, the triumphant advance of the national idea, and the spread of liberal, democratic, and, later, socialist ideas. It signified the Greco-Roman and Christian roots of the intellectual unity of the European people, their shared cultural values and cultural development, and their concept of humanity. Last but not least, Europe meant the common interest in freedom and independence of the diverse European states and nations. It was an interest whose common denominator was scarcely ever possible to identify in any particular case. The linking element was always found in the shared determination to thwart the hegemonic aspirations of a state or nation that was gaining too much power or expanding in a menacing way. Seeing Germany and German development from the European perspective in this manner was something that Bismarck learned early, and the conclusions that he drew are clearly reflected in his political conduct and his path in life.

ln this sense, too, the biographical approach directly addresses the issues of how the problems that arise in Bismarck's biography throw light upon the man's political path in life and vice versa. A range of perspectives opens up from which the individual object or course of events can be illuminated from a variety of angles and in different dimensions, depending on whether the Prussian, German, European, or biographical context is at the center.

The profile of the Prussian prime minister and first chancellor of the empire founded in 1871 thereby departs radically from the unequivocal features in the monumental or diabolical portrait of Bismarck. He appears as a multifaceted, highly ambiguous figure, and to that extent serves as a mirror and representative of his century, from which one tried so hard to divorce him after 1890. Prussian Junker and grandson of a nonaristocratic cabinet advisor to Frederick the Great; standing on the far right wing of the conservative party and secretly holding the early conviction that the motto for the right had to be "better to make a revolution than to suffer one"; a man of the flatlands who spent three quarters of his life in the city; the fiercest political opponent of the liberals, yet the one who helped their economic and social principles to victory as no other did; critic of the national idea and "arch-Prussian" who founded the German nation-state; the committed defender of the political and social position of the nobility, yet the one who undermined its very foundations; the enemy of democracy who introduced the democratic right to vote such apparent incompatibilities were utterly characteristic of Bismarck's life and illustrate only some of its ambiguities.

One of Bismarck's favorite metaphors was the river, which to him represented circumstances, life, and politics. Man could not change the course of the river; he could only try to navigate its waters more or less skillfnlly. Long before Bismarck attempted to stylize his life and his political conduct in a specific way and specific direction for political purposes primarily in his memoirs, Gedanken und Erinnerungen (Reflections and Recollections) - this metaphor indicated the pattern by which to interpret his life. From the motion of the ship, one was to deduce the direction, bends, currents, and velocitv of the river; its eddies, backswaps, and shoals; its course and surrounding area.

Naturally, one must beware of overworking this pattern, too. Another helmsman might have been able to steer the ship successfully on a different course, just as the Hegelian Weligeist can have different "managers." Individuality never merges entirely with the general. But the perspective on what did and did not prove to be possible is very instructive. It helps guard against certain illusions and turns attention to the hard realities of facts and circumstances.

This perspective shows someone who, resisting his times and many of its apparent or real prevailing forces and currents, became a man of those times because his resistance almost always permitted him to go only as far as necessary to avoid being shunted aside. That was already the case for the "counterrevolutionary" in 1848. It was not his style to retreat behind the old bastions of power, to the of fice of the civil servant, to the barracks, the palace of the diplomat, or the castle of the landlord. Against what initially seemed to be a sweeping victory for the revolution, he organized resistance with means that, seen from the outside, were almost exactly like those of the political enemy. The people's associations and the popular press, election campaigns, and parliamentary maneuvers were as much a part of the effort as the appeal to wider sections of the population and special interests, the organization of a conservative party, and the proclamation of a program that looked to the future.

Bismarck's political ascendance did not come so much in the drawing room, the narrow circle of immediate associates sharing his persuasions, or court society but rather on the tribune of parliament, the popular assembly, and with the pen of the journalist. Highly conservative in view and conviction yet highly modern in means and methods - that was the combination that vexed friend and foe alike, made him known, raised his profile in public, and simultaneously invested him with the capacity to prevail. The crown and government as well as his party colleagues repeatedly hesitated to draw on him for routine cases, so to speak. "Red reactionary, smells of blood" - that was what one Prussian king, Frederick William IV, was reputed to have noted next to Bismarck's name on a list of possible ministerial candidates. As soon as things got hot, however, his name crowded all others out. In the fierce debate that was ignited when Prussia yielded to Austria and Russia in the 1850 settlement of Olmütz, he ultimately rescued the government from what initially seemed to be an almost hopeless parliamentary predicament. Bismarck, who had never even completed his training in the Prussian civil service, was rewarded by the monarch by being appointed half a year later, at barely thirty-six years of age, as Prussia's delegate to the Diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt in order to ensure the return to the old order.

"The man would also take over command of a frigate or a lithotomy, quipped the newspapers at that time, and the later William I spoke scornfully of "this reserve lieutenant" who, without any experience in the diplomatic field, had been made delegate to the Diet. But the new man holding what was at that point perhaps the Prussian monarchy's most important diplomatic post was more than a reckless, clever, opportunistic careerist, a fact he demonstrated in subsequent years not only to his political friends but also to his opponents and critics. As preoccupied as he was with "his" Prussia, the "ultraPrussian," the "Junker" whose political and social horizon was widely seen to be limited despite all his versatility and rhetorical and tactical ability, became a diplomat who always thought in European dimensions and moved far beyond the parochial perspective held by many of those who shared his political convictions.

Even at that early point many of them began dubiously shaking their heads, and the thought spread that the ostensibly so conservative new delegate to the Diet of the German Confederation was bent primarily on the practical advancement of Prussia's interests and power - especially his own. His political partners were, to him, only "post horses that he rides to the next station," as a contemporary noted as early as the 1850s, when Bismarck was still considered to be the keeper of the Holy Grail, the guardian of conservative thought.

Focusing exclusively on the country's interests while never losing sight of the means necessary to push them was what Liberals in those years came to call Realpolitik. They emphatically assured that an avowal of such Realpolitik was not tantamount to a renunciation of their old ideals and objectives. On the other end of the political spectrum, Bismarck was saying the same thing. In this way, however, priorities and bearings shifted on both ends. Successfully navigating the river of time tacitly became the supreme political maxim for both sides.

This fact contained the elements of future conflict as well as of rapprochement and compromise. Above all, though, it connoted the orientation to circumstances as they were and thus a change of perspective that, in retrospect, is apt to be obscured by the impact of the great individual.

Certainly, when the former delegate to the Diet of the German Confederation, who had meanwhile been transferred to Petersburg and then to Paris, was appointed by William I to the top position in the Prussian government as the "friend in need" at the height of the constitutional conflict in September 1862, the king made a change of course that had profound implications for world history. Had this appointment not come about, there is little doubt that the Liberals would have soon won out. After all, they commanded a twothirds majority in the Prussian House of Deputies and had the crown prince on their side. In such a decision-making situation, the significance that a single, great individual can acquire is incalculable. To assert himself successfully, however, this great individual ultimately had to follow the river of time - with less restraint than many contemporaries were able to recognize at first. Bismarck himself knew that very well; he also knew that he might become a sorcerer's apprentice on this path. That was the price to pay, and it was one of Bismarck's most delicate and difficult tasks to make sure that those in whose name and at whose request he acted remained unaware of the high costs.

For nine years, from 1862 to 1871, Bismarck kept not only his domestic opponents in suspense - the Liberals and their like-minded friends in the rest of Germany - but the governments of Europe as well. Wherever a fire was raging or had just broken out in Russia's Polish territories, in Schleswig Holstein, in the relative positions of the German states, then in relations with France - he jumped in immediately, fanning the blaze with one hand and helping to contain or extinguish it with the other. It was never altogether clear where the one began and the other ended and where he happened to have set the fire himself. Then, as later, people puzzled constantly about which of his operations served which other ones, in terms of the relation between domestic and foreign policy as well.

Indisputably, however, he was successful, extraordinarily successful, first in foreign policy through his handling of the Schleswig-Holstein question and the rivalry with Austria, the preeminent power of the German Confederation, then increasingly in domestic policy. In the latter area, the front began to crumble after the victory over Denmark and the ensuing diplomatic triumphs on the European level and in relations with Austria. There rose voices saying that history often takes winding paths and that one must not allow past conflicts to distract from the exciting prospects regarding the German question. Then came Königgrätz and the success of the conservatives in the elections for the Prussian House of Deputies on the same day, 3 July 1866. When the "Minister of Conflict" offered a negotiated peace both at home and abroad instead of dictating terms as expected, there was no stopping the break. A major part of the liberal opposition, flanked by corresponding groups of party colleagues outside Prussia, changed sides and embraced a policy of limited cooperation. Beginning with the national question, this arrangement eventually included other fields as well, developing into a political and, above all, parliamentary collaboration that lasted more than ten years.

Nonetheless, the coordinate system remained entirely different on both sides in that period. In Germany, as everywhere in Europe, Liberals of every shade, indeed, the entire left, saw the nation-state primarily as a means of breaking up and fundamentally altering the traditional status quo and structures of government, the economy, and society. For the most part those structures were tied to the inveterate "particularist state," as the Liberals put it. Accordingly, the intention was not for the particularist state to merge completely with the new political entity, the nation-state, but to be largely mediatized instead. This was especially envisioned for the most powerful particularist state since Austria's exclusion from Germany in 1866 - Prussia. Bismarck wanted nothing to do with that notion. Quite the contrary, he was at times inclined to see the new empire, of which he was the main architect, as a kind of Greater Prussia. In any case, the pivotal point of his political thinking for a long time, perhaps even to the end, was Prussia and, of course, her ruling house, whose "liegeman" and "electoral vassal" he devotedly strove to be in his political and personal self-concept. As the central context for the country's existence and position, that key word "Prussia" established his immediate orientation to the European political order. Unlike the Liberals, Bismarck, the one who had done so much to alter circumstances in central Europe, increasingly distrusted any change. As chancellor and foreign minister of the new empire, he undertook everything possible to preserve the basic structure of the order established after the "modifications" of 1864, 1866, and 1870-71.

In so doing, Bismarck became more and more a latter-day Metternich harboring the same suspicion of all new political and social movements and nationalism that the Austrian chancellor of state had exhibited. In Bismarck's time, those movements were embodied primarily in the Catholic party, that is, the "Center," and the party of the workers, the Social Democratic Party. Like Metternich, the chancellor of the continent's new secret preeminent power saw no other way of mastering such emerging movements than to repress them with ever harsher policies. And just as with the figure that dominated the first half of the century, this road led Bismarck to a dead end regardless of how much he tried to break the impasse in the 1880s with his social policy, which in itself was exemplary in many ways.

The comparison does not end there. In the course of their political lives, both Metternich and Bismarck sought in their domestic and foreign policy to preserve and cement an order that time was passing up at an ever greater rate. In a sober, quite unsentimental assessment of the forces, interests, and views operating in and on that order, the two men initially wrested from it enormous successes for their states as well as for themselves personally. But then something slowly began to wane not their tactical skill or ability to adapt to shifts and rapidly changing circumstances, but their willingness to allow the ever more rapidly flowing river of time to carry them once again to totally new shores. It can be left open as to whether such willingness could have prevailed at all in a politician who, for all his agility, was nonetheless bound by his own past. Here must lie the limits of every political being, even the most dynamic and adaptable.

"Short-sighted and far-sighted eyes both distort vision," wrote Bismarck at the height of his political career, in 1869. "But I consider the latter defect the more dangerous one for a practical statesman because it causes the things of immediate consequence to be overlooked." In this sense Bismarck a "genius of the present," as he has justifiably been called envisaged the paths to be taken and possible alternative routes on rather short notice and tended to be reserved with forecasts and speculations about future developments. But if he constantly repeated in different ways that "in politics ... [one cannot] hold to a plan for long and blindly proceed accordingly," he simultaneously stressed that one must "map out the general direction to be followed" and then "unwaveringly keep sight of it." To the surprise of many contemporaries, it was possible to follow this "direction" in step with key trends of the times until 1871, particularly with the national idea that was bringing them together. Thereafter, however, the march only went increasingly against them.

In that alternation between going with things and going against them, the epoch's basic constellations reflected in so many ways in Otto von Bismarck's path in life once again become especially visible and clear. Depending on whether they are viewed from the European, German, Prussian, or specifically biographical perspective - and the exhibition offers each in the multiple shifts between the respective focal points and various objects -- those constellations and the forces, ideas, and interests operating within them appear as many different pieces of a mosaic. But the pattern is very clear and, with it, the fact that developments, for all the continued successes that Bismarck scored on the surface, increasingly threatened not only Bismarck's political position but everything he had achieved as well.

With advancing age, the chancellor had an ever clearer sense of the threats to the German nation-state, forebodings and even genuine scenarios of catastrophe that in retrospect contain something of the prophetic. And he suspected, although he was never willing to admit it openly, that the danger came not only from the forces of change that he always evoked - steadily mounting nationalism, intensifying economic and social friction and its exploitation by various parties, and the preoccupation with the idea of power both within and without. No less problematic was the rigid clinging to the status quo, to a domestic and international political order that had increasingly outlived its usefulness, a condition that he himself came to represent more and more.

Because one could neither hang onto the present nor restore the past, rescue from the numerous and varied dangers that were, in fact, menacing the empire could be expected only from a resolute step into the future. Given the circumstances and, above all, his own unwillingness, the act of taking that step himself was in every respect more than Bismarck could manage. Yet for all his aversion to speculative thinking, another kind of vision sometimes shimmered behind his growing pessimism, the vision of a German nation-state built on foundations quite different from those he had provided and tried to preserve. In a conversation with a confidant of long standing, Baroness Hildegard von Spitzemberg, the 78-year-old stated in March 1893: "It can be that God plans for Germany yet a second period of decay followed by a new period of glory on a new basis, the republic - but that no longer affects me." Skeptic that he was, Bismarck would probably have doubted that such a republican German nation-state would be integrated more firmly into Europe and in that context would be better able to exercise self-restraint in her goals and policies. But as improbable as it is that human beings learn from history, one should not discount the possibility.

Lothar Gall