Room 1

BETWEEN TWO WORLDS

The year in which Otto von Bismarck was born, 1815, revolved around the Congress of Vienna, that great attempt to establish a fundamentally new European order in domestic and foreign politics after twenty-five years of epic revolutionary convulsion, numerous wars, and, finally, Napoleonic domination. Under the leadership of the Great Powers represented in Vienna Austria, Russia, Great Britain, and Prussia the balance of power and the legitimacy of the dynasties became the premises for the reorganization of Europe. The man charting this course for the Congress was Prince Klemens von Metternich, the Austrian foreign minister, subsequent chancellor of state, and the main figure in the coalition against Napoleon, who had been defeated once and for all by allied troops in the Battle of Waterloo on 30 May 1815. However, the various Powers had to "share possession of the European world as by way of settlement with the revolution" (Karl von Rotteck). Having intended to overcome the revolution, the Congress of Vienna also inherited its legacy. This conflict marked all its measures and steps.

At first, some of the radical territorial alterations that had taken place during the Napoleonic era were reversed. With minor changes, France was confined to her boundaries of 1790. All rulers installed by Napoleon were removed as illegitimate, and the old dynasties were enthroned again in Spain, Switzerland, Holland (which acquired the former Austrian Netherlands), and Italy, where the Papal States were partially restored and Habsburg rulers brought back in Modena and Tuscany. Austria received Lombardy and Venetia. In Germany, the Kingdom of Westphalia and the Grand Duchy of Berg were dissolved. However, no changes were made in most of the territorial rearrangements that had fundamentally altered the German state system since 1803 (Reichsdeputationshauptschluss) and since the founding of the Confederation of the Rhine in 1806, which had led in the same year to the fall of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.

The Germany that resulted from the reconstitution of Europe at the Congress of Vienna was long marked by this initial state of affairs. The defunct empire was replaced by the German Confederation, an indissoluble union consisting of thirty-five monarchies and the four free cities of Frankfurt, Hamburg, Bremen, and Lübeck. The members of the Confederation also included foreign monarchs who had ruled in personal union over territories that had once been part of the empire - the kings of England (for Hanover), the Netherlands (for Luxembourg), and Denmark (for Holstein, including Lauenburg). Austria and Prussia were members of the Confederation by virtue of their old imperial lands only. The responsibilities and authority of the Confederation and the relation of the member states to each other were laid down in the Acts of the German Confederation (Bundesakte) passed on 8 June 1815. On the one hand, the new Confederation was a clear repudiation of the expectations and demands of the early national movement in Germany; on the other hand, Article 13 of the Acts seemed to open new perspectives by stipulating that all member states should have a constitution providing for assemblies of the estates (landständische Verfassung).

The new order in Germany was a key part of the new order among the European powers, which expressly guaranteed the integrity of the German Confederation. With the readmission of France, this system was based on the prerevolutionary balance of power, the pentarchy of the eighteenth century. In addition, though, the three monarchs of the conservative powers in the east, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, established the Holy Alliance on 26 September 1815, symbolically affirming the principle of restoration. Nearly all the European states joined.

As a result of the peculiar link between this restoration of prerevolutionary circumstances, the pragmatic consideration given the new status quo, and the overarching claim to legitimacy, the territorial settlements arrived at by the Congress of Vienna survived for a remarkably long period. They were to preserve the equilibrium in Europe until the Italian and German wars of unifcation in the 1850s and 1860s, and to some degree even until the First World War. Although the Metternich System was restored as the determining factor of domestic policy in the decades following the Congress of Vienna, it was increasingly challenged by new forces of the liberal and national movement and ultimately capitulated to them in the revolution of 1848.

For Prussia, the most important outcome of the Congress of Vienna was the westward expansion of her territory. As compensation for some areas of Poland that she had gained through the Third Partition of Poland in 1795 and that had meanwhile passed to the Czar, Prussia received the northern part of Saxony and, above all, the two provinces of Rhineland and Westphalia. These new acquisitions, whose areas on the Left Bank of the Rhine remained under Napoleonic Law, not only oriented the entire country to the west in a cultural sense but also paved the way for Prussia's rise to the status of the strongest German economic power. The territories of the old and the new Prussia, however, remained separated by the Kingdom of Hanover and the Hessian principalities. The Congress of Vienna thereby created the basic framework that shaped Prussia's later policies, which were aimed at overcoming this artificial segmentation of the country. By 1848, with her total population having grown from ten million inhabitants (1815) to approximately sixteen million, Prussia had almost caught up with Austria within Germany.

Even in the years before the Congress of Vienna, new leaders had come foreward in Prussia. Learning from the defeat against Napoleon in 1806, they introduced a number of reforms designed to build a new state and help the country rise again by liberating the political and economic forces of the citizens. It was primarily Friedrich Karl Freiherr vom und zum Stein, Karl August von Hardenberg, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Gerhard von Scharnhorst, and August Neidhardt von Gneisenau who persuaded Frederick William III to approve important laws liberalizing the right to own property and abolishing the hereditary subjection of peasants, dissolving guilds that restricted freedom of trade, granting self-government in towns and cities, thoroughly reforming the schools and universities, opening the officers corps to the middle class, and basing promotion on merit. As Stein saw it, a reorganization of the entire administrative system was necessary in order to push through all these social and military reforms.

In 1815 Prussia seemed to be on the way to becoming a modern state with liberal institutions. On 22 May of that year, Frederick William III once again promised his subjects a modern constitution in gratitude for the victory over Napoleon and the expulsion of French troops. But the attempts at reform were certainly not supported by all groups in the population, least of all by the aristocracy, whose privileges had hitherto been undisputed. Only a minority of the nobility - typically including many "foreigners" like Stein (from Nassau) and Hardenberg (from Hanover) fought together with enlightened citizens and civil servants against the old structures and, hence, against the staid landed aristocracy East of the Elbe, the Junkers.

Otto von Bismarck grew up between these two worlds of an enlightened middle class and a conservative nobility. He was born on 1 April 1815 on his father's estate, Schönhausen, near Magdeburg in the Old Mark (in Brandenburg). His mother, Wilhelmine, came from an old family of scholars; his grandfather, Anastasius Ludwig Mencken, had been a crown councilor. By contrast, Bismarck's paternal ancestors had been aristocratic landlords for centuries and had made their careers as officers in the Prussian army. The different backgrounds of the parents had an impact on Otto von Bismarck's childhood. He spent the first years of his life at Kniephof, his father's estate in Pomerania, to which the family had moved in 1816. Thereafter, his mother sent him to the Plamann boarding school in Berlin founded by the educator Johann Ernst Plamann on the tenets of Pestalozzi. The educational methods were strict but were regarded as exemplary nevertheless. From 1827 to 1830 Otto attended the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium and completed his schooling at the Gymnasium zum Grauen Kloster from 1830 to 1832. During that time his parents maintained an apartment in Berlin in which the whole family would gather over the winter months. Given the rather monotonous life that the countryside had to offer a woman of high intellectual standards, Wilhelmine von Bismarck would presumably have liked to move to the city entirely.

Otto felt much closer to his father, Ferdinand von Bismarck, than to Wilhelmine. From 1832 to 1835 he nonetheless completed law training in Göttingen and Berlin as she expected. In 1836, after working for a year at the Berlin Municipal Court, he took a position as a government trainee in Aachen to prepare for a career in the civil service. In the summer of 1837, at the age of 22, he was dismissed from his job in Aachen after crisscrossing Germany for months without permission as he followed his first great love. He resumed practical training in December of 1837, this time in Potsdam, but soon gave it up again. In 1838 he enlisted for a one-year tour of military duty, attended the Academy of Agriculture in Eldena on the side, and finally decided to withdraw to the family's Pomeranian estates. Characteristically, he left the civil service - with his father's moral support only after his mother's death in 1839. If Otto von Bismarck had lived largely according to his mother's wishes up to that point, he now followed in the footsteps of his father.

For two years he drew a certain satisfaction in working with his brother to improve the family's indebted estates. He lived alone at Kniephof as a bachelor, where he missed the intellectual stimulation he had enjoyed in his student days, especially with his friends, John Motley and Alexander Keyserling. In 1842 he tried to combat resurgent inner discord and lack of direction by traveling for several months in England, France, and Italy. He groped his way out of this crisis in his life only through human contact and discussion of life's major questions within the circle of pietistic nobility in Pomerania. It was in that setting that he also met his wife, Johanna von Puttkamer. After the death of his father in 1845, Otto von Bismarck moved to Schönhausen, the ancestral seat of the family. His engagement and marriage to Johanna were celebrated in 1847, and in the same year he took his first steps in the political arena.

On his travels in England, Bismarck had been confronted with the parliamentary system of government. However, it influenced his conservative principles just as little as had the political demands of the enlightened Rhenish bourgeoisie he had met during his time in Aachen. The Rhinelanders were very self-assured toward Old Prussians. In a petition submitted in 1818, they had earned the king's disfavor by reminding him of his promise to grant a constitution. Moreover, they defended their Catholicism against the predominance of the Protestants. They gained in power primarily because of economic growth. Individual entrepreneurs like Alfred Krupp studied English methods of industrial manufacturing and introduced them in Prussia. The Rhine and Ruhr areas became an industrial region that soon eclipsed once-prosperous Silesia, with its iron and coal deposits and outmoded textile trade.

On the whole, the decisive factor in Prussia's economic advance was the elimination of customs barriers and the expansion of the railroad network, due in great part to the initiative of private companies, beginning with the line from Berlin to Potsdam (1838) and that from Berlin to Anhalt (1841). The new mode of travel had advantages for Bismarck, too, because the trip to the Schönhausen estate in the Old Mark and Kniepfhof in Pomerania was quicker and more comfortable. The journey from Berlin to Stettin, the main railroad link in Pomerania, took four and a half hours at the end of the 1840s.

Leonore Koschnick and Marie-Louise von Plessen