Year: 2011
Type: article
Abstract: At first glance this biography of Germany's first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, exudes an air of blandness. The nondescript title vanishes in the sea of ink that has been spent on Bismarck in the last hundred years, thus placing the book at a disadvantage vis-à-vis a host of high-quality and more suggestively named biographies on the market, cases in point being Lothar Gall's seminal Bismarck: Der weiße Revolutionär (Frankfurt/Main, 1980) and Ernst Engelberg's Bismarck: Urpreuße und Reichsgründer (Berlin, 1985). On closer inspection, however, the reader soon discovers that the author has some genuinely thought-provoking things to say. Drawing on published material and internet sources, Jonathan Steinberg paints a rich picture of Bismarck's personality as an individual and as a statesman. He explores how the chancellor exercised his personal power and elucidates the reactions of contemporaries based on a broad range of eyewitness accounts. Steinberg's is not a ‘great statesman’ biography in the conventional sense, though, as Weberian notions of political authority are discarded in favour of a critical but objective engagement with the ‘sovereignty of an extraordinary, gigantic self’ (p. 4). At issue here are the transformation of Prussian society in the nineteenth century and the way in which Bismarck used his personal power to govern with, but most of the time against, the Hohenzollern court, parliaments, the masses and economic forces. This dialectic approach allows Steinberg to deliver a multi-faceted reading of the chancellor's interaction with society. Most noticeably, the attempt to link the prevalent hatred of Jews among the Prussian nobility to Bismarckian politics makes Steinberg one of the first biographers to do so in a sustained manner. He deftly traces the roots of antisemitism in the conservative milieu of the Junkers and the later popularization of antisemitic sentiments in the highest social circles with the help of reputed contemporary historians and theologians. Although Bismarck got on well with individual politicians of Jewish extraction such as Ferdinand Lassalle, Eduard Simon and Benjamin Disraeli, he found antisemitic rhetoric to be a useful weapon against the Progressive Party and as a result did nothing to protect Jewish citizens against extreme antisemitism of the Treitschke variety. Hence, by manipulating the latter for his own purposes, Bismarck contributed directly to the legitimization of excesses against Jews, which were to have such terrible consequences for Jewish–Gentile relations after the First World War.
Source: German History
Author: J. Heinzen
Institution: University of Bern
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2006725591