Bismarck: A Life by Jonathan Steinberg (review)

This book offers much to praise. An eminent historian has written a biography of Otto von Bismarck for a popular audience. The prose is engaging, the account gripping. Addressing his readers in the first person, Jonathan Steinberg guides them through the sources, from which he quotes copiously. This technique provides a sense of immediacy to the account, as it invites readers to become first-hand witnesses to the biographer’s own process of discovery; to share his insights, hunches, perplexity, and shock over what the sources reveal about the subject. The goal of the volume, he confides, “is to explain to author and reader how Bismarck exercised his personal power” (9).

Despite the claim that he has exploited “a wealth of unexpected, unusual and fascinating new material” (ix), the author has not discovered much that cannot be found in the great Bismarck biographies by Erich Eyck, Otto Pflanze, Lothar Gall, and Ernst Engelberg. Steinberg’s distinctive contribution to this literature is to emphasize the story’s personal dimension—to an extent uncommon since World War II. The real subject of the book is “the sheer power of [Bismarck’s] personality,” or what Steinberg repeatedly calls his “sovereign self.” Steinberg’s Bismarck is extravagant in every sense, “an extraordinary, gigantic self” (4), a “demonic figure” (185) whose political genius is matched by his appetites, his relentless ambition and willpower, personal magnetism, brutality, ruthlessness, irritability, intolerance, and hypochondria. The only principle that he observes is the increase of his own power. To make this case, Steinberg calls upon a large cast of contemporary witnesses, all of whom experienced the great man personally in one way or another. The author relies particularly on the testimonies of Bismarck’s student-friend, the American John Lothrop Motley; the British diplomat Odo Russell; and inveterate diarist and salonnière Hildegard von Spitzemberg. In this way, he paints a riveting picture of an extraordinary historical figure, a statesman who at once fascinated, mesmerized, mystified, attracted, and repelled those who dealt with him.

The problem with this larger-than-life picture of the hero—which, Steinberg suggests at one point, had an “unearthly dimension” (465)—is the difficulty of putting it into historical context. The problem has two dimensions, and they are central to the biographical enterprise itself. The first is the challenge of situating the biographical subject in the historical circumstances that shaped him. Given the paucity or unreliability of sources that pertain to the subject’s early life, this is, as Steinberg’s account concedes, an inherently difficult undertaking. Steinberg follows Pflanze’s lead toward a psychoanalytical explanation. In the beginning were the parents—Bismarck’s psychic ambivalences about his father and his powerful, unaffectionate mother. This family drama left him with emotional wounds that were reopened in the triangle that Bismarck formed with King William of Prussia and Queen Augusta—a personal relationship that was crucial to Bismarck’s career, insofar as his power rested institutionally on the confidence of the king alone.

This dimension of Bismarck’s biography remains necessarily shrouded in mystery, “in the dark recesses of his colossal and complex nature” (415). But so, too, does another: namely, the historical contextualization of the hero’s subsequent actions and impact. The terms in which Steinberg has rendered his portrait of Bismarck appear to transcend, overwhelm, or paralyze this effort as well. A single motif, a “colossal will to power” (238), rules the biography from beginning to end. The fact that this will is sovereign, self-serving, and attached to no principles other than the attainment of personal power relieves the biographer from attending systematically to Bismarck’s thinking about politics, society, history, or—for that matter—his own agenda. Bismarck “succeeded in imposing his will on Prussian conduct” (216). He “needed constitutions and parliaments to show his own brilliance” (82). His exploitation of German nationalism and universal manhood suffrage served the same end, enabling him to create “a system of rule that expressed his power over others...