An English gent followed by two German rotters - or rottweillers!

Of course, the English gent was the subject of my preceding post - Sir Edward Grey.  The two German rotters were of more or less the same era in which he lived.  In terms of sheer malignant, vicious nastiness there was not much to choose between them but, and that is a large 'but', one of them was possessed of high, clear and sophisticated intelligence, whilst the other was merely cunning.

In my post on Grey I used the term 'Big Men taking Big Decisions' and they certainly didn't come much bigger than Otto von Bismarck - he was huge in height and girth but more important, also in political judgment.  He was the product of an old Prussian Junker family but unusually he did not choose the army for a career, instead he entered the Prussian civil service and then their foreign office.  His rise was swift and having reached the pinnacle as Chancellor of Prussia he set about achieving the aims he had set himself.  The Danes were foolish enough to provoke him into a war that he wanted over the provinces of Schleswig and Holstein.  The Prussian army operating like a well-oiled machine under the new General Staff system instituted after the Napoleonic wars by, amongst others, Karl von Clausewitz, went to work with Teutonic efficiency and in the end Prussia swallowed both.  Next it was the turn of the Austrians, his erstwhile ally in the fight against Denmark.  An argument was sparked, war was declared, and again the 'new model' Prussian army inflicted a battle of annihilation on the Austrians.  The Prussian king and his dimwitted generals - dimwitted in geopolitics, that is - were all for inflicting a public humiliation on the Austrians but Bismarck would have none of it.  In defeating the Austrian army Bismarck had achieved his political aim of an all-German federation under the leadership of Prussia.  He knew that from now on his main enemy would be an affronted and fearful France and that in the forthcoming struggle he would need Austria as an ally.  Thus, he insisted on generous terms that would leave Vienna grateful despite their defeat. 

France, still living on past Napoleonic glories was determined to sort out this 'new kid on the block', so it was not very hard for Bismarck to engineer a dispute after which he let slip von Moltke with his immensely clever staff officers and an army now re-enforced by elements from the rest of Germany.  Within a month the French army surrendered at Sedan.  Bismarck would have been happy to call it a day but the King and the generals insisted that Paris be taken which took another year.  At the end, and against Bismarck's advice, the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine were incorporated into the new German empire, an empire whose birth and baptism took place, just to add even more salt to French wounds, in the halls of Versailles!  Bismarck thought this foolish because, whilst he agreed with von Clausewitze that "war was the continuation of policy by other means" and moral scruples never troubled him, nevertheless, he could see no point in creating enemies unnecessarily and so long as Germany held Alsace Lorraine, France would always remain a bitter and vengeful enemy. 

However, he had achieved his aims - a new German empire led by Prussians with a new 'constitution' that made the Chancellor almost as powerful as the Emperor.  Thereafter he avoided war like the plague.  By dexterous, guileful, crafty - dare one say 'duplicitous? - diplomacy he kept both the Russians and the Austrians on his side (and away from isolated France) and also kept them from each other's throats because that would have put him in the invidious position of choosing sides.  He had few concerns with England provided the arch-Tory Lord Salisbury was in power with his notion of 'splendid isolation', although the feeble, silly moralising of Gladstone was a worry to him from time to time.  The Royal Navy policed the high seas and offered exactly the same protection to the German merchant marine as it did to its own, so that was fine, and as for the minuscule British army, he famously said that if it ever landed in Germany he would send the local police to arrest it!

This monstrous man who I truly believe had the words 'real-politik' branded on his heart was, nevertheless, one of the greatest of European statesmen who, whilst he wanted a united Germany and was prepared to fight for it, once it was achieved he was content to keep his armies back in barracks. It was only after his overthrow by the new, young, psychotic Kaiser William II that all of his careful European political architecture was destroyed and of course, as we all now know, the whole of Europe was engulfed in the wreckage.

The second German rotter was a man of whom I had never heard until a few years ago when I read Robert Massie's superb book "Dreadnought: Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War".  This vile wretch possessed exactly the same amount of political morality as Bismarck, that is, none, but lacked his penetrating intelligence.  As Massie puts it: "For sixteen years, from the fall of Bismark in 1890 to his own forced retirement in 1906, Freidrich von Holstein played a principal role in making German foreign policy.  Working beneath the surface at the Wilhelmstrasse, he was known as the 'Eminence Grise', the 'Empire Jesuit', and the 'Monster of the Labyrinth'.  Holstein preferred this anonymity.  Twice, he refused elevation to State Secretary; it would have meant wasting time before the Reichstag, seeing foreign ambassadors, and consorting with men who could not comprehend the intricacy and beauty of the diplomatic web he was constantly, obsessively spinning.  In all his years as Geheimrat (First Counsellor) of the Political Department  of the Foreign Ministry, Freidrich von Holstein met his sovereign, Kaiser William II, only twice."

No one man bears the entire responsibility for WWI but this lonely, embittered, querulous puppet-master hiding in his office in the Wilhelmstrasse and pulling the strings of German foreign policy after Bismarck must share much of the blame even if the war began eight years after his dismissal.

Oh dear, I hear you sigh, why is he banging on about all this long-ago stuff that took place in another age, another world?  Well, it's true that history never repeats itself in detail, but it certainly does in general.  Today we have an American 'empire' that is sensing its weaknesses as well as its strengths.  It is (I hope!) coming to terms with the certain threat from an oriental 'Prussia', China, a new nation like the German empire, invigorated by economic success and determined to make its influence felt beyond its frontiers.  Almost certainly, they will have their Holsteins, but do they have a Bismarck?  Similarly, do our American cousins have an Asquith, a Lloyd George, a Churchill and above all, an Edward Grey?  I hope so!

 

Comments

Bismarck, not Bismark.

[David Duff]

Whoever you are, many thanks. Bismarck's biography is staring at me from my bookshelf, so not only can I not spell, I can't read either! I will correct it tomorrow.