Bismarck: The Story of a Fighter
by Emil Ludwig trans. by . Boston : Little, Brown & Co. 8vo, xviii+633 pp. $5.00.
LUDWIG has followed the method he used so successfully for Napoleon: he has made Bismarck speak for himself, in countless recorded conversations, intimate letters to his beloved sister and wife, official documents. He draws a striking contrast between the two men: Bismarck sought only the possible; Napoleon strove perpetually after the unattainable, thus making a far stronger appeal to the imaginative aspiration.
What is the result of Bismarck’s self-revelation? Here is the paradox of the book. Ludwig seems in many ways cordially to admire his great man; yet the terms in which he describes him ego-centrie, supreme egotist, insufferably arrogant, diabolic, Satanic, Mephistopheles — by no means suggest an admirable character. This is, at best, a qualified admiration.
Ludwig’s picturesque and dramatic gift has vitalized Bismarck’s figure, especially in the earlier periods of his life. We are shown the child Otto beginning life on a remote Pomeranian estate, and spending miserable years at a school where he was ‘waked in the morning with the point of a rapier.’ suffering tyranny and humiliation that haunted his dreams through fifty years, though without in the least diminishing the tyranny and humiliation he inflicted on others who ventured to disagree with him. Equally vivid is the picture of his Byronic young manhood, when, with intense self-admiration, he played the rôle of Lermontov’s melancholy Demon. The young squire, with the arrogance of Attila, the manners of a boor, and the gluttony of Gargantua, galloping under his ancestral oaks, is evoked with fine imaginative realism. Then the squire entered polities as a fanatical royalist in the troubled days of 1848, ferociously eager to shoot down the advocates of liberty. His championship of royalty in those critical days laid the foundation of his future power, which rested on his ascendancy over King William I. Ludwig clearly shows that this champion of the king was without any genuine loyalty, perpetually disparaging his sovereign in conversations even with strangers. He supported the throne because this opened the door for his ambition, just as be upheld the hochgeboren caste not from love but as an extension of his own ego. Under other circumstances, he would have beheaded Wilhelm with all the unction of Oliver Cromwell, whom he so much resembles in his tremendous vigor, his despotism, and, it should be added, his verbid pietism. Once again. Ludwig shows that Bismarck deliberately contrived three European wars, against Denmark, Austria, and France, in each case adroitly fixing the appearance of ‘war guilt’ on his adversary, and thus establishing a precedent.
The description of the last years is excellent, when the boundless arrogance of the fallen minister came home to roost and he found himself hated by his sovereign, detested by his own caste, turning eagerly for adulation to the masses, whom he had so heartily despised. His only refuge was the sentimental Johanna, completely self-effaced before her idol.
Ludwig’s Bismarck does not compare well with the makers and conservers of our own nation. There is in him nothing of the heroic sacrifice of Washington, the high nobility of Lincoln. Perhaps his fittest epitaph is the phrase of a distinguished German whom Ludwig quotes: ‘Bismarck makes Germany great and the Germans small.’
CHARLES JOHNSTON