Bismarck Born: The Architect of German Unification

Otto von Bismarck was born into minor Prussian nobility on April 1, 1815, in Schonhausen, Brandenburg, with no obvious path to the kind of power he would eventually wield. He spent his youth drinking, dueling, and managing his family's estates with conspicuous boredom. He entered politics at 32 and was appointed Minister President of Prussia in 1862 by King Wilhelm I at a moment of constitutional crisis. His first act was to tell the Prussian parliament that the great questions of the day would be decided "not by speeches and majority votes, but by iron and blood." He meant it. Three wars in seven years, Denmark in 1864, Austria in 1866, and France in 1870, each one precisely calibrated to isolate the target diplomatically and prevent a coalition from forming against Prussia. He won all three. When it was over, he had a united German Empire, proclaimed in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles in January 1871 while Paris was still under siege. He served as the first Chancellor of the German Empire for the next nineteen years, building a complex system of alliances designed to keep France isolated and prevent a two-front war. He introduced the world's first comprehensive social insurance system, including health insurance, accident insurance, and old age pensions, not out of compassion but to undercut the appeal of socialism among German workers. He called it "state socialism" and saw it as a vaccination against revolution. His relationship with Kaiser Wilhelm I was one of managed dominance: Bismarck made the policy, the Kaiser signed the decrees. When Wilhelm II succeeded his grandfather in 1888, the dynamic changed. The young Kaiser wanted his own foreign policy and resented his chancellor's control. Bismarck was forced to resign in March 1890. The Punch cartoon of the occasion, captioned "Dropping the Pilot," became one of the most famous political cartoons in history. He retired to his estate at Friedrichsruh and spent eight years criticizing his successors. He died on July 30, 1898, at 83. The alliance system he had built to preserve peace collapsed within sixteen years of his departure.