Otto von Bismarck

Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck was born on 1 April 1815 at Schönhausen in the Altmark, in the year of Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna. His father Ferdinand came from an old family of country squires, his mother Wilhelmine Mencken from a middle-class family of scholars and senior officials; she sent him at the age of six to a strict boarding school in Berlin, for which he never forgave her.

As a student at Göttingen he was known for duels and debts. Work as a government lawyer in Aachen and Potsdam bored him; after his military service he withdrew to the Kniephof estate in Pomerania. Under the influence of a circle of Pietist nobles he became a devout Lutheran, and in 1847 he married Johanna von Puttkamer. In the same year his political career began in the United Diet.

Bismarck was appointed in 1862 to settle a conflict between King Wilhelm I and the liberal parliament over army reform. He governed for four years without an approved budget and used the strengthened army to solve the 'German question' without Austria. After the victory of 1866 he concluded a mild peace with Vienna and made his peace with the liberals; in 1870 the war with France brought the south German states into the new empire as well.

As imperial chancellor he called Germany 'satiated' and directed his foreign policy at isolating France and preventing a war on two fronts: the League of the Three Emperors, the alliance with Austria-Hungary (1879), the Triple Alliance with Italy (1882) and the Reinsurance Treaty with Russia (1887). At home he changed allies as it suited him and combined repression with social legislation to bind workers to the state.

In Central Europe the nineteenth century was the century of nationalism and industrialisation. After 1815 Germany consisted of dozens of states in a loose confederation under Austrian presidency. The revolution of 1848 wanted unity and freedom, but failed; after that railways, the customs union and Prussian heavy industry drove unification forward economically.

The new empire had universal male suffrage, but the government depended on the emperor and not on the Reichstag. The fast-growing cities produced an organised labour movement, which Bismarck regarded as a danger to the state. In the same years the European powers divided up Africa; at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885 the rules for doing so were laid down, without a single African at the table.

Unification made Germany within one generation the strongest land and industrial power on the continent. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 poisoned relations with France for decades. At home both the Kulturkampf and the Anti-Socialist Law ended in failure: the Catholic Centre Party and the Social Democrats emerged stronger, and in 1890 the SPD won more votes than any other party.

The sickness insurance law of 1883, the accident insurance law of 1884 and the old-age and invalidity law of 1889 obliged employers and workers to pay contributions and gave, for the first time, a legal right to benefits. Other countries adopted the system. The colonial policy, which Bismarck himself had long rejected, gave Germany possessions in Africa where its rule later led to large-scale violence, as in German South West Africa.

Wilhelm II, emperor since 1888, wanted to rule himself and clashed with the chancellor over the Anti-Socialist Law and over relations with Russia. On 18 March 1890 Bismarck submitted his resignation under pressure. He withdrew to Friedrichsruh near Hamburg, criticised his successors in the press and wrote his memoirs, 'Gedanken und Erinnerungen'. He died on 30 July 1898.

After his death a Bismarck cult grew up, with hundreds of towers and statues. Historians have since been divided: admired for his diplomatic restraint after 1871, criticised for keeping parliament weak, treating minorities as 'enemies of the Reich' and leaving a state that depended heavily on one person. How far a straight line runs from his empire to 1914 and 1933 is one of the classic debates of German historiography.