In the autumn of 1862, amid a situation of acute crisis which they had quite clearly engineered, they put forward the only candidate of the extreme conservative, ultra-royalist and outright absolutist clique for the office of Prussian Prime Minister. This was Otto von Bismarck, of whom the Prussian King had prophesied in 1848 that he was to only be used once the bayonet freely reigned...For the next thirty years he was to fight vehemently and with staggering success on behalf of the groups that lent him support, groups representing the old Prussia and its ruling elites against the forces of social and political progress. But the consequences were to prove completely disastrous in the long run for the majority of Germany's population.
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Hans-Ulrich Wehler,
The German Empire 1871-1918 "He left a nation totally without political education...totally bereft of political will accustomed to expect that the great man at the top would provide their politics for them. And further as a result of his improper exploitation of monarchical sentiment to conceal his own power politics in party battles, it had grown accustomed to submit patiently and fatalistically to whatever was decided for it in the name of monarchical government."
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Max Weber,
Parliament and Government in the new order in Germany Bismarck saw politics as struggle. When he talked about 'politics as the art of the possible', he meant that in a limited sense. He never considered compromise a satisfactory outcome. He had to win and destroy the opponents or lose and be destroyed himself...Whoever has power in a normal political system may win a round but must then continue the struggle to reach consensus. That was not Bismarck's way. He set out to 'beat them all' and did. In a political system where principle stood at the centre of political activity, he had none but the naked exercise of his own power and the preservation of royal absolutism on which the power rested. If politics according to Bismarck were the 'art of the possible', but without compromise, what sort of art or craft was it? And to what end?...The Bismarckian assumption that a master player can 'game' the system worked only to a point at which irrational emotions, violence, confusion, incompetence, began to mix themselves up with his plans. What is the purpose of the art of politics if not to serve some cause, to improve the conditions under which people have to live, to make societies, freer, more just and more humane...? Bismarck practised his wizardry to preserve a semi-absolute monarchy and, when it suited him, he would preserve the rights of a narrow, frugal, fiercely reactionary Junker class, who hated all progress, liberalism, Jews, socialists, Catholics, democrats, and bankers. He differed with them only in his ruhtlessness.
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Jonathan Steinberg,
Bismarck: A Life, page 472-473.
Bismarck, the living human being; Bismarck, the genius-statesman; Bismarck the Iron Chancellor as icon, make up a complex legacy. Patriotic biographers left out the uncomfortable aspects of his actual life and the editors of documents omitted or censored them. A generation of conservative German historians exalted the wisdom, moderation, and vision of the statesman; the public and propagandists exalted the strong man, the essential German. The real Bismarck, violent, intemperate, hypochondriac, and misogynist, only appeared in biographies late in the twentieth century. What the three Bismarck images have in common as phenomena is the absence of the redeeming human virtues: kindness, generosity, compassion, humility, abstinence, patience, liberality, and tolerance. Bismarck the man, Bismarck the statesman, Bismarck the icon embodied none of these virtues.
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Jonathan Steinberg,
Bismarck: A Life. page 478.
Bismarck had a plan. Bismarck always had a plan.
