ABSTRACT
Bismarck was fifty-six when he had brought about the greatest transformation in the affairs of Europe since Napoleon, but barely a third of his time in power had passed. Nothing he could do in the future could possibly rival what he had already achieved. A man of a different temperament might have kept an eye open for a suitable moment to step off the stage. Threats of resignation were part of Bismarck’s stock-in-trade and the cultivation of ill-health, real and psychosomatic, had become a habit. Nevertheless it is impossible to discern a moment when he seriously contemplated with-drawing. His addiction to power and his all-consuming political passion grew with advancing age. His eventual departure was to become a fall, as resounding and painful as any in history. Yet his great triumphs engendered hubris only in others, not in him. On the contrary, he was plagued by nightmares of anxiety, pessimism and dark foreboding, sometimes amounting to paranoia. It was the reverse side of the unflinching realism that made him so formidable.
