ABSTRACT
There was another, softer side to him, an almost poetic quality that made him a wizard with words and a brilliant and fascinating conversationalist. When he spoke his voice was high and thin, almost feminine, and his personal charm, when he chose to turn it on, was great. Diplomats were seduced by it, when they ought to have known better. As a public speaker he
was not stentorian or a demagogue, rather a man who weighed his words carefully, delighting in sarcasm and irony, a parliamentary polemicist who hardly ever used a script and whose speeches still read well. To his family, his wife and three children, he was totally devoted, but he expected their complete submission to his needs. His enemies were their enemies and their task was to form a phalanx around him against the hostile outer world. Rarely were so many contrasting qualities concentrated in such profusion in a single individual. Genius is more difficult to define in politics than in art. Bismarck claimed that politics was an art, and if there is such a quality as political genius then he had it. But opinions diverge diametrically when it comes to deciding whether his was a genius that produced beneficent results.
BISMARCK’S CAREER We can now see that Bismarck’s extraordinarily powerful impact owed much to the fact that he was a man who could thrive in the halfway house between absolute monarchy and parliamentary institutions that existed in Prussia after the revolution of 1848. He entered politics as a conservative Prussian Junker in 1847. The Junkers, the name customarily given to the landed aristocracy in the Prussian provinces east of the Elbe, were regarded by most of the world as reactionary backwoodsmen. Bismarck came to early prominence because, unlike most politically active members of his class, he was able to master the techniques required in a parliamentary assembly. He was on a steep learning curve and soon realized the maintenance of the conservative order required more than a dogmatic adherence to monarchical legitimism. His performance as a spokesman for the conservatives in the period after the failure of the revolution gave him the reputation that enabled him to leapfrog into a key diplomatic position in 1851, at the age of 36. He was appointed the Prussian envoy to the diet of the German Confederation at Frankfurt. It was a capital vantage point for observing what was going on within and between the nearly forty German states that made up the Confederation.
