ABSTRACT
Johanna, who had not seen her husband for months, learnt of the appointment only through the newspapers. Otto, in his first letter to her two days after the meeting at Babelsberg, took the fatalistic line he often affected: ‘It’s not a cheerful prospect and I feel frightened every morning when I wake up. But it must be…Accept what God has sent us, it is not an easy matter for me.’1 It certainly was not easy and Bismarck’s way of coping with it was to confuse all and sundry about where he was heading. He suggested that Johanna and the children should move into his official residence in the Wilhelmstrasse as soon as the prorogation of the Landtag would give him time to settle them in. It was a way of signalling to the public that he at any rate did not regard his tenure of office as shortlived. To the general public he was still the reactionary Junker and his appointment was seen as a last-ditch attempt to avoid the inevitable triumph of the parliamentary principle. For the same reason his appointment was welcomed on the right, in the Kreuzzeitung, where it was seen as the prelude to sweeping away the whole constitutional bag of tricks. It was recognized that Bismarck was a great deal more intelligent and resourceful than the average Junker and that he might have taken a leaf out of Louis Napoleon’s book, with whom, it was known, he got on well. This might mean that he would try to use success abroad to keep the Prussian public quiet at home. His hostility to Austrian aspirations in Germany was also well known.
