BISMARCK AS HISTORIOGRAPHER.

By GUY STANTON Font).

At the threshold of his diplomatic career, in June, 1850, Bismarck wrote to an intimate friend:

I can not deny that I possess some of the inclinations of Caliph Omar. not only to destroy all books except the Christian Koran, but to annihilate the means for producing new ones; the art of printing is, more than powder, the chosen instrument of the anti-Christ.1

There is in this passage ust that element of the exaggeration of a passing mood that makes it truly Bismarckian, for no statesman of

any time more fully appreciated the power of the press, either when he tried to throttle it or when be forged it into a weapon with which

vto strike down his enemies or break a way for his own views. One

of his earliest acts was to use the press to defend his views on the position of his class and to join with others of the conservatives of 1848 to found an organ for their party. One of his latest was from his retirement at Friedrichsruh from 1890 to 1897, to make the press of Hamburg the mouthpiece of his views of his own and his successor’s policy. Throughout the long career that intervenes between these dates he made the press of Germany and of foreign countries the medium through which he paralyzed opposition at its very inception. Sometimes he wrote the articles himself which were published as the editorials of his organs; more frequently he used such agents as Busch and Bucher to draft the expression of the views he outlined to them, or as frequently he trusted to a faithful and subsidized press to defend his cause.

Nor was it the journalist alone to whom Bismarck supplied material. He appreciated fully the value of more sober and substantial presentations of his policy and personality. From his letters and papers and from the records of his office he generously allowed men like Hahn, Kohl, and Poschinger to supply the press and the public with such a mass of material that it is safe to say that no great man ever did his destined work in the daylight of such full publicity as did Bismarck. llc it was “ho opened the Prussian archives to Sybel ‘ to a degrw never known before or since. and he probably read the proof of this work which was to record ollicittll)’ the great achievements of Prussia between 1850 and 1*70. .\s has been well said. he surrounded himself with a publicity stall. and to each was assigncd a class of thc pcoplc to whom he was iiiti-il to appeal as the exponent of l’iis'marckianism. .\s chief of the stall’ thc great task was reserved to Bismarck himself to marshal thc future around his work under general orders transmitted in an autobiography. Such a work would seemingly he a liiting conclusion to the story of llismarck's career and complete the full measure of thc historians debt.

\Vlifili after his‘ ri'til‘cittcltt in 1890 t’tlillors sprt‘atl that thc creator of modern united (lcnnany was at work on his memoirs. the political aml scholarly world :iwititwl with intense interest the story of a career without parallel in the history of (icrmany since Frederick the (lreat. It was- an c\'c|it of more than literary importance when at 94 o'clock on the ‘.“th of Xm'emlx-r. 1898. the gates of the great house of ('otta at Stuttgart swung open and the task began of shipping 100,000 copies of the (lcdanken und l'Irinm-rungcn of Prince llismarck. orders for which at the end of the wcck were reported at 318.0(KL-a number triple that recorded for the memoirs of our own tlrant. Layman and scholar told stories of devouring them at a single sitting. The chorus- of praise was broken only by the feeble voices of those whom the princely hater had not spared even as he stood at the threshold of the tomb.

Gradually as the iiist strong impression of standing in the presciicc of a man. not a hook. dicd away. the (ierinan critical spirit as» sertcd itself. The discriminating scholarship which ranks with Hismarck himself among the gifts of the gods to the Germans roused itself to the measuring and weighing of Bismarck as‘ a writer of history. ()ttt‘c at thc work it proceeded Will] the saint‘ sanity. penetration. and objcctivencss that its great master. Rankc. had set it as a model in his discussion of the memoirs of Richelieu.= t'hief among those who haw contributed to the growing possibility of estimating our debt to Bismarck as an liistoriographcr arc the names of .\t-lunollcr. .\‘chiemann. l'lmann. Festt-r. llcigcl. Kacmmel. and abou- all his" two biographcis. .\lax lA'iiI. and l'Irich .\larcks.‘ 'l'li-~ control material consists in the many volumes of Bismarck’s speeches and his correspondence oflicial and private, similar material for many of his contemporaries such as the Gerlachs, Manteuffel, Roon, Moltke, and \Villiam I, the personal reminiscences of those who knew him intimately as did Busch and Abeken and the Keudells, or who were witnesses or coadjutors in some of his greatest acts, as Charles, King of Roulnania, and the Crown Prince, later Emperor Frederick III. In addition there are the volumes in which the Frenchmen connected with the events leading up to 1870, men like Benedetti, Chaudordy, Grammont, Rothan, Ollivier, and Lebrun, have revealed with amazing fr: ‘ kness their part in the great catastrophe of the Second Empire.

It may be vell to recall briefly how the “Recollections and Reminiscences ” were Written. The story may be pieced together from the

judgment of Otto Hintze on the matter seems to me sound; cf. Forschungen zur Brand.Preuss. Gesch., XIII, 271. Further material in criticism or appreciation of the Ged. u. Er. may be found in Otto Kaemmel, Kritische Studien zu Fürst Bismarcks Ged. u. Er., Leipzig, 1899 (reprinted from the Grenzboten); Schiemann, in Tiirmer, January, 1899, and Deutsche Rundschau, August, 1899; R. Fester, in Hist. Zeit., 1900, 460—465; Forschungen zur Brand-Preuss. Gesch., XV, 551-557; Allgemeine Zeitung, Beilage, December 30, 1899, and 1903; Hist. Vierteljahrschrift, 1902, 232 ft; Meinecke, Hist. Zeit., 1899 and 1901 (on Fester’s view of the Olmiitz speech cf. Hist. Zeit., 1902, 240) ; 0. Lorenz, in Preuss. Jahrb., 1902, 286 fli; Heigel, Neue Gesch. Essays, Munich, 1902; H. Ulmann in Hist. Vierteljahrschrift, 1902, 49 11.; Thimme in Hist. Zeit., vol. 89; W. Busch in Hist. Zeit., vol. 92 (Busch, Die Berliner Märztage, 1848, Munich, 1898, may well be compared with the account given by Bismarck) ; Delbriick in Preuss. Jahrb., vol. 96, June, 1899; Majunke in Hist-Pol. Blätter für das katholische Deutschland, 1899, 123, 284, 651; Schmoller, Lenz, Marcks, Zu Bismarcks Gedächtnis, Leipzig, 1899 (a very stimulating collection of letters and addresses on Bismarck and his work and memoirs); L. Bamberger, Bismarck I'osthumus, Berlin, 1899 (also in Die Nation) ; Gen. Blume, Die Beschiessung von Paris, Berlin, 1899; E. Berner, Der Regierungsanfang des Prinzregenten, etc., Berlin, 1902, and Oncken's review of it in Forsch. z. Brand—Preuss. Gesch., XV, 299 it; Koser, in Hist. Zeit., vol. 83, pp. 43 ff.; Nippold in Deutsche Revue, XXXI, 222-235; Lindau in Deutsche Revue, August, 1899; Petersdorff in Bismarck Jahrb., VI, 71; F. von Bodelschwingh, Betrachtungen eines Patrioten über Bismarck und seine Zeit, Berlin, 1899; Diest-Daber, Berichtigung von Unwahrheiten in den Erinnerungen des Fürsten Bismarcks, Zurich, 1899 (not accessible to me) ; B. Gebhardt, in Sonntagsbeilage zur Vossischen Zeitung, March 4 and 11, 1900 (a popular summary, chapter by chapter, of some of the results of the criticism of the Ged. u. Er.) ; Kohl, Wegweiser durch Bismarcks Ged. u. Er., Leipzig, 1899 (practically nothing but a summary of the Ged. u. En, wholly uncritical; on pp. 13 to 16 he gives what he considers an uncontrovertible example of the accuracy of Bismarck’s memory); Kohl, Regesten zu einer wissenschaftlichen Biographie des ersten deutschen Reichskanzlers (to 1890), Leipzig, 1891, 1892 (useful in fixing dates in Bismarck’s movements; needs supplementing with Bismarck‘s Briefe an seine Braut und Gattin. Stuttgart, 1899: cf. II. Grimm in Deutsche Rundschau, April, 1901, for an appreciation of these letters which contains suggestive references to the Ged. u. Er.) ; Schweninger, Dem Andenken Bismarcks, Leipzig, 1899; Busch, Bismarck: Some Secret Pages of his History, London, 1898 (for critical estimates of Busch’s work cf. Kaufmann in Litt. Centralblatt, 1898, no. 46; Lenz in Deutsche Litteraturzeitung, 1900, p. 1513; Brandenburg in Hist. Vierteljahrschrift, III, 573; Grunow, Busch‘s Tagebuchblätter und die deutsche Presse, Leipzig, 1899; and Marcks, Meinecke, Kaemmel, and Delbriick, sup. cit). Among the many entries in Dahlmann-Waitz, Quellenkunde zur deutschen Geschichte (7th edition) the following deserve especial mention in this connection: Nos. 9122 (Studt), 9358-9376, 9438, 9442, 9443. 9476, 9505, 9506. Lenz, Geschichte Bismarcks, Leipzig, 1902, and Marcks, Kaiser Wilhelm I. (4th edition), Leipzig, 1900, are both written in such a way as to constitute a critical appreciation of the Ged. u. Er. The first volume of Marcks’s biography of Bismarck has appeared (1909), but had not come into my hands at the time this paper was written (December, 1909).

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