BISMARCK by Werner Richter. 420 pages. Putnam. $6.95.
He was a chub-cheeked country boy, with sly blue eyes, reddish-blond hair and a face, as he described it, "like a young girl with a bit of a moustache." Such was the appearance of the greatest German of his time. Otto von Bismarck made Prussia dominant in Germany and Germany dominant in Europe. He has inspired a shelf of biographies but remains essentially a riddle. Was he a selfless hero or a scheming tyrant?
Bismarck was quite a bit of both but, above all, a much misjudged figure, argues Werner Richter, a German biographer who has written books on everyone from Ludwig II to Abraham Lincoln. Instead of painting Bismarck black or white—Prussia's royal colors—Richter sees him as an eminently human creature given to occasional flirtation, frequent psychosomatic ailments, fits of weeping, and almost constant self-doubt. For 30 years, the man who first said that "politics is the art of the possible" manipulated the events of a continent simply because he knew how to manipulate people. The Iron Chancellor, in Richter's view, was one of history's nimblest con men.
Junkers & Jews. "Iron and blood" were his watchwords, but Bismarck just as often won his way by using bribery and bluster. Early in his expansionist program, France or even Italy could have stopped him from grabbing the other German states and trampling Austria. Bismarck scared off Napoleon III by threatening general war; that was mostly bluff, but the appeasing Napoleon was so racked with pain from bladder troubles that he scarcely knew what was going on. The Chancellor then bought off Italy's vain Victor Emmanuel by giving him the Order of the Black Eagle and promising him the port of Venice, which Bismarck had not yet wrested from the Austrians.
Bismarck was scornful of the forces that helped him most and disliked the people whom he most helped. "Nobody despises public opinion as I do," he said. Yet he shrewdly used public opinion, most notably by editing the famous Ems telegram to make it appear that the Kaiser had inexcusably affronted the French ambassador. Result: France felt compelled to declare war, and Germany conquered Alsace-Lorraine. While his generals were mounting history's first blitzkrieg, the Chancellor condemned their "criminal" sacrifice of manpower. He called their tactics "all fists and no head" and remarked that Prussia's only worthwhile militarists had been trained abroad.
Most surprisingly, Bismarck judged his fellow Junkers to be overly stiff and inbred. He recommended that they loosen up and get some elan by marrying Jews; an ideal match, he said, "would bring together a Christian stallion of German breed with a Jewish mare." His whole life was dedicated to making the once lowly Prussian monarchs the most powerful kings of Europe; yet he lied to them and fought with them, sneered that the Hohenzollerns were Johnny-come-latelies from Swabia.