Bismarck’s Alliance Nightmare (article)

Otto von Bismarck was for his own times, and has remained, the personification of Realpolitik—of calculating power politics. His proudest claim to fame as Realpolitiker was to have united the German states outside of Austria in 1870-1871 through a victorious war that, as Prussian chancellor, he manipulated the French into provoking over a German candidate to succeed a deposed queen of Spain, Isabella II. After this crowning stunt, he dominated European diplomacy for the next two decades as the newly proclaimed German Emperor’s so-called Iron Chancellor, contriving and maintaining an intricate network of alliances binding all the other European powers directly or indirectly to Germany except France. Indeed, the rationale of his complex diplomatic design was to keep France from finding support for a possible war to recover Alsace-Lorraine, annexed by Germany as war booty in 1871. After this annexation he realized only too well that the new German Empire, for all its military might, was permanently at risk in that any European power could threaten it confident of French support. At statesmanly nerves’ edge, he aimed to tranquilize the rest of Europe. Thus he restrained as best he could the German proponents of state backing for commercial or colonial expansion. Thus too, when a dangerous crisis arose in the Balkans, he defused it in 1878 through an international conference that he convened and ran as “honest broker.” But above all he conducted a personal, and in crucial respects secretive, diplomacy of often contradictory foreign alliances for mutual assistance or desistance in case of war—the first such peacetime alliances in history. Of this diplomatic juggling, Emperor Wilhelm I is often said to have remarked that only Bismarck could keep five balls at once in midair while riding horseback. Bismarck himself was the source of the familiar diagnosis of him as suffering from (in its usual French formulation) a “cauchemar des alliances”—an alliance nightmare.

Clearly a twenty-year running nightmare smacks of pathology. That in private the Iron Chancellor was an insomniac, a hypochondriac, a glutton, a morphine addict, and lots else in this vein is no news. But was his Realpolitik itself fed from subrational depths as his calling it nightmarish suggests? And if so, what was the latent stuff of that running nightmare?

To begin with, Bismarck’s cauchemar des alliances evinced a morbid defensiveness against a real danger. To his credit as statesman, he saw that real danger and defended against it effectively, albeit compulsively. To his discredit as statesman, however, he had failed to foresee it, or at all odds to forestall it, though it was clear to him right after his Empire brought it on: as early as August 1871 he was calling the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine a mistake. This is no doubt why he took the danger so personally. His nightmare amounted, then, to a guilty anxiety lest a self-identified Germany risk disaster in the European power play.

That Bismarck was complicit in putting Germany at risk and then took that risk tormentedly to heart suggests that there was a biographic referent for his defensive cauchemar des alliances such as underlies all good nightmares—a personal disaster that he was frenetically guarding against after the fact. To repeat, his system of alliances, continually reaffirmed, renewed, and reinforced, was designed to debar any and every party to it from a rapprochement with revanchist France. Once “alliance” is understood in its original, dynastic sense of marriage, Bismarck’s personal precedent for his nightmarish fear of a hostile alliance and his country’s ruination both together, the traumatic origin of his cauchemar des alliances, is evident.

In 1837, twenty-two-year-old Bismarck, then a Prussian civil servant stationed in Aachen, was wildly smitten with an English beauty of seventeen touring abroad with her parents: Isabella Loraine. Technically she was Isabella Loraine-Smith, but Bismarck ignored the “-Smith,” just as he dropped “-Schönhausen” from his own name (Alan Palmer, Bismarck [London: Wiedenfeld and Nicolson, 1976], p. 12n). Hitherto dutiful and frugal, he deserted his post for months on end to tag after the girl, gambled himself deep into debt in hopes of matching her family’s affluence, and even gave out a date for their prospective marriage in England, only to wind up jilted for a rival. This courtship-and-casino fiasco left him with a broken heart and, it seemed, a broken career, plus debts that cost him years of labor on his run-down family estate in Pomerania to repay (Palmer, Bismarck, pp. 11-13; Ernst Engelberg, Bismarck: Ur-

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preuße und Reichsgründer [Berlin: Siedler, 1985], pp. 44-47; Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany, I [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990], pp. 44-46). In letters he recounted the devastating double disaster with bitter humor to one friend just afterwards and to another in 1845, and he reminisced about it moodily to his wife in 1851. Nor did he put it behind him even then; instead, true to posttraumatic form, it returned to haunt him long years afterwards. Its return may have been facilitated by the coincidence that the Spanish crisis was touched off by a second Isabella, or again that the French name for the most problematic, un-Germanic chunk of German war booty from France, which he briefly hesitated to claim in 1871 for that very reason, was Lorraine. In any case, after having done his preponderant share of putting the new Empire in jeopardy from the word go through the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, the grand master of Realpolitik relived his youthful courtship-and-casino trauma preventively two-in-one. He guarded against that treacherous marriage and those catastrophic gambling losses both together vicariously when, as Imperial chancellor, he warded off a hostile foreign alliance by playing an alliance game in which he hedged all his bets, or counter-gambled.

The one major European nation that he enmeshed only indirectly in his tangled diplomatic web was the one he was traumatically set to marry into and failed: his fickle fiancée’s native England. His courtship fiasco duly flickers through his explanation that there was simply no forming a “permanent union” with England given her inherent volatility (Dictated 15 December 1891 [“kein ewiger Bund”]: Otto von Bismarck, Die gesammelten Werke, XV [Berlin: Stollberg, 1934], p. 563).

[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of historical miniatures we hope will become a regular feature of Clio’s Psyche. Submissions are welcome.]

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