Feelings While Reading the Third Volume of Bismarck

The third volume of Bismarck's thoughts and memories bears the dedication on the title page: “To sons and grandchildren for understanding the past and for learning for the future.” Anyone who has read the volume without party prejudices, but with an interest in the destinies of humanity, of nations and their development, can only look back with shock at this “dedication”. Bismarck speaks to help understand the past. A past in which his word had the power to determine reality. What he says about it is as if the facts themselves were speaking. And how this word, which bore witness to the facts, had an effect on the immediate future is written on page 55 of the book: “How exactly, I would like to say, subaltern Caprivi followed the ‘consignment’, was shown by the fact that he did not address any kind of question or inquiry to me about the state of the state affairs that he was about to take over, about the previous goals and intentions of the Reich government and the means of implementing them.” The “lesson for the future” that Bismarck could have taught was not even sought by the man who took his place.

Bismarck's statement is a significant symptom for the historical development of Central Europe. His dismissal indeed marks a turning point in modern history. In this dismissal, two factors emerge that have long been decisive for the fate of Europe, but which have now, to a certain extent, become historically topical. These are the social question and the conflict with the East. The social question had to be included in practical and political considerations. The time when it could only be considered, within certain limits, as the bearer of criticism by dissatisfied masses was over. Whatever one may think of revolutions, every unprejudiced person should realize that the social question, at any rate, can never be answered by revolutionary methods. If anywhere, calm reason is required here, by the thing itself. And the first thing to be done in regard to this question is to ascertain how to arrive at this “calm reason” in practice. The European development of the last three decades has suffered from this “preliminary question”. With Bismarck's dismissal, it unloaded like a worrying sheet of lightning. The words on page 116 of the third volume stand out loudly from this sheet of lightning: “The reasons that led His Majesty to dismiss me ... were never officially revealed to me or mentioned by His Majesty, ... I could only guess at them through ConjJectur. ... I had the impression that the Kaiser did not want me to appear in Berlin before and after New Year 1890 because he knew that, in view of my convictions about social democracy in the Reichstag, I would not speak in the sense of those who had since become its...

Today, the whole of Europe is still at the same point it was at the time when Bismarck was not supposed to appear in Berlin because of what he would have said.

The other factor at work in Bismarck's dismissal is the question of the East. It will have to be said that the question is: how should Europe behave when the forces of the eastern nations are actively involved in its affairs? Bismarck added to the Triple Alliance a political relationship with Russia, which he hoped would, together with the Triple Alliance, preserve the European nation states that had come into being with his help. The Slav aspirations argue against such a relationship. The sharp contrast between the West and the East of the world speaks to such a relationship. Even Bismarck could only think of a provisional arrangement in what he did in this direction. But he could believe that in the time in which this provisional arrangement exists, things will happen that will put the great national question of the East on a different footing from that on which it stood in 1890. The fact that those who succeeded in dethroning him did not see the situation in the same way as he did contributed to his dismissal.

And with regard to the Eastern question, Europe is still at the same point as those who abandoned Bismarck's Russian policy. The Eastern question is ultimately a question of intellectual understanding; and everything else is provisional.

Even for those who do not believe that Bismarck's views have survived from the past before 1890 into the future as a decisive force, the third volume of his memoirs is nevertheless a “lesson for the future”. And today in a very special sense. For the “future” of which Bismarck speaks is today partly a gruesome past, partly a present full of tasks. The dramatic description of this book can only be properly understood today if one maintains the feeling in life that Bismarck's fall expresses a symptom of the emergence of great developmental questions for humanity, and that the infertility of the last thirty years in dealing with these questions is the continuation of the “lesson” that speaks from this fall. Understanding of ideas arises out of feelings; understanding of important ideas may flash from the feeling which the third volume of Bismarck's Thoughts and Recollections arouses.