Anderson on Bismark

I’ve been beguiling my drivetime with podcast lectures by Margaret Anderson on the history of the “Second Reich”—Germany from 1820 to 1919, with forays backward and forward (link). Audio quality is pretty mediocre, but the content is crisp and well-packaged. One of the many virtues is that she does as good a job as any I’ve heard in showing just why Bismark was so important. She pegs her case on the non-inevitability of Germany’s rise to preeminence—how nobody at (say) the end of the Revolution of 1848 would have anticipated that Germany (Germany?) would become the dominant power in Europe. And yet it did, and in something like 20 years.

Germany’s rise owed most to Bismark’s own enterprise and craft, but fortune favors the prepared mind and Bismark knew how to grab an opportunity when it presented itself. Case in point: Russia. As the curtain rises, Germany was inhibited—all of Europe was inhibited—by the looming shadow of the Tsar, always ready to wield Russia’s heavy paw to suppress any threatening innovation.

Yet Russia thoughtlessly allowed itself to be drawn into an unnecessary war—Crimea—which, against all expectation, it was badly humiliated. Bismark seized the occasion, and used Russia’s postwar passivity as the occasion for his own program to unify the patchwork of German sovereignty. Comparisons to the 1980s, with the reunification of Germany following hard upon Russia’s retreat from Afghanistan, are permitted.

Anderson also makes vivid—and almost laughable—Bismark’s success in deploying Austria as its ally in its campaign to conquer Schleswig-Holstein. Bismark gained immensely from this Austrian cover. Austria had little or nothing to gain from this distant adventure. Bismark, disencumbered of his Danish problem, promptly turned his back on his old ally and drove the Austrians into a humiliating defeat.

History doesn’t “repeat itself” in any crude or mechanical way. Yet it is always handy to remember that empires die—or at any rate, lose their hegemony—and other powers take their place, and it can all happen so quickly, and so unexpectedly, and yet seem so inevitable once it is done.

Footnote: There are good reading references at the course webpage.