Bismarck was 'mad and bad' - but a great statesman

Human virtue was absent, and the only creatures he truly loved were his dogs: Lorraine Courtney discovers that Otto von Bismarck was an appalling human being.

He might have created modern Germany, but he was a deeply flawed man. That Bismarck was a political maverick is indisputable: in his 28 years in power (between 1862 and 1890), he turned the relatively minor power of Prussia into a new German Reich that dominated Europe. Bismarck's staying power involved use of the full gamut of political tricks, from repression and divide-and-rule to rainbow coalitions and appeals to national security.

But the real secret of his success lay in his ability to control his royal master, the Prussian king and first German emperor, Wilhelm I. Bismarck's time in power saw him become ever more irascible and dictatorial, clashing with political opponents and retreating to his country estate whenever it all got too much. But was the creator of modern Germany a precursor of Adolf Hitler?Jonathan Steinberg, professor of history, at Pennsylvania University, reckons that Bismarck was mad, bad and utterly devoid of any of "the redeeming human virtues: kindness, generosity, compassion, humility, abstinence, patience, liberality and tolerance". His lively biography takes the reader from a classically unhappy childhood, via university days of drinking and duelling to the raging, vindictive old man at the end of his life. The man Steinberg calls "the real Bismarck, violent, intemperate, hypochondriac and misogynist" is also revealed to be a power-crazed, anti-Semitic control freak. Steinberg ultimately concludes that the horrible legacy was "thus linear and direct between Bismarck and Hitler".

He allows his protagonist just one redeeming feature, charisma, but then that was also true of the Führer.

Obsessed with revenge, hateful towards his many enemies, loving only his two giant wolfhounds, Bismarck was clearly an appalling human being. Yet while he described the intellectual Liberal leader Eduard Lasker as "that dumb Jewboy", Bismarck interacted with Jewish politicians in a way the Nazis never could have. And there was never any inkling that he wanted them killed. In fact, he was eventually sacked because, as Kaiser Wilhelm put it, "you negotiate with Catholics and Jews behind my back".

The German sociologist Max Weber rightly accused Bismarck of leaving Germans "accustomed to expect that the great man at the top would provide their politics for them". Yet it was only when Hitler filled the post of Reich Chancellor, a position Bismarck had invented, that Weber's worst fears were realised.

This is a very readable account of a larger-than-life figure, although the text succumbs occasionally to bouts of hyperbole. Bismarck may not live up to Steinberg's hypothesis as "the most famous statesman of his or perhaps any age", but he was a crucial player in German unification and a larger recasting of global power relations in the 1860s.

With rich anecdotes and sources, Steinberg brings the reader up close and personal to this remarkable, contradictory and self-destructive man who had the knack of repulsing, as well as fascinating.

Bismarck: A Life, by Jonathan Steinberg, Oxford University Press, 537pp,approx €30