Quotation | Otto von Bismarck ~ Diplomacy
“A statesman cannot create anything himself. He must wait and listen until he hears the steps of God sounding through events; then leap up and grasp the hem of his garment.”
COMMENT
On the face of it, one is inclined to see benevolence in this quotation by Bismarck of himself as a diplomat and Germany's first chancellor, or Iron Chancellor as he was widely referred to on the international scene.
But in a recent biography by Steinberg (2011), on pages 184-185 a new view emerges of this politician and which does not make for such an apparently enlightened figure on the world stage.
...a political genius of a very unusual kind [whose success] rested on several sets of conflicting characteristics among which brutal, disarming honesty mingled with the wiles and deceits of a confidence man. He played his parts with perfect self-confidence, yet mixed them with rage, anxiety, illness, hypochondria, and irrationality. ... He used democracy when it suited him, negotiated with revolutionaries and the dangerous Ferdinand Lassalle, the socialist who might have contested his authority. He utterly dominated his cabinet ministers with a sovereign contempt and blackened their reputations as soon as he no longer needed them. He outwitted the parliamentary parties, even the strongest of them, and betrayed all those ... who had put him into power. By 1870 even his closest friends ... realized that they had helped put a demonic figure into power...
Not one would wish to befriend …
2 December 2021
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© Kenneth Thomas Webb 2023
First Published 13 February 2020
