Otto von Bismarck

Otto von Bismarck (born April 1, 1815, Schönhausen, Altmark, Prussia [Germany]—died July 30, 1898, Friedrichsruh, near Hamburg) prime minister of Prussia (1862–73, 1873–90) and founder and first chancellor (1871–90) of the German Empire. Once the empire was established, he actively and skillfully pursued pacific policies in foreign affairs, succeeding in preserving the peace in Europe for about two decades. But in domestic policies his patrimony was less benign, for he failed to rise above the authoritarian proclivities of the landed squirearchy to which he was born.


Bismarck was born at Schönhausen, in the Kingdom of Prussia. His father, Ferdinand von Bismarck-Schönhausen, was a Junker squire descended from a Swabian family that had ultimately settled as estate owners in Pomerania. Ferdinand was a typical member of the Prussian landowning elite. The family’s economic circumstances were modest—Ferdinand’s farming skills being perhaps less than average—and Bismarck was not to know real wealth until the rewards flowed in after the achievement of German unification. His mother, Wilhelmine Mencken, came from an educated bourgeois family that had produced a number of higher civil servants and academics. She had been married to Ferdinand von Bismarck at age 16 and found provincial life confining. When her son Otto was seven, she enrolled him in the progressive Plamann Institute in Berlin and moved to the capital to be near him. The young Bismarck resented exchanging an easy life in the country for a more circumscribed life in a large city, where in school he was pitted against the sons of Berlin’s best-educated families. He spent five years at the school and went on to the Frederick William gymnasium for three years. He took his university entrance examination (Abitur) in 1832.


During this period he met and married Johanna von Puttkamer, the daughter of a conservative aristocratic family famed for its devout pietism. While courting Johanna, Bismarck experienced a religious conversion that was to give him inner strength and security. A subsequent critic was to remark that Bismarck believed in a God who invariably agreed with him on all issues. There is no question that the marriage was a very happy one. In fact, Bismarck’s last words before dying in 1898 expressed the wish that he would once again see Johanna, who had passed away some years earlier.