Otto von Bismarck
Otto von Bismarck unified Germany in eight years by three deliberate wars and then spent nineteen preventing a fourth. Born in 1815 into a Junker family of Brandenburg landowners, he was an idle law student, a heavy drinker and duellist, and an obscure estate manager into his thirties, known as the mad Junker. He entered politics in 1847 as an ultra-conservative, served as ambassador to the Diet at Frankfurt, to St Petersburg and to Paris, and was appointed minister-president of Prussia in 1862 during a constitutional crisis over army funding, which he resolved by collecting taxes without a budget for four years. He told a parliamentary committee that the great questions of the day would be settled not by speeches and majority votes but by iron and blood. He then engineered three wars. Denmark in 1864 gained Schleswig and Holstein and gave him a quarrel to use against Austria; Austria in 1866 was beaten in seven weeks at Königgrätz and excluded from Germany, and he insisted on lenient terms so that it could become an ally; and France in 1870, provoked by his editing of the Ems telegram, produced Sedan, the proclamation of the German Empire at Versailles in January 1871, and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine. He then declared Germany satisfied and built an alliance system to isolate France, keeping Austria and Russia both attached. Domestically he fought the Catholic Church in the Kulturkampf and lost, banned the Social Democrats, and outflanked them by introducing health insurance in 1883, accident insurance and old-age pensions — the first welfare state. Wilhelm II dismissed him in 1890. He died in 1898. He is said to have predicted that some damned foolish thing in the Balkans would begin the next war.
- Lived: 1815 CE – 1898 CE
- Nationality: Prussian
- Roles: chancellor, statesman, realpolitiker
