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Books > History > World history > 1750 to 1900
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Bismarck - A Life (Paperback)
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Bismarck - A Life (Paperback)
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This is the life story of one of the most interesting human beings
who ever lived. A political genius who remade Europe and united
Germany between 1862 and 1890 by the sheer power of his great
personality. It takes the reader into close proximity with a human
being of almost superhuman abilities. We see him through the eyes
of his secretaries, his old friends, his neighbours, his enemies
and the press. Otto von Bismarck 'made' Germany but never 'ruled'
it. For twenty eight years he acted as a prime minister without a
party. He made speeches, brilliant in content but hesitant in
delivery, and rarely addressed a public meeting. He planned three
wars and after a certain stage in his career always wore military
uniform to which he had no claim. The 'Iron Chancellor', the image
of Prussian militarism, suffered from hypochondria and hysteria.
Contemporaries called him a 'dictator' and several observers
credited him with 'demonic' powers'. They were not wrong. The sheer
power of his remarkable 'sovereign sel' awed even his enemies.
William I observed that it was hard to be emperor under a man like
Bismarck. He towered physically and intellectually over his
contemporaries. His spoken and written prose sparkled with wit,
insight, grand visions and petty malice. He united Germany and
transformed Europe like Napoleon before and Hitler after him but
with neither their control of the state nor command of great
armies. He was and remained a royal servant. This new biography
explores the greatness and limits of a huge and ultimately
destructive self. It uses the diaries and letters of his
contemporaries to explore the most remarkable figure of the
nineteenth century, a man who never said a dull thing or wrote a
slack sentence. A political genius who combined creative and
destructive traits, generosity and pettiness, tolerance and
ferocious enmity, courtesy and rudeness - in short, not only the
most important nineteenth-century statesman but by far the most
entertaining.
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