In fact, it was so boring that Bismarck wrote: He scraped through his course and joined the Prussian civil service, a terminally boring occupation. His friends considered him a dandy, and his tutors considered him a drunk. Remarkably for such a great man, he was useless as a student. For now all you need to know is Otto entered Göttingen university in Hanover in the 1830s and studied to be a lawyer. This language thing is exactly why people would soon start wondering why there were 39 Germanic states instead of one united Germany.īut more on that in a moment. It was like literally moving to another country, albeit one where they spoke the same language. When you hear us say Bismarck studied in Hanover, it wasn’t like you moving from, say, Colorado to Washington. Its power was balanced between the Catholic Austrian Empire in the south, and the Protestant kingdom of Prussia – where Otto von Bismarck was born – in the north.Īs we run through Bismarck’s life, it’s important to remember there was nothing at this stage that even remotely resembled modern Germany. The Confederation was designed to be weak. To fill it, the surviving superpowers created something called the German Confederation, a collection of 39 states locked in loose association. The destruction of the thousand year-old Holy Roman Empire had left a void in the center of the continent. While Otto was sulking in Berlin, Europe was trying to rebuild itself after Napoleon. He hated it so much, in fact, that it gave him a lifelong loathing of strong women like his mother. Aged 7, Otto’s strict mother sent him away to school in the Prussian capital, Berlin, an experience Otto absolutely hated. His father was a Junker, a kind of minor aristocrat, while his mother came from a family of middle class professionals. Despite the image he’d later cultivate as a man of the people, Otto von Bismarck came from the Prussian nobility. Less than three months after he was born, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo.įor baby Otto, Napoleon’s defeat meant being able to grow up on his parent’s estate without war. Not that young Otto was aware of any of this. Bismarck’s own home of Prussia had been deeply humiliated by a French military occupation. Not ten years before, Napoleon’s Grand Army had come storming through Central Europe, destroying the Holy Roman Empire and leaving the Germanic states in ruins. When Otto von Bismarck was born in the Prussian village of Schönhausen on April 1, 1815, it was into a world that had been shattered by war. In this video, we take a look at the man known to history as the Iron Chancellor. But while we all know the modern Germany he gave us, few of us know much about Bismarck himself. By the time he died, the German nation had been forged in blood and iron and Central Europe had a new sheriff in town. When Otto von Bismarck was born, Germany was a collection of 39 weak states cowering between the superpowers of France, Austria, and Russia.
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