Preston Damsky
HIST 133A
Source Exploration V.1

Bismarck’s Conception of a modus vivendi with Rome (December 19, 1882) 
http://germanhistorydocs.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=1839

SOURCE SUMMARY

Document is a private letter written by Otto von Bismarck (1815-1898) on December 19, 1882 to the current Crown Prince of Prussia Friedrich Wilhelm, who would later rule Prussia for 99 days in 1888 as Frederick III. The entire letter is available in a translated English version on the German History in Documents and Images website.  The translation was done by Erwin Fink. The original source is in German and published in 1935 in volume 6.C of Die gesammelten Werke [The Collected Works], ed. Gerhard Ritter and Rudolf Stadelmann (Friedrichsruh edition) which is an incredibly large nineteen volume, near-complete collection of Bismarck’s lifetime writings and correspondences. The document was reprinted in full in Volume 2 of Staat und Kirche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert by Ernst Randolph Huber and Wolfgang Huber, a Protestant father and son academic team who have put together a now five volume set on church-state relations in Germany. 

Bismarck’s letter was written in 1882, four years after the installation of a new pope, Leo XIII, and the easing of the anti-Catholic policies of the Kulturkampf. In the letter Bismarck criticizes the idea of a “lasting modus vivendi” between the German Empire and the Roman Catholic church. In Bismarck’s eyes, the Catholic church represents an outside authority in the German state which is not subject to the sovereignty of the German crown. Bismarck worries about Catholic influence in Germany, represented in the Reichstag by the Central Party, and its tendency to attract other interests which are contrary to the German Crown such as the “Poles, Guelphs, Danes, and Social Democrats” (GHDI, 1). Although Bismarck is worried of Catholic influence, he firmly believes that the German government is in a good position politically and sees no need to make official declarations or concordats. Furthermore, any effort on diplomatically engaging with Rome is useless to Bismarck as their interests will always be contrary to those of a Protestant, German state (Bismarck, 149). The best policy, according to Bismarck, will be to patiently wait out the church while consolidating the crown’s control over the German education system to instill nationalism within German Catholics. 

AUTHOR BACKGROUND & CONTEXT

Born April 1, 1815 in Schönhausen, Prussia, Otto von Bismarck entered life as a member of the Prussian landowning Junker class. His father was a squire and an average farmer and thus Bismarck’s family did not live in extravagant opulence (Britannica). Taylor notes that the Prussian Junkers were unlike those of the east and they often worked the farms themselves. Bismarck’s family was no different and his father faced economic difficulties throughout his life (Taylor 9-11). Bismarck performed poorly in school which he saw as restricting and dull. At university Bismarck “led the life of a heavy-drinking, hard-fighting, whoring young nobleman let off the leash” but abstained from joining the Burschenschaften because of their ban on dueling and opposition to traditional aristocratic values (Feuchtwanger, 17).
 
Although Bismarck was a staunch conservative he was not indoctrinated in those ideas. According to his memoirs, Bismarck had a liberal mother who in turn had a liberal father. Bismarck rejected the notion that “nobility has been the starting point of my domestic policy” and distanced himself from the absolutism of Louis XIV (Bismarck, 39).

He became a public official in Aachen in 1836 but quit shortly before the death of his mother in January of 1839. Bismarck managed the family estate until 1847 when he was elected as a representative of Magdeburg to the Prussian diet. He performed a variety of ministerial and diplomatic roles within the Prussian government until 1862 when he was appointed prime minister of Prussia by King Wilhelm I (Wikipedia). After three wars for unification, Germany was united in 1871, mostly thanks to the diplomatic and political maneuvering of Bismarck. Bismarck had achieved his goal of a unified, powerful Germany and had done so while preserving the monarchial and aristocratic social order (Feuctwanger, 73).

In the 1870s Bismarck, a Protestant, began a series of policies targeting Roman Catholic church influence and control of numerous German social institutions, primarily education. Bismarck’s stated motivation for this Kulturkampf revolved more around preserving the unity of the newly formed German state than a desire to persecute German Catholics. In writings after his retirement, Bismarck cites the desire to remove Constitutional church protections, combat Polonization, and “above all” assert state dominance over the educational system (Bismarck, 145). Taylor seems to agree with this analysis and makes the argument that Bismarck's Kulturkampf was a political strategy designed to ally Bismarck with the National Liberals in order to combat the Catholic Center party. The National Liberals were secularists who wanted to remove all church influence on a matter of principle. Bismarck hoped could reduce his temporary dependence on the National Liberals, his historic rivals, by appealing to the Conservative party's spirit of nationalism in combating the Center party which was viewed by Bismarck as being in an alliance with autonomist movements throughout the Reich. This failed however, as Conservatives disliked attacks on religious institutions, specifically the introduction of civil marriage laws (Taylor 151-160).

The death of Pius IX in 1878 allowed the new pope, Leo XIII to broker peace between his Center Party allies and Bismarck. Although he eventually reversed much of the anti-clerical “May Laws”, Bismarck viewed his Kulturkampf as a success precisely because he achieved those three aforementioned goals (Bismarck, 147-149) with some level of permanence. However, after his retirement Bismarck still hesitated to say that the de facto modus vivendi between the Kaiserdom and the Roman Catholic Church would be long lasting. Rather, Bismarck saw the conflict between the crown and church as something with a long historical tradition that would take a long time to be resolved, and most likely never in Germany. Catholics viewed the period of the kulturkampf as a time of repression as many Catholic clerics and papers faced government persecution.

Emperor Wilhelm I died in 1888 to be succeeded for less than one hundred days by Frederick III who died of cancer and was later succeeded by Wilhelm II. Wilhelm II and Bismarck found little common ground. They disagreed first on domestic issues relating to the social question, where Bismarck felt Wilhelm II was too weak (Pflanze, 358), and then on Wilhelm’s growingly jingoistic foreign policy (Pflanze, 381). Bismarck was forced to resign in 1890 after a long decline in his political support. German politicians saw little reason to align themselves with Bismarck, who was old and in poor health, over the young Kaiser. Bismarck spent his final years writing his memoirs. He was seen in German politics as a retired, old statesmen who was opposed to the current order. He died on July, 30 1898. His tombstone called him “A true German servant of Emperor Wilhelm I” which was interpreted as partially insulting towards Wilhelm II. His son Herbert von Bismarck promoted his father’s policies while serving in the Reichstag until 1904 when he died. The end of the Bismarckian age marked the rise of an aggressive German state under Wilhelm II which sought to grow German power at the expense of other European states (Taylor, 267). 

SOURCE EXPLORATION

The UCSB Library has much of the original German Die gesammelten Werke but not volume 6.C. The UCSB Library does however hold Volume 6.B of Die gesammelten Werke which has a copyright date of 1931. A Melvyl search of “Die gesammelten Werke volume 6c” leads to a publishing date of 1935. I could not find an English translation of Die gesammelten Werke. I found volume two of Staat und Kirche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert but volume two could only be found in Germany.

However, when finding Die gesammelten Werke on the 4th floor of the UCSB library in the German history section I came across numerous books which provided me with important information:

A.J.P. Taylor, Bismarck The Man and the Statesmen (London: Hamish Hamilton Ltd, 1955)
	- Information regarding Bismarck's kulturkampf motivation
	- Specifics regarding the actual policies of the kulturkampf
	- Helpful information on Bismarck’s battles with Wilhelm II later in life
	- Information on Bismarck’s death

Otto Pflanze, Bismarck and the Development of Germany v2 and v3 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
•	Good recounting of final years as Chancellor
•	Goes into in-depth discussion of labor issues 
•	Kulturkampf policies
•	Wilhelm II was opposed to looking like a dictator over the labor question

A.J. Butler, Bismarck The Man and the Statesmen (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1899), 
A.J. Butler, Bismarck The Man and the Statesmen vol II (Leipzig: Bernhard Tauchnitz, 1899) 
	-  Background on Bismarck’s mother and grandfather
	- Bismarck’s own views on his class

Edgar Feuchtwanger, Bismarck (London: Routledge, 2002) 
•	Information on Bismarck’s early life
•	Bismarck’s education

All of these sources heavily utilized Die gesammelten Werke but none of them seem to use the December 19, 1882 letter. I checked the bibliographical/footnotes of each book and looked for mentionings of Volume 6C of Die gesammelten Werke. If the author used this letter I would be able to tell from the page numbers of the citation but no one cited p266ff of volume 6C. A search on google scholar of “Bismarck December 19, 1882”and "Bismarck modus vivendi Frederick", "die gesammelten Werke vol. 6c  pp. 266ff" (what GDI cites as the page number in Die gesammelten Werke) revealed little of help as well. However, a google scholar search of “Bismarck modus vivendi” led me to an online version of the second volume of Butler’s Bismarck, The Man and the Statesman which included a chapter on the “Culturkampf” explaining Bismarck’s account of it. Butler’s work is merely him translating some of Bismarck’s post-retirement writings. The online version does not include references to Butler as the translator but I managed to find a text version of the second volume in the UCSB Library which does give the translation credit. 

I've been unable to tell precisely how the letter originally made it into Volume 6C. In office hours I worked with Professor Marcuse to track down where Frederick III’s papers went after his death only to find most correspondences were either returned, destroyed, or sent to various government archives. A google search of "Bismarck nachlass" led me to a German website of the "Otto von Bismarck Stiftung" in a section called Bismarck Nachlass which has a mention of more of Bismarck's papers being discovered in the "Friedrichsruher output" of the 1920s and 1930s. The website suggests that the vast majorty of Bismarck's papers are held by the foundation, in the Federal Archives (in Berlin), or the archives of the Foreign Office and the Privy Prussian State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage in Berlin-Dahlem. Without access to Volume 6C of Die gesammelten Werke I have no way of telling how that letter originally surfaced but given how it seems to first appear in 1935 it may have something to do with this “Friedrichsruher output”.

GOOGLE NGRAM

Kulturkampf: Searched between 1800 and 1950 on German corpus with smoothing of 3. Term originates in 1870 and shoots up after that. It steadily increases in usage until the years preceding WWII but then sharply increases after 1945. Searched between 1800 and 1950 on English corpus with smoothing of 3. Term originates in mid-1870s. It increases dramatically during the years of WWI. 

Culturkampf: Searched between 1800 and 1950 on German corpus with smoothing of 3. Term originates in 1870 and shoots up after that to an apex in 1878 and falls out of usage in 1907. Searched between 1800 and 1950 on English corpus with smoothing of 3. Term originates in 1872. It increases steadily until 1892 when it shoots up to an apex around 1901 and drops dramatically in 1907.

Modus vivendi: Searched between 1800 and 1950 on German corpus with smoothing of 3. Term originates in 1860 and peaks in 1880 only to peak again in 1927. It's usage in the 1860s likely has more to do regarding the wars of unification then any potential conflicts between crown and church.