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Bismarck: A Life. By Jonathan Steinberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Pp. xiv + 577. Cloth $34.95. ISBN 978-0199782529.
This book offers much to praise. An eminent historian has written a biography of Otto von Bismarck for a popular audience. The prose is engaging, the account gripping. Addressing his readers in the first person, Jonathan Steinberg guides them through the sources, from which he quotes copiously. This technique provides a sense of immediacy to the account, as it invites readers to become first-hand witnesses to the biographer's own process of discovery; to share his insights, hunches, perplexity, and shock over what the sources reveal about the subject. The goal of the volume, he confides, "is to explain to author and reader how Bismarck exercised his personal power" (9).
Despite the claim that he has exploited "a wealth of unexpected, unusual and fascinating new material" (ix), the author has not discovered much that cannot be found in the great Bismarck biographies by Erich Eyck, Otto Pflanze, Lothar Gall, and Ernst Engelberg. Steinberg's distinctive contribution to this literature is to emphasize the story's personal dimension-to an extent uncommon since World War II. The real subject of the book is "the sheer power of [Bismarck's] personality," or what Steinberg repeatedly calls his "sovereign self." Steinberg's Bismarck is extravagant in every sense, "an extraordinary, gigantic self" (4), a "demonic figure" (185) whose political genius is matched by his appetites, his relentless ambition and willpower, personal magnetism, brutality, ruthlessness, irritability, intolerance, and hypochondria. The only principle that he observes is the increase of his own power. To make this case, Steinberg calls upon a large cast of contemporary...