Otto von Bismarck 'made' Germany but never 'ruled' it. He was a political genius who remade Europe and united Germany between 1862 and 1890 by the sheer power of his great personality and for twenty eight years he acted as a prime minister but without a party.
This biography takes the reader into close proximity with a human being of almost superhuman abilities and one of the most interesting human beings who ever lived. It uses the diaries and letters of his contemporaries to explore a man who never said a dull thing or wrote a slack sentence. We see him through the eyes of his secretaries, his old friends, his neighbours, his enemies and the press. Bismarck’s personality 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.
Jonathan Steinberg served for 33 years at Cambridge University as University Lecturer and then Reader in European History, Fellow of Trinity Hall, and Vice-Master. He now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia where he is the Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Modern European History. Steinberg has written on twentieth century Germany, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.
Samuel Johnson Prize 2011 Shortlist
