Bismarck's Private Advisor

...Procrastinating countries can often have their own way if they hold out long enough...

...In Gold and Iron, though, the reader is impressed most of all by just how little the financier was able to influence Bismarck or anyone else with authority...

...All the more surprising, then, that his name, so familiar to contemporaries (in 1872 he became the first Jew knighted in Prussia, hence the "von"), should have by now been forgotten...

...They maintain that it was the flawed form modernization took in 19th- and 20th-century Germany that led to the subsequent tragic events...

...the author cites statistics showing their disproportionate numbers in journalism and business...

...He gained the Iron Chancellor's lifelong gratitude for helping to raise loans for the Prussian state during the early 1860s—when Bismarck refused to allow parliamentary intervention in military policy, and parliament responded by vetoing the government's budget and tax plans...

...One is struck," Stern writes, "by the penetration of economic power, its ubiquitous presence, but also by its limits and indeed by its inferiority as compared to the power of the state...

...The fact that Bleichrdder had relatively little political clout did not prevent anti-Semites from painting him as the master wire-puller, the man behind the scenes who controlled everything and everybody including Bismarck, the Judenknecht ("lackey of the Jews...

...Stern notes that to the nation's antimodernists, Jews symbolized everything hateful...

...In Gold and Iron, the first study of Bismarck's private banker, Ger-son von Bleichrdder, Stern continues this theme and spins out some of the implications for German Jews...

...But in this case, the modesty of Bismarck's efforts reflected an unwillingness to go out on a limb for a Jewish friend, much less for all Jews...

...The Chancellor rewarded Bleichrdder with his friendship and afforded him the opportunity to consort with the great and the mighty...

...Bleichrdder's one major involvement in politics came in the 1870s...

...One of the last episodes described by Stern is Bismarck's abysmal failure to come to the banker's defense during the outbreak of anti-Semitic agitation in the late 1870s and 1880s...

...But most historians—though they would not go so far as to say that such specific aspects of the Hitler horror as "the final solution" or concentration camps were inevitable?disagree...

...The Rumanian government, however, proceeded to ignore the promises it had made, and other matters soon caught Bismarck's attention...

...At the Congress of Berlin in 1878, the inclusion of the stipulation in the Treaty appeared to crown the campaign with success...

...Instead, they eventually joined with the traditional aristocracy to exclude the working class from state power...

...Bleichrdder, the owner of possibly the most important banking house in pre-1914 Germany, was a Jew who owed his early rise to connections with the Paris House of Rothschild...

...It was in this atmosphere that Bleichrdder, the richest of Jews and a confidant of Bismarck, became the object of countless frenzied slurs in books, brochures and speeches...

...it is a finely crafted study, and the tragedy it narrates in such detail is all the more engaging because it is true...

...Bleichrdder was quite useful to Bismarck, politically and personally...

...Reviewed by Steven Kelman Author, "Push Comes to Shove," "Behind the Berlin Wall" Contemporary German history is like a novel whose unhappy ending is revealed on the first page: The reader's fascination comes from trying to piece together why and when things started falling apart...

...They point in particular to the nation's failure to develop basic democratic and parliamentary institutions in the pre-World War 1 period, or to meet the demands of industrial workers for a share of political power and its attendant benefits...

...On a personal level, Bleichrdder helped Bismarck manage his investments so that he was not reduced to poverty, like so many Junkers...

...Unlike Jews in other countries, though, they were never allowed to translate their social advancements into participation in the polity, a situation they shared with the German working class...

...His explanations have focused on the aristocracy's opposition to the new idea that achievement ought to be the criterion of social recognition...

...The industrial and commercial middle-classes were thus put on the defensive and hindered from assuming the role they played elsewhere on the Continent as the vanguard of civil liberties and democratic rule...

...Eventually, ambassadors were sent and recognition was granted without Rumanian adherence to the provisions of the Treaty...

...After a decade-long search through the archives at the House of Rothschild in Paris, at Bismarck's estate in Friedrichsruh, and at assorted other places, the historian has rectified this neglect...

...He played a prominent role in the attempt to have Western nations withhold recognition from newly-independent Rumania unless it granted citizenship and civil rights to the several hundred thousand Jews living there...

...That the commercial section was subservient to the diplomatic corps was a reflection of the widely-held view that money matters were unworthy of the practitioners of high politics...

...Fritz Stern's book can be read on a number of different levels: as history, sociology or human drama...

...This opposition, calling into question the legitimacy of the parvenus and the system of economic and political liberalism they advocated, attained greater currency in Germany than in other European countries...

...This vision of immense Jewish power was fostered by the tremendous success Jews enjoyed in German society in the late 19th century...

...Those with more exoteric interests can turn to it for an evocation of a man and his milieu...

...In the case of the rise of National Socialism, one could argue that it was not uniquely German—that it could have happened in any nation ravaged by the Great Depression...

...They were vilified simultaneously as plutocratic capitalists and revolutionary Socialists because both of those social roles represented the disruption of the old ways and the coming to birth of a new society...

...In addition, the financier provided Bismarck with confidential economic intelligence, information that was difficult to obtain from the commercial section of the German Foreign Service...

...Fritz Stern, professor of history at Columbia University, has in some earlier works—especially the brilliant Politics oj Cultural Despair, a study of the thought of "conservative revolutionaries" in Imperial Germany who execrated liberalism, modernism and capitalism—established himself as one of the leading interpreters of the country's defective entry into modernity...

...Less theoretical and more descriptive than Stern's earlier works, for the student of the problems of modernization in Germany Gold and Iron will nevertheless illustrate a number of theoretical issues...