← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · Petr
Thread ID: 20483 | Posts: 9 | Started: 2005-10-01
2005-10-01 17:57 | User Profile
I came upon this stuff on the Phora forum, and it was said that this biography of Bismarck by Emil Ludwig was banned from circulation in Germany during the Third Reich...
[url]http://www.geocities.com/yipperson23/Bismarck.htm[/url] [COLOR=Indigo][FONT=Georgia]
[SIZE=4][I] Jewish-related excerpts from Emil Ludwigââ¬â¢s ââ¬ËBismarckââ¬â¢[/I][/SIZE]
[SIZE=3] [B]THE JEWISH QUESTION[/B]
When the Jewish question comes up for discussion, Bismarck would like to absent himself, for in this matter he is not at one with the government. Ultimately, however he puts in an appearance; and, since he has already become, in a sense, one of the leaders of the extreme right, he takes up his parable against the "tedious humanitarian twaddle" of the left, which is striving to secure equality for all the king's subjects.
"I am no enemy of the Jews," he declares arrogantly; "and if they are hostile to me I forgive them. I love them under every circumstance. For my part, I would grant them all rights, save only the right of holding chief offices in a Christian State.... To me, the words about God's grace are not empty ones.... But I can only regard as God's will that which us revealed in the Gospels.... If we withdraw the religious foundation of the State then the State remains nothing more than a chance aggregate of rights, a sort of bulwark against the war of all against all.... It is not clear to me how, in such a State the ideas of the communists, for instance, concerning the immorality of property could be disputed.... For this reason we ought not encroach upon the people's Christianity." [B] pp. 76-77[/B] [B]
PREFERENCE FOR JEWS, EMANCIPATION OF THE JEWS[/B]
The only people whose conversation Bismarck refers to with pleasure in these days are Jews. He speaks of Lassalle as one of the most brilliant of men, as one from whom he is loath to part even when they have been talking far on into the night. Bleichroder, whom he employs as confidential agent, always has entry; receives a power of attorney for the administration of Bismarck's property, and, at the premier's instigation is raised into the ranks of the hereditary nobility. For years a certain Doctor Cohen acts as both friend and physician, the relationship continuing till Cohen's death. Thus Bismarck entrusts both his health and his property to Jews. "My intercourse with Simson is a real pleasure to me .... He is a man of genuine talent. When he came to visit me he was most entertaining- a thing I cannot say of the majority of my visitors. He is filled with genuine patriotism; is a noble vessel into which the most sublime sentiments have been poured." That characterisation cannot be paralleled among all those penned by Bismarck. Yet, twenty years earlier, as secretary in the Erfurt parliament, he had made fun of this same Simson. "My father would turn in his grave if he saw me here, acting as clerk to a Jewish professor." IN a dispute, Simson had actually called the minister a rope-dancer. Bismarck had certainly not forgotten these things. At a later date, he was full of praise for Disraeli. We cannot but ask why it was that he should make so much of Bleichroder instead of Hansemann, of Cohen instead of Frerichs; of Lassalle instead pf Liebknecht; of Simson instead of Richter, of Disraeli instead of Salisbury.
By this date Bismarck had long since discarded anti-Semitism, together with the other reactionary prejudices of his youth. Even in the strictest privacy, he never appears to have given vent to any more expressions of antagonism to the Jews, although ugh we can hardly doubt that- reason notwithstanding- the traditional prejudices of his class in this matter must have, to some extent, persisted to the last. Twenty years after his speech against the admission of Jews to position s in the State service, it was he who carried through a law for the emancipation of the Jews, insisting that since Prussia had no State religion, the government could not take sides in such matters. In the Reichstag he extolled the Jews on account of their ââ¬Åespecial capacity and intelligence for affairs of Stateââ¬Â; in private he spoke of respect for parents, conjugal fidelity, and benevolence as their crowning virtues. He advocated marriages between the nobility and the Jews; and he referred to the Lynars, the Stirums, the Kurserows, and other houses in which Jewish alliances ââ¬Å have lead to the birth of extremely sensible, excellent persons ââ¬Â¦ Conversely, it is better still when a Christian stallion of German stock enters into a union with a Jewish mare. Money must be freely circulated, and there is no such thing as a bad race. I do not know what I might advise my own sons to do in this matter.ââ¬Â In old age, he summarised the social and biological value of the Jews in the following epigram: ââ¬ÅThe mingling of Jewish blood with the various German stocks introduces a certain sparkle whose value must not be underestimated.ââ¬Â [B] pp. 319-320[/B]
[B]BLEICHROEDER, A GREAT JEWISH FINANCIER[/B]
Manteuffel [Upper House opposition]: ââ¬ÅThere is reason to believe that, before Prince Bismarck became minister in Prussia, he was in close touch with exalted circles in the world of finance. The intimate relationships between Herr von Bleichroeder and the prince, which, indirectly at least, date from the princeââ¬â¢s pre-ministerial era- in the days when, upon the meagre allowance made to a Prussian envoy and without notable private means, he was able to represent his sovereign in St. Petersburg, Paris, Frankfort, must have helped to provide Prince Bismarck with good counsel. ââ¬Â¦ There is hardly any mistake which the present government has not committed, simply in order to hide its scandalous relationships with the financiers of Berlin.ââ¬Â
Further it was said that Bismarck had placed government orders with a Jew named Behrend, the tenant of his paper-mill at Varzin. A certain Captain von Puttkamer wrote that Bismarck had only promulgated the law concerning the Farther Pomeranian fiefs in order to ensure his wifeââ¬â¢s inheritance of a Puttkamer fief.
The members of Bismarckââ¬â¢s own order describe the man before whose greatness they are dimmed [Bleichroeder] as a vulgar financial intriguer, doing him great harm in a period of company promotion, and making the Jews in all cases the centre of their invectives. Above all, they harm their country, for Europe is delighted at these charges of corruption. Whilst this class is prone, during the speculations of an all too victorious epoch, to avail itself of the services of Jewish banking houses (because the Jews are clever financiers), the very same persons who turn the Jews to account calumniate them before the eyes of foreigners, and declare that Bismarck, who was the originator of the national impetus, is really responsible for these excrescences of financial speculation, ââ¬Åfor corruption has assumed colossal dimensionsââ¬Â¦ We live under an evil regime, and its name is Bismarck.ââ¬Â Only the last sentence was actionable. The anti-Semitic author of the article fled to escape being jailed, and wrote henceforward from Switzerland.
Among the nobles who were acquiring wealth there was current talk about ââ¬Åthe dangers to the general welfare of the State in that the first statesman of the German empire should have given a general power of attorney to the leading banker, who was a great Jewish financier.ââ¬Â Moltke and others of the generals tried by indirect means to separate Bismarck from Bleichroeder.
ââ¬ÅThere is no question in my mind,ââ¬Â says Bismarck in old age, ââ¬Åas to what I owe to Bleichroeder and his sons. He was my banker. It is false to say that I ever gave him any political tips which could have enabled him to make advantageous deals on his account or on mine. It is quite true that in the year 1866 he provided me with the means for carrying on the war, which no one else would supply. That was an action for which I owed him gratitude. As a responsible man I could not allow even a Jew to say of me that I had used him, and had then failed to recompense him for services which, as a statesman, I could not but esteem highly.ââ¬Â
[B]pp. 434-436[/B][/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
2005-10-01 18:30 | User Profile
"If we withdraw the religious foundation of the State then the State remains nothing more than a chance aggregate of rights, a sort of bulwark against the war of all against all.... It is not clear to me how, in such a State the ideas of the communists, for instance, concerning the immorality of property could be disputed.... For this reason we ought not encroach upon the people's Christianity."
2005-10-01 19:10 | User Profile
All of this did not stop [B]Georg Ritter von Schönerer[/B], the founder of modern racial anti-Semitism in Austria (and a very considerable ideological influence on NSDAP), from almost cultically worshipping Bismarck:
(from Brigitte Hamann's [I]Hitler's Vienna - A Dictator's Apprenticeship[/I], pp. 238-239, 249: [COLOR=Blue][SIZE=3]
[FONT=Times New Roman]"In other words, he was among those who believed that the timely "perfecting" of the German Reich by an Anschluss of Austria's German parts was in the natural course of events. Schönerer wrote letters of tribute to to his idol in Berlin and did not even budge when he received an unmistakably reserved response in which Bismarck let him know that he found any tempestuous Austrian-German nationalism politically inopportune. [B]The statesman Bismarck was not interested in utopian nationalist dreams.[/B] He did not dream of letting the Schönerians jeopardize his Double Alliance policy (between Germany and Austria-Hungary).
"Yet Schönerer continued to indulge in his hero cult, filling Waldviertel with devotional Bismarck articles. He had a Bismarck tower made of granite blocks built in the park of Rosenau, on whose top a summer-solstice fire was lit every year; [B]he had "Heil Bismarck" chiseled in in large runes into some of the erratic granite blocks from the Ice Age that are charasteristic of Waldviertel. [/B]He donated embellished signs to village taverns, bearing names such as "Iron Cross," "Prince Bismarck" and "The German Guard at the Camp." He planted Bismarck oak trees and pleased the young people in Zwettl by distributing hundreds of spiked Prussian paper helmets (3)
...
Schönerer increasingly became a comic figure. His slogan "Without Judea, without Rome, we'll build Germany's church and dome!" now triggered derisive laughter - as did his annual pilgrimages to Bismarck's grave in Friedrichruh near Hamburg."[/SIZE][/FONT][/COLOR]
This reminds of some cartoon-Nazis who continue to venerate Adolf Hitler in spite that they should know that his actual policies would have pretty certainly ran against their own ideas - like Hitler-worshippers of Slavic origin, or in general, people who think that he represented pan-European values...
If I recall rightly, one of Kaiser Wilhelm II's biggest blunders was abandoning the German-Russian friendship that Bismarck had so carefully cultivated - therefore condemning Germany to a two-front warfare in the First World War.
Petr
2005-10-01 23:43 | User Profile
Perhaps I should add that Emil Ludwig's original name was [B]Emil Cohn[/B], so his judgment is obviously biased.
Petr
2005-10-08 07:30 | User Profile
Wasn't Bismarck's Germany not the second reich? (I may be wrong)
2005-10-09 02:53 | User Profile
Emil Ludwig was a crazed Leftist German hater. I would not take much stock in anything he said.
2005-10-23 23:29 | User Profile
[url]http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1102&letter=B&search=bismarck[/url]
[B][SIZE="4"]BISMARCK, PRINCE OTTO EDUARD LEOPOLD:[/SIZE]
By : Gotthard Deutsch S. Mannheimer [/B]
[SIZE="3"][FONT="Garamond"] Prussian statesman; born at Schönhausen April 1, 1815; died at Friedrichsruh July 30, 1898; member of the Prussian Diet ([I]Vereinigter Landtag[/I]), 1847-51; representative of Prussia at the Bundestag at Frankfort-on-the-Main, 1851-59; Prussian ambassador at St. Petersburg from March, 1859, to May, 1862, and at Paris from May to Sept., 1862; secretary of state and premier from Sept., 1862, to Aug., 1866; then chancellor of the North German Federation until 1870, and of the German empire from Dec., 1870, to March 20, 1890.
[B]As a delegate to the first Prussian Diet, convened in 1847, Bismarck, a strong adherent of the feudal party ("Junkerpartei"), opposed the new law which favored the emancipation of the Jews. He eloquently advocated the idea of a Christian state in which Jews might have all personal liberties, but should not be accorded the right of serving as magistrates. He evinced the same spirit of religious or, rather, racial prejudice when Eduard Simson was elected speaker of the Erfurt parliament and himself one of the secretaries: "My late father," he said, "would thrice turn in his grave should he hear that I had become the secretary of a Jewish savant" (Simson had been baptized). In 1881 Bismarck praised Simson as one of the most distinguished and patriotic representatives of the national idea.[/B]
Time and experience wrought a change in Bismarck's views. Many years later (1870), at Versailles, he confessed that he had heard and had delivered "many a stupid speech at this Diet."
As Prussian minister of state, he acquiesced in the full emancipation which had come to the Jews through the revolution of 1848; and under his chancellorship the North German Federation passed the law of July 3, 1869: "All existing restrictions of civil and political rights, restrictions derived from the difference of religion, are hereby abolished. Especially the right of participating in the representation of the municipality and of the state, and of holding public office, shall be independent of the religious creed." In words and deeds Bismarck proved himself a stanch defender of these principles, which were embodied in article 3 of the constitution of the empire. "I shall never consent to any attempt at curtailing the constitutional rights of the Jews" (Poschinger, "Fürst Bismarck," p. 227). With thesame emphasis he declared his opposition to the anti-Semitic movement: "I decidedly disapprove of this agitation against the Jews, be it on religious or on racial grounds."
In 1868, when the agitation began against the Jews in Rumania, he took the part of the persecuted, and tried to influence Prince (afterward King) Karl in their favor, as is seen from a letter addressed to Crémieux by Count von der Goltz, Prussian ambassador to the French court (April 2): "From the letter of the president of the cabinet of Feb. 22 you may have learned already of the deep interest which the royal government takes in this affair. The readiness with which Count Bismarck has complied with your wish expressed in your letter of March 26 is a new proof thereof. His Excellency authorizes me to inform you that the Prussian consul-general at Bucharest has been ordered by telegraph to remonstrate with Prince Karl against the proposed law concerning the Israelites, which has just been submitted to the Rumanian legislature."
[B]At the Berlin Congress of 1878, Bismarck, pleading for the rights of the Rumanian Jews, remarked to Prince Gortschakoff that perhaps the sad condition of the Jews in Russia was due to the fact that they were deprived of civil and political equality. That no political considerations but the sentiments of justice and humanity dictated his actions is shown in the answer made by his coadjutor, Von Bülow, secretary of state for foreign affairs, to the representatives of the [I]Alliance Israélite Universelle[/I], who, desiring the chancellor's intercession in behalf of the Jews of the Balkan districts, had pleaded for toleration: "Gentlemen," said Von Bülow, "'toleration' is an incorrect word; not toleration, but unrestricted exercise of all their rights shall we demand, at the congress, for your coreligionists."[/B]
And yet the "iron chancellor," who had it in his power to crush the anti-Semitic movement at its beginning, was led by political reasons to foster it for some time. Having changed the liberal policy which he had followed since 1867, and in which he had had the support of the prominent Jewish statesmen Lasker and Bamberger, he sought the alliance of the Conservative party, which in 1878 had gained the ascendency in the Reichstag. The court chaplain, Adolf Stöcker, founder of the Christian-Socialist party and of its offspring, anti-Semitism, was not hampered in his reactionary agitations. Bismarck considered this new movement an efficient auxiliary in combating liberalism and democracy. But this strange fellowship, which, especially in Berlin, had pernicious consequences, was not of long duration. Bismarck never yielded to the demands of the agitators, and strenuously checked their attempts to deprive the Jews of the rights guaranteed to them by the fundamental laws of the empire.[/FONT][/SIZE]
2005-10-24 21:59 | User Profile
He had connections with the Jewish banking network of the 19th century, as did anyone trying to run three wars in 7 years in those days. So, maybe the fact that Jewish bankers helped him finance a series of wars softened his position of Jews in general. The Second Reich was built on blood and iron, which does not come cheap.
AE
[quote=Petr][URL="http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1102&letter=B&search=bismarck"]http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=1102&letter=B&search=bismarck[/URL]
[SIZE=3][FONT=Garamond]Bismarck never yielded to the demands of the agitators, and strenuously checked their attempts to deprive the Jews of the rights guaranteed to them by the fundamental laws of the empire.[/FONT][/SIZE]
2005-10-24 23:55 | User Profile
[quote=Angeleyes]He had connections with the Jewish banking network of the 19th century, as did anyone trying to run three wars in 7 years in those days. So, maybe the fact that Jewish bankers helped him finance a series of wars softened his position of Jews in general. The Second Reich was built on blood and iron, which does not come cheap.
AE
[SIZE=2]The jews [/SIZE][SIZE=2][COLOR=Indigo][FONT=Georgia]Bleichroeder lent Bismarck a train load of gold so he could buy off the Wittlebach's of Bavaria, and get them to support a war with France i.e. the Franco Prussian war.
The head of the Wittlesbach family, Ludwig a/k/a the Mad King was on a castle building spree at the time, so the hard cash came in handy. The rest of the Wittlesbach clan also got their pockets lined.
Years later the the jews Bleichroeder reminded Hitler about the loan---Hitler allegedly replied what have you done for Germany lately?
[/FONT][/COLOR][/SIZE]