When was bismarck born

He spent his final years at Friedrichsruh, alone, resentful, pessimistic and desperately bored. He had his huge black mastiffs for company and visits from his family — sons and daughter, sister, niece and daughter-in-law. He felt far too young to do nothing, but he could find nothing to do except write his memoirs, in which he soon lost interest. Bismarck was confined to a wheel-chair now and as the summer of wore on, he developed an inflammation of the lungs.

He had difficulty breathing and lay in bed much of the time, talking or singing quietly to himself. On July 30th he had a relapse and the family gathered round his bed that night as he mumbled distractedly. This frequently expressed nostalgia may have been more guise than reality. During this period he met and married Johanna von Puttkamer, the daughter of a conservative aristocratic family famed for its devout pietism.

While courting Johanna, Bismarck experienced a religious conversion that was to give him inner strength and security. A subsequent critic was to remark that Bismarck believed in a God who invariably agreed with him on all issues. There is no question that the marriage was a very happy one. In fact, Bismarck's last words before dying in expressed the wish that he would once again see Johanna, who had passed away some years earlier.

Bismarck, Otto von Early Years. Early Career. Prime Minister. German Unification. His father was from an old Brandenburg aristocratic family. Bismarck used to say that the Bismarcks were nobler than the Hohenzollerns, the ruling house, because they were older. His mother Wilhelmine Mencken, however, was bourgeois, the daughter of a prominent Prussian civil servant.

This is a transcript from the video series European History and European Lives: to Watch it now, on The Great Courses. His mother was the dominant influence in his life. Although practically all the pictures of Bismarck show him in uniform, he never served in the army. Learn more about t he Twenties and the Great Depression.

The years on his estate turned out to be formative, and his letters from that period are wonderful. Bismarck eventually married her equally aristocratic and Christian friend Johanna von Puttkamer. This Christian spiritual connection in the Pietist movement counted among its numbers the most influential aristocratic families, and by marrying into it, Bismarck got connections at court with the king and crown prince, which he otherwise would not have had.

He owed his political career to the von Thaddens, the von Blanckenburgs, the von Puttkamers, and, above all, to the two von Gerlach brothers, who helped him, in the early stages of the revolution, to get elected to the Landtag, the Prussian parliament, and then to begin to write for the new reactionary newspaper.