Hanging out with Bismarck

Or: You can only destroy a historical monument once

I sat on a park bench with my eyes closed, listening to birds singing in the trees above and enjoying the warm spring sun on my face. Somewhere nearby a woodpecker pecked some wood. Teenagers were making the collective ‘I-double-dare-you’ noise they make the world over before one of them does something stupid. Then came the sound of glass breaking, followed by a collective ‘oohhh’ and running footsteps. 

I opened my eyes and saw a group of five boys running down the stone steps ahead of me, down the hill and out of sight. I felt I was old enough to sigh and ‘tut-tut’ in disapproval. The beer bottle they had smashed had broken into countless shards which now lay scattered over a wide area on the floor. I looked up the giant stone memorial the kids had been sitting on and its smooth round face seemed to share my disapproval.

I was sitting in Hamburg’s Elbpark, home to the largest of hundreds of memorials worldwide dedicated to Otto von Bismarck, the founder of the German nation state and its first chancellor. Hamburg’s Bismarck monument is a huge stone structure, 35m tall and 600 tonnes heavy. It’s towered over the port, the source of the city’s wealth, since 1906 when it was completed eight years after Bismarck’s death. 

The Bismarck memorial during construction, 1906.

In a way, this monument was the reason I was in Hamburg and so I thought it was right that I paid it a visit. I had come to talk about my book Blood and Iron: Rise and Fall of the German Empire 1871-1918. Despite the overwhelmingly positive response to it, some people have accused me of being too soft on Bismarck, who, in my view, was one of the most capable statesmen of the 19th century, perhaps ever. Similarly, Hamburg continues to have a heated debate around the man’s legacy and whether or not it still wants to be home to his largest memorial. So Hamburg seemed the perfect place to talk about Bismarck and what place he should take in German history.

This issue escalated a number of years ago when the Black Lives Matter movement reached German shores. Public debate began to look further back than the Second World War and has rediscovered the colonial empire. On the eve of the First World War, Germany presided over the third largest empire and committed horrific crimes to defend it.