No statesman has ever enjoyed such an inflated reputation as Otto von Bismarck. His catchphrases still reverberate around the echo-chamber of politics: “Realpolitik,” “honest broker,” “the art of the possible.” He fought three wars and won all of them. He unified Germany and made it a Continental superpower. But he also unleashed the daemonic forces that came close to destroying Western civilization in the twentieth century. If Hitler was the most devilish figure in modern history, Bismarck was the most Faustian. It was this Prussian reactionary whose “blood and iron” smashed the old rules that had hitherto constrained the destructive power of modernity. He probably never said “laws are like sausages: it’s better not to see them being made.” Yet the remark was attributed to him, for he held not only laws but humanity in contempt.

Jonathan Steinberg’s magnificent biography brings out the monstrous egotism of Bismarck more clearly than anybody before him. Steinberg suggests that the key to the young Otto was his cold, clever, and frustrated mother, from whom he inherited his brains and his ruthless streak, but who also left him damaged and emotionally crippled. At university in Göttingen, the teenage Bismarck fought twenty-five duels and befriended an American student, John Motley, later the celebrated historian of the Dutch Republic. Motley was so impressed by this “mad Junker,” who “in every respect . . . went immeasurably beyond any person I have ever known,” that he wrote a biographical novel about him. Morton’s