Despot (right) and monarch

Bismarck: A Life. By Jonathan Steinberg. Oxford University Press; 592 pages; $34.95 and £25. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

IN THIS new biography of the creator of the modern unified German state, Jonathan Steinberg finds a great many contradictory things to say about his subject. Otto von Bismarck was “a hypochondriac with the constitution of an ox, a brutal tyrant who could easily shed tears, a convert to an extreme form of Protestantism, who secularised schools and introduced civil divorce”. He was a brilliant writer yet his letters and his memoirs cannot be trusted because he started to tell lies to his mother at a young age and never stopped doing so. He was neurotic, vindictive and insensitive as well as charming, charismatic and full of warmth.

Mr Steinberg, a professor of modern European history at the University of Pennsylvania, is fascinated by Bismarck's complex personality. He started writing about him because he wanted to understand how his hero led three wars and unified Germany without commanding a single soldier, without a big political party backing him, without any experience in government before his nomination as minister-president of Prussia in 1862 and without great oratorical skills.

Bismarck became 19th-century Europe's greatest statesman (alongside Napoleon) through the sheer force of his personality, assisted by his outstanding intelligence, gargantuan capacity for work and his quasi-symbiotic relationship with King William I of Prussia. His ambitions started early. John Motley, an American who was Bismarck's roommate at Göttingen University, saw the will to dominate in his friend when he was only 18 years old. In an 1839 novel Motley thinly disguised him as Otto von Rabenmarck who tells the narrator, a new student at Göttingen: “I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life.”

Bismarck was enormously powerful in his 26 years as Prussia's political leader. But from the first he was dependent on the goodwill of his king. Indeed, if William had decided to fire him after the fiasco of a belligerent “blood and iron” speech that Bismarck delivered a few days after he was appointed minister-president, his career would have been at an end—and Germany would have probably become a federation of sovereign principalities.

Though the king was unhappy about the speech, he steadfastly backed Bismarck and would do so in subsequent conflicts. Much to the dismay of Queen Augusta, the king's wife, Bismarck had near-hypnotic powers over William. He manipulated him with temper tantrums, tears, hysterical outbursts and frequent threats of resignation. “It is hard to be king under Bismarck,” sighed the sovereign.

Mr Steinberg is at his best when describing the relationship between the royal family and Bismarck. He argues that Bismarck's misogyny stemmed from his childhood when he found himself in a triangle between his cold, intelligent and ambitious mother, whom he disliked, and his weak, kindly father. He despised Queen Augusta, because she interfered in his relationship with the king, and Crown Princess Victoria, the eldest daughter of England's Queen Victoria, because she inserted herself into his relationship with the crown prince.

These strong women played the role of evil enchantresses in Bismarck's psyche, argues Mr Steinberg. They dominated their weak husbands and threatened Bismarck, who sensed conspiracies everywhere. Even in later years, he could not bear to be in the same room with Queen Augusta (by then an elderly lady) and dropped out of an official dinner at the last minute when he found out that he was seated next to her.

Bismarck left his successors an unstable structure. The haphazardly thrown-together constitution of Prussia, with a lower house elected by a three-class voting system and an ineffectual House of Lords, was unsuited for a country that had become a political and economic powerhouse within three decades. By the end of the 19th century Germany possessed heavy industry, advanced technology, thriving ports and harbours, a skilled labour force and an urban intellectual elite, as well as Europe's strongest army. Germans tolerated their archaic government so long as the brilliant and despotic Bismarck was in charge. But the shaky construct fell apart after his death, as did the fragile Bismarckian balance of power in Europe.