Berlin

The main business sessions at the Congress of Berlin were held in the new Imperial Chancellery on the Wilhelmstrasse. As noted above, the Chancellery was now housed in the former Radziwill Palais, which had been thoroughly renovated to accommodate the chancellor’s office and a private residence. The chancellor’s quarters were, in the words of Baroness Spitzemberg, “ordinary and tasteless,” but the public rooms were suitably grand, if a bit garish. Bismarck thought that the main receiving room looked like a French bordello, which he considered fitting given the kind of people who frequented it.

The German chancellor, true to his nickname, ran the proceedings at the congress with an iron hand, forcing his colleagues to keep their speeches short and to finish each day’s agenda before retiring. When some delegates complained of the pace, he curtly replied: “No one has ever died from overwork.”

Bismarck cracked the whip partly because he was anxious to quit Berlin for his annual water-cure at Bad Kissingen, where (much like Helmut Kohl a century or so later) he ritualistically tried, with little success, to purge the effects of months of excess. The chancellor had always been a prodigious eater, drinker, and smoker, fond of consuming six-course dinners washed down with a couple flagons of wine and followed by a seven-inch Havana cigar, one of his half-dozen or so per day. (Cigars were more than a source of pleasure for him; when he was surrounded by boring guests at dinner and wanted to “fog himself in,” he resorted to a mighty cigar holder of his own design that allowed him to fire up three Havanas at once.) On workdays the chancellor usually added two bottles of champagne at midday and a few snifters of brandy at night. By the late 1870s he was gaining weight so rapidly that, as he complained, he had to purchase a totally new wardrobe every year. Now tipping the scales at over three hundred pounds, he suffered from acute gastric disorders, gout, shingles, piles, and insomnia. Yet when his doctors advised moderation he dismissed them as “dolts” who made “elephants out of gnats.” Moreover, though he frequently complained during the Congress of Berlin about the stress of keeping his colleagues in line and of having constantly to speak French (still the diplomatic language of the day), he refused to change his punishing habits. As he later told a friend:

Seldom did I sleep before six o’clock [a.m.], often not before eight in the morning, [and then] only for a few hours. Before twelve o’clock I could not speak to anyone, and you can imagine what condition I was in at the sessions. My brain was like a gelatinous, disjointed mass. Before I entered the congress I drank two or three beer glasses filled with the strongest port wine . . . in order to bring my blood into circulation. Otherwise I would have been incapable of presiding.

Disraeli, himself a physical wreck on the verge of collapse (he died three years later), was amused to hear the chancellor’s laments. He wrote to Victoria: “Bismarck, with one hand full of cherries, and the other full of shrimps, eaten alternatively, complains he cannot sleep and must go to Kissingen.”

To find some diversion during the conference, delegates amused themselves at frequent banquets, balls, receptions, outings, and theatrical performances. Berlin hostesses competed fiercely with each other to snare the most prestigious delegates; winners got the British or French, losers got the Moroccans. For some of the less hardy visitors, these events could themselves be a source of stress. “It is absolutely necessary to go to these receptions,” complained Disraeli in a report to the queen, “but these late hours try me. I begin to die at ten o’clock and should like to be buried before midnight.” Yet the old man showed no distress at an extravagant dinner party hosted by Bleichröder, where, in contrast to the usual Berlin house parties, Chateau Lafite freely flowed.