Berlin

Leopold had less success, at least initially, in his attempt to win the backing of Bismarck himself. The chancellor immediately saw through the king’s humanitarian pose. In the margins of a royal letter outlining the Belgian’s grand plan, Bismarck penciled the word “swindle,” and he told an aide that “His Majesty displays the pretensions and naive selfishness of an Italian who considers that his charm and good looks will enable him to get away with anything.” However, as Britain, France, and Portugal began to press into the Congo region, threatening to divide it up among themselves, Bismarck came around to Bleichröder’s conviction that Leopold’s plan would be beneficial to Germany, since the Reich’s trade interests in the area were more likely to find protection under the Belgian king than under any of his rivals. In November 1884, therefore, Bismarck secretly recognized Leopold’s so-called “Congo Free State.” To help the king gain official recognition for his enterprise, Bismarck agreed to host an international conference on the question in the German capital.

Like the Congress of Berlin seven years earlier, the West Africa Conference took place in Bismarck’s Chancellery building on the Wilhelmstrasse. The chancellor was not the official chairman, but, as in the Berlin Congress, he personally guided the proceedings. This time his paunch did not hang over the conference table because he had finally agreed to go on a diet and even to cut his alcohol consumption to a measly two bottles of wine a day, which of course made him more surly than ever. It did not help his disposition that the participants at this conference were not political heavyweights, as in the Congress of Berlin, but mere ambassadors. There was not a single African in attendance, which is hardly surprising, since the European colonizers considered the native Africans no more capable of defining the future of their own lands than American whites believed the Indians were entitled to settle the fate of the American West.

More curious was the absence of Leopold II, the man on whose behalf the conference had been organized. He thought it best to stay away and let the German hosts handle his interests in Berlin. Bleichröder did so by entertaining the delegates with elaborate dinner parties at his mansion. But of course it was Bismarck, once again, who was the crucial figure here, and it was through the diplomatic skill of the German chancellor that Leopold gained what he most dearly wanted: the blessing of the Great Powers for his grand “humanitarian” project in the Congo. Bismarck won Britain’s acceptance by promising to support London’s interests in Niger against France. He negotiated a complex deal with France and Portugal, whereby those powers were pacified, at least partly, with properties north of the Congo River. The territory that ended up under Leopold’s control was not quite as large as he had originally envisaged, but at over a million square miles it was the largest private domain in the history of imperialism.

At the end of the conference, Bismarck delivered a pretty speech in which he spoke of the meeting’s glorious successes—freedom of trade in the whole Congo Basin and “careful solicitude” for the moral and physical welfare of the native races. This last claim, of course, was a black farce. By turning the Congo over to Leopold, Bismarck and his colleagues facilitated the creation of a brutal, genocidal regime— the horrific realm evoked in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.

Important as Bismarck’s role in this tragic development was, however, it should not be overstated. Because of the West Africa Conference, the myth evolved that the Scramble for Africa was precipitated in Berlin—that “Berlin carved up Africa.” In reality, Bismarck only helped to direct and refine the carving, which had begun well before the conference in Berlin. Moreover, while Germany certainly got what it wanted from the meeting, the Reich came across here more as an arbitrator than as a self-aggrandizer.

Indeed, in the African conference, as in the Congress of Berlin, Bismarck showed that the new Germany, far from being a threat to the European and world order, could be a force for peace and stability. He proved that the word “Wilhelmstrasse” could stand for adroit diplomacy rather than rampant militarism. Alas, much like the diplomatic settlement engineered at the Congress of Berlin, this image would turn out to be very short-lived. Already by the turn of the century, mention of Berlin’s main governmental street conjured up visions of a rapacious foreign policy acting as a fig leaf for aggression.

Metropolis of Opposition