Otto von Bismarck’s Four-Legged Friends

“Historians like to say, everything has a history. Recently, the history of animals, has seen some development. The history of dogs, living closely beside humans for millennia as guards, workers, hunting aids and companions, illustrates a relationship with nature over time and sheds light on how our species has understood our role on our planet as owners, custodians, or exploiters of the natural world, and it includes ambiguous friendships…” 

So begins today’s story from Dr. Claudia Kreklau.

For further reading:
Parry, Tyler D., and Charlton W. Yingling. “Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas.” Past & Present 246 (2020): 69–108.

A.W.H. Bates, (ed.), Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain: A Social History, The Palgrave Macmillan Animal Ethics Series. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2017. 

Transcript

90 Second Narratives
Season 9: “Friendship”
Episode 1: “Otto von Bismarck’s Four-Legged Friends”

Sky Michael Johnston:

Welcome to 90 Second Narratives, the podcast that brings you “little stories with BIG historical significance.” I’m the host and creator of the podcast, Sky Michael Johnston. 

Today is an episode of several firsts for the show. It is the first episode of Season 9 which will feature stories about friendship. And this is the first time a former guest has come back for a second story. It couldn’t be more fitting than for it to be my friend, Dr. Claudia Kreklau, 90 Second Narrative’s first storyteller from Season 1 Episode 1. Dr. Kreklau is an Associate Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews. Her story today is “Otto von Bismarck’s Four-Legged Friends.”

Claudia Kreklau:

Historians like to say, everything has a history. Recently, the history of animals, has seen some development. The history of dogs, living closely beside humans for millennia as guards, workers, hunting aids and companions, illustrates a relationship with nature over time and sheds light on how our species has understood our role on our planet as owners, custodians, or exploiters of the natural world, and it includes ambiguous friendships. 

Otto von Bismarck, Prussian Minister and Chancellor of Germany in the nineteenth century, had many dogs by the names of Flora, Sultan, Tyras, and Rebekka, who gained international fame during their owner’s lifetime.

His pets functioned as part of the extended familia of the Bismarck’s household. During early mornings, Otto went for walks before breakfast accompanied by his hounds, and his dogs attended houshold meals as a rule.  Indoors, they were free to roam about and “rampag[e].”  Otto had the habits of feeding his dogs at the table, giving them six sausages for their dinner in front of the guests on 11th April 1879. This made the Tiras and Rebekkas of the Bismarck household well-known among their circle of friends, acquaintances and colleagues. In the 1880s, when Bismarck became despondent, he only wanted to spend time with his pets, wanting no human company.  These dogs clearly meant a lot to Otto von Bismarck, yet, attitudes towards animals at the time were ambiguous at best, and Otto not immune to the general acceptance of violence towards them. 

At some points, Bismarck’s treatment of his pets aimed to merely avert danger to humans. One of the Tirsases on 13th June 1878 jumped upon the foreign emissary Gortschakow during a visit.  When the diplomat visited again in May of 1881, his dog Tiras was tied away to prevent a repetition of the international debacle. The dogs seemed to display something of a vicious attitude towards guests, leading historian Otto Pflanze to call the animal “particularly savage,” noting that even household members feared the creature.  As these dogs also served as hunting aids, such behavior should not entirely surprise us. 

Yet, at other times, Bismarck’s treatment of his dogs was beyond any measure of the reasonable. When Rebekka displayed behavior Bismarck called wanting in “domesticity” in 1845, he chained her up for several days on end [‘tagelang’].  Several anecdotes recollect the dogs attacking or threatening smaller dogs or even members of the Bismarck family, such as Otto’s daughter’s lap dog and his wife Johanna when dancing with Otto, eliciting growls from the boar hound. In response to the attack on the smaller pet, Bismarck “lashed the animal with a riding whip until he could no longer lift his arm.”  Contemporaries noted that Bismarck punished his dogs severely. 

The most extreme example of Bismarck’s violence against his hounds is the case of Sultan’s death in 1877. Christoph von Tiedemann, a colleague, recollects: “during coffee it was suddenly discovered that Sultan, the big boarhound, who had just been spoiled by everyone at table, had disappeared. As Sultan had a love-affair in a nearby town” the party presumed him there, as on previous occasions. When Sultan returned, Bismarck said angrily he would give the dog “a good thrashing” (tüchtig durchprügeln) when he found him. When he returned, the guests were told “Sultan was on his last breaths.” Sultan died, his head on Bismarck’s lap, “tears” in the Prince’s eyes, “whispering soothing words in the dog’s ear,” leaving Bismarck to regret having “punished him” so harshly. The results were insomnia and guilt pangs. Sultan was buried on the 26th October  1877 “at a beautiful area in the park.”  Bismarck mourned the hound quoting Shakespeare, avoided conversation, and raged against himself in the following days, blaming himself for the death of the dog, for “having beat him,” calling himself “raging, brutal, and causing everyone pain, who met him” before also regretting mourning the death of an animal for so long.”  For Bismarck to rage so strongly against himself suggests that the beating of the animal must have at least been so violent, as to make such a causal connection plausible. Onlookers asserted, the Prince had “lost a friend and [felt] lonely.”  

One might presume, Bismarck eased in his treatment of Sultan’s successor after this event, but no. When Sultan’s successor Tiras, a dog of the same breed, ripped a maid’s dress, Bismarck beat this dog as well.

Bismarck channeled contemporary Prussian, masculine, militaristic attitudes towards animals, as much as he questioned them, giving him an ambiguous, partly deeply attached, partly abusive attitude towards his pets paired with self-loathing. Bismarck was used to shooting animals, killing a seal during a trip to the Northern Sea islands while hunting for but not finding any dolphins to slay. It was only after having completed such deeds that regret hit the constant hunter. Regarding his dead sea-hound, Bismarck wrote, that he was sorry to have shot it, because it had “such a good-natured doglike face and great beautiful eyes, that I was decently sorry.” Yet, at the same time, the compassion for the dead mammal lay closer to the values of anti-vivisection activists active in this era.

Further, when the Kaiser gave him a “dreadful black dog…a caricature of a dog, with a huge head, drooping eyes, scantily thin, small chested, without breed, pitiful to look on” Bismarck considered poisoning him, but told his family friends: “yet, he likes me so very much, has such good loyal eyes—therefore, I cannot make the decision to do it.”  His family friend Spitzemberg found this “sentimental love to animals” both charming and odd in equal measure.

On more than one occasion Bismarck expressed the hope to meet his many dogs in the afterlife. When visiting the Bismarcks, Spitzemberg heard Johanna, Otto’s wife, say about dear Flora’s death, that she hoped to meet her pet in a next realm. Bismarck replied “And why shouldn’t that be? …I certainly hope to meet dogs and horses in heaven.”  Similarly, a friend recollected him saying “Those old German forefathers of ours had a kind religion. They believed that, after death, they would again meet in the celestial hunting-grounds all the good dogs that had been their faithful companions in life. I wish I could believe that.”  Bismarck repeatedly acknowledged how undignified his own grief was when his pets died—especially after Sultan’s death in 1877—aware of how insensible this sounded to conservative aristocratic ears. And yet, treasuring his pets emotionally places Otto von Bismarck into the long line of paradoxical central European lovers of nature and skeptics of humans—all the way to Hitler and his well-known German Shepard Blondie.

Sky Michael Johnston:

If you are interested in learning more about the history of dogs, you can read “Slave Hounds and Abolition in the Americas” by Tyler D. Parry and Charlton W. Yingling published in Past & Present in 2020. On early animal rights movements in the nineteenth century, you can consult the 2017 book, Anti-Vivisection and the Profession of Medicine in Britain: A Social History, edited by A.W.H. Bates and published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Thank you for listening today. Please subscribe to 90 Second Narratives and join me all season for more stories about friendship.