The New York Review, 31.1.91

...The emphasis an Europe was evident in both the plan and the contents of the exhibition. The Austrian architect Boris Podrecca designed it so that visitors would come first into a central courtyard, or Lichthof, in which they would move by way of an ascending ramp past images and artifacts that represented the development, changes, and internal and external tensions of European society from the battle of Waterloo to the apocalypse of the First World War, which opened a new age. The outer rim of the exhibition was divided into smaller rooms devoted to special themes, such as the age of Metternich, the revolutions of 1848, Seen in their European dimension, the national wars of the 1850s and 1860s, and the unification of Germany and its new European role.
Thanks to the energy and diplomacy of the exhibition's director, Dr. Marie-Louise Gräfin von Plessen, 280 museums and special collections collaborated in sending exhibits to Berlin, including the Museum of the Army in Paris, the National Historical Museum in Frederiksborg, Denmark, the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan, and museums in Florence, Vienna, Versailles, and London. As a result visitors were privileged to see under one roof such masterpieces of historical painting as Lanfredini's powerful representation of the execution of the revolutionary priest Ugo Bassi by Austrian troops in Bologna in 1849, Flandrin's portrait of Napoleon III, and the large canvas that dominated the central court, Giuseppe Pelizza da Volpedo's Fiumana, a study for his monumental painting The Fourth Estate. Foreign contributions also added to the variety and scope of the exhibition's portrayal of the political life of the age, the progress of industrialism, and the emergence of the social problem and, in the case of the Prussian military victories of the 1860s, enabled visitors to see these conflicts from the other side of the hill. Particularly striking in this respect were Alphonse de Neuville's painting of the dogged French defense in the churchyard of Saint-Privat in 1870 and a desolate photograph showing the results of the German bombardment of Strasbourg in the same year.

Through this century of political transformation, material progress, and mounting violence, Otto von Bismarck made his way, first exploiting the forces of revolutionary change, later, in his years as imperial chancellor, seeking, not without success, to direct them in ways that would serve his country, and in the end, like many another European leader, becoming a kind of sorcerer's apprentice, overwhelmed by forces that he had helped to release. The exhibition illuminated every phase of this Progress. There were theme rooms devoted to Bismarck's Prussian ancestry and his life as a landed proprietor, his diplomatic debut in Frankfurt in the 1850s, and his foreign policy as Prussian minister president (which led him later to confess, "If it hadn't been for me, there wouldn't have been three great wars, 80,000 men would not have died, and parents, brothers, sisters and widows would not be mourning. But that I have had to settle with God").
Other rooms contained materials that illustrated the various shapes of his contorted relationship with the Reichstag, his savage offensive against socialism and political catholicism, his social insurance policies, which were trailblazing but fell so short of his own objectives that he never even mentioned them in his memoirs, his ventures into overseas colonialism, and finally - in one of the most interesting of these rooms - his transformation, after his dismissal by William II in 1890, into a national cult figure.
For those interested in the inner life of the great man, a vestibule between the central court and the theme rooms provided, among other things, family portraits, pictures of him an horseback and with his dogs, two felt hats and a hunting cap, a pair of the gigantic boots that he customarily wore, which extended far above the knee and so impressed contemporaries that Anton von Werner painted a picture of them, a portrait of his doctor Ernst Schweninger, a pill box from the King Solomon Pharmacy in Berlin with powders to be taken daily, a postcard from Bad Kissingen showing the Prince Bismarck Weighing Machine and the variations in the chancellor's weight between 1874 and 1893, and a collection of his favorite reading, the Schlegel Tieck translation of Shakespeare in twelve volumes, the collected works of Schiller and Heine, and the poems of Uhland, Chamisso, and Rückert.
Whether intended or not, the topicality of the Bismarck exhibition was not in doubt. Even the rooms dedicated to periods and subjects that might ordinarily seem remote had something to say to the present. In his introductory essay in the exhibition's informative catalog, splendidly illustrated with dozens of color plates, Lothar Gall makes the point that the history of the revolutions of 1848 reveals agencies and provisional alliances, as well as moods, symbols, and hopes, that Europeans who remember the tumultuous events of 1989 will recognize in their own immediate experience. At the same time, the presence in the exhibition of forms and structures of history that have long since disappeared - such things as Prussia itself, the institution of monarchy, and the nobility as a political and social force may have suggested to reflective visitors that that disappearance was not an unalloyed gain but one that has revealed problems and deficits in modern society.
Of immediate contemporary relevance, finally, was one of the most interesting features of the exhibition, an inner gallery flanking the central court that was dedicated to what the catalog called the "deutsche Seelensuche" and what we may call the German search for identity. Here were grouped symbolic representations of Germanness, German Sehnsucht (longing), and German national aspiration - Schloss Marienburg, the home of the Teutonic Knights; Luther in his study; Cologne Cathedral; the Kyffhäuser, where Frederick Barbarossa lies sleeping; a barrow or megalithic grave under an ancient oak that invokes the memory of Klopstock's poem about Hermann the Cherusker; the Lorelei; Hagen consigning the hoard of the Niebelungs to the Rhine; and several portraits of Germania in full armor.
We are reminded by these Images of how many ill defined expectations were aroused in the nineteenth century by references to German renewal or rebirth, and Gall tells us that Bismarck, who in 1848 dismissed the aspiration to unity as "German fantasizing" but later used it for his own purposes, was always wary of its explosive potential. This he sought to control by a statecraft based upon the anti ideological rationality that he had learned as a Prussian diplomat and by an insistence after 1871 that Germany was a power with no territorial ambitions and a common interest with its European neighbors in collaboration, interdependence, and peace. Bismarck believed, in short, as most Germans and all of Germany's neighbors do today, that a united Germany was safest when it was a member of an effective European international System...

Gordon A. Craig

 Otto Vossler, "Bismarck's Ethos", Historische Zeitschrift, Vol. CLXXI, p. 286.