MORE ABOUT BISMARCK...


JULY 9:

Bismarck deserves to be discussed over two days, I believe.

He was – like Churchill – eminent at producing one-liners, which were remembered many years afterwards.  Here are a few of them:

Laws are like sausages. It is better not to know how they are made!

It is more important to make history than to write about it.

When history passes through your room you’d better do what you can to pinch its coattails.

There is a Providence that protects idiots, drunkards, children and the United States of America.

If you want to cheat the world, tell the truth.

Never believe anything in politics, before it has been officially denied.

Interesting to reflect upon these Bismarck sentences.

I mentioned yesterday that a 7 meter high statue of Bismarck was erected in the then German South Jutland in 1901. And that this statue can now be seen a bit hidden in the Hüttener Nationalpark north of Rendsburg.  I can today show you a picture of this statue as it looks today. See below.

And at the end a small story from Aumühle near Hamburg, where Bismarck after 1871 lived at the castle Friedrichsruh.   It was built in the 18th century by Frederick von Lippe as his castle for hunting in the Sachsenhausen forests.  It is in the region of Lauenburg, which was Danish from 1814-64.  It was given to the Danish king Frederik VI in 1814 to comfort him a bit, as he after the Napoleonic wars ( when Denmark was on Napoleon’s side ) had to give away Norway.
The castle of Friedrichsruh was, by the way, the headquarters for the Swedish White Busses, which picked up Danish prisoners in the German concentration camps towards the end of World War II.   The castle is today still owned by the Bismarck family.

Bismarck himself is buried in Aumühle. I want to tell a small event linked to that. My wife’s German aunt lived in Aumühle. Her husband was a professor in theology. And the priest in Aumühle now and then asked him to preach in the church at special occasions. Once he returned from one of the services he said to his wife:  This morning I was preaching to the Trinity.  Above me was the Lord, below me in the crypt Bismarck. And in front of me sat the last leader of the Nazi government, admiral Karl Dönitz.

He lived in Aumühle until his death in 1980. Before that he had served ten years in the Spandau prison in Berlin after he was convicted a war criminal by the war criminals court in Nuremberg in 1946.





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