The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. X | Page 8

of Modern German Culture. Permission
Dodd, Mead & Company, New York.]
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THE LOVE LETTERS OF BISMARCK[2] TRANSLATED UNDER
THE SUPERVISION OF CHARLTON T. LEWIS
Hôtel de Prusse, Stettin, (Not dated: Written about the end of
December, 1846.)
TO HERR VON PUTTKAMER:
Most Honored Sir.--I begin this communication by indicating its
content in the first sentence--it is a request for the highest thing you can
dispose of in this world, the hand of your daughter. I do not conceal
from myself the fact that I appear presumptuous when I, whom you
have come to know only recently and through a few meetings, claim
the strongest proof of confidence which you can give to any man. I
know, however, that even irrespective of all obstacles in space and time
which can increase your difficulty in forming an opinion of me,
through my own efforts I can never be in a position to give you such
guaranties for the future that they would, from your point of view,
justify intrusting me with an object so precious, unless you supplement
by trust in God that which trust in human beings cannot supply. All that
I can do is to give you information about myself with absolute candor,
so far as I have come to understand myself. It will be easy for you to
get reports from others in regard to my public conduct; I content myself,
therefore, with an account of what underlay that--my inner life, and

especially my relations to Christianity. To do that I must take a start far
back.
In earliest childhood I was estranged from my parents' house, and at no
time became entirely at home there again; and my education from the
beginning was conducted on the assumption that everything is
subordinate to the cultivation of the intelligence and the early
acquisition of positive sciences.
After a course of religious teaching, irregularly attended and not
comprehended, I had at the time of my confirmation by Schleiermacher,
on my sixteenth birthday no belief other than a bare deism, which was
not long free from pantheistic elements. It was at about this time that I,
not through indifference, but after mature consideration, ceased to pray
every evening, as I had been in the habit of doing since childhood;
because prayer seemed inconsistent with my view of God's nature;
saying to myself: either God himself, being omnipresent, is the cause of
everything--even of every thought and volition of mine--and so in a
sense offers prayers to himself through me, or, if my will is
independent of God's will, it implies arrogance and a doubt as to the
inflexibility as well as the perfection of the divine determination to
believe that it can be influenced by human appeals. When not quite
seventeen years old I went to Göttingen University. During the next
eight years I seldom saw the home of my parents; my father indulgently
refrained from interference; my mother censured me from far away
when I neglected my studies and professional work, probably in the
conviction that she must leave the rest to guidance from above: with
this exception I was literally cut off from the counsel and instruction of
others. In this period, when studies which ambition at times led me to
prosecute zealously--or emptiness and satiety, the inevitable
companions of my way of living--brought me nearer to the real
meaning of life and eternity, it was in old-world philosophies,
uncomprehended writings of Hegel, and particularly in Spinoza's
seeming mathematical clearness, that I sought for peace of mind in that
which the human understanding cannot comprehend. But it was
loneliness that first led me to reflect on these things persistently, when I
went to Kniephof, after my mother's death, five or six years ago.

Though at first my views did not materially change at Kniephof, yet
conscience began to be more audible in the solitude, and to represent
that many a thing was wrong which I had before regarded as
permissible. Yet my struggle for insight was still confined to the circle
of the understanding, and led me, while reading such writings as those
of Strauss, Feuerbach, and Bruno Bauer, only deeper into the blind
alley of doubt.
I was firmly convinced that God has denied to man the possibility of
true knowledge; that it is presumption to claim to understand the will
and plans of the Lord of the World; that the individual must await in
submission the judgment that his Creator will pass upon him in death,
and that the will of God becomes known to us on earth solely through
conscience, which He has given us as a special organ for feeling our
way through the gloom of the world. That I found no peace in these
views I need not say. Many an