In contrast to the Three Emperors’ Meeting, Berlin did not dress itself up at all for Bismarck’s 1878 conference. Brandes saw this as a sign of maturity: “Berlin has become enough of a metropolis that its citizens are not losing their equanimity by the Congress,” he wrote in his diary. By now, he added, Berliners had seen enough foreigners in their midst that they did not automatically turn their heads and gape at exotic-looking strangers. They did not even bat an eye at the colorfully dressed delegations from Japan, China, and Morocco, though there was considerable bafflement regarding the Moroccans’ practice of slaughtering animals in their rooms at the Hotel du Rome.
Interestingly, the foreign dignitary who aroused the most curiosity was the aging Benjamin Disraeli, who had resumed the British premiership in 1874. (Disraeli, incidentally, would be the last sitting British prime minister to visit Germany until Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden in 1938, where he met with Hitler to begin the sellout of Czechoslovakia that culminated in the Munich Conference later that year.) The great English diplomat was known not only for his extraordinary political gifts but also for his somewhat steamy novels. Berliners were impressed that a Jew with artistic inclinations could have reached such astonishing heights (the only German analogue would be the career of Walther Rathenau, who became foreign minister after World War I, only to be cut down by right-wing assassins in 1922). Disraeli’s life, it seemed to the Berliners, might have been the stuff of one of his romantic novels. Everywhere he went in town, ladies pushed flowers into his gnarled hands and men took off their hats. Even Bismarck was impressed: “Der alte Jude, das ist der Mann! (The old Jew, that’s the man!)” he declared. Disraeli, in turn, was charmed by the German capital. When asked by Bismarck how he liked Berlin and the “unlovable” Berliners, the Englishman responded that he found the city “better than its reputation” and the inhabitants exceptionally accommodating.
The main business sessions at the Congress of Berlin were held in the new Imperial Chancellery on the Wilhelmstrasse. As noted above, the Chancellery was now housed in the former Radziwill Palais, which had been thoroughly renovated to accommodate the chancellor’s office and a private residence. The chancellor’s quarters were, in the words of Baroness Spitzemberg, “ordinary and tasteless,” but the public rooms were suitably grand, if a bit garish. Bismarck thought that the main receiving room looked like a French bordello, which he considered fitting given the kind of people who frequented it.
The German chancellor, true to his nickname, ran the proceedings at the congress with an iron hand, forcing his colleagues to keep their speeches short and to finish each day’s agenda before retiring. When some delegates complained of the pace, he curtly replied: “No one has ever died from overwork.”
Bismarck cracked the whip partly because he was anxious to quit Berlin for his annual water-cure at Bad Kissingen, where (much like Helmut Kohl a century or so later) he ritualistically tried, with little success, to purge the effects of months of excess. The chancellor had always been a prodigious eater, drinker, and smoker, fond of consuming six-course dinners washed down with a couple flagons of wine and followed by a seven-inch Havana cigar, one of his half-dozen or so per day. (Cigars were more than a source of pleasure for him; when he was surrounded by boring guests at dinner and wanted to “fog himself in,” he resorted to a mighty cigar holder of his own design that allowed him to fire up three Havanas at once.) On workdays the chancellor usually added two bottles of champagne at midday and a few snifters of brandy at night. By the late 1870s he was gaining weight so rapidly that, as he complained, he had to purchase a totally new wardrobe every year. Now tipping the scales at over three hundred pounds, he suffered from acute gastric disorders, gout, shingles, piles, and insomnia. Yet when his doctors advised moderation he dismissed them as “dolts” who made “elephants out of gnats.” Moreover, though he frequently complained during the Congress of Berlin about the stress of keeping his colleagues in line and of having constantly to speak French (still the diplomatic language of the day), he refused to change his punishing habits. As he later told a friend:
Seldom did I sleep before six o’clock [a.m.], often not before eight in the morning, [and then] only for a few hours. Before twelve o’clock I could not speak to anyone, and you can imagine what condition I was in at the sessions. My brain was like a gelatinous, disjointed mass. Before I entered the congress I drank two or three beer glasses filled with the strongest port wine . . . in order to bring my blood into circulation. Otherwise I would have been incapable of presiding.
Disraeli, himself a physical wreck on the verge of collapse (he died three years later), was amused to hear the chancellor’s laments. He wrote to Victoria: “Bismarck, with one hand full of cherries, and the other full of shrimps, eaten alternatively, complains he cannot sleep and must go to Kissingen.”
To find some diversion during the conference, delegates amused themselves at frequent banquets, balls, receptions, outings, and theatrical performances. Berlin hostesses competed fiercely with each other to snare the most prestigious delegates; winners got the British or French, losers got the Moroccans. For some of the less hardy visitors, these events could themselves be a source of stress. “It is absolutely necessary to go to these receptions,” complained Disraeli in a report to the queen, “but these late hours try me. I begin to die at ten o’clock and should like to be buried before midnight.” Yet the old man showed no distress at an extravagant dinner party hosted by Bleichröder, where, in contrast to the usual Berlin house parties, Chateau Lafite freely flowed.
Bismarck did not let the many diversions during the conference impede progress on the principal business at hand. Alternatively cajoling and threatening—at one point he confronted the Turkish delegation in full uniform with spiked helmet—he managed to push the affair to a conclusion on July 13, 1878, exactly one month from its opening. The terms of the agreement showed that the chancellor had remained faithful to his promise to be an “honest broker.” The major victor was not Germany, but Britain, which gained Cyprus, a reduction in the size of Bulgaria, and the continued closure of the Straits to Russian warships. Turkey retained sovereignty over Macedonia and the coast of the Aegean. In exchange for supporting Turkey, Austria obtained a protectorate over the Porte’s Balkan provinces of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Mainly because of pressure from Disraeli, Russia emerged the big loser, having to give up much of what it had gained through the Treaty of San Stefano. Thus, though Bismarck had certainly not set out to humiliate them, the Russians accused him of bias and betrayal. St. Petersburg broke away from its alliance with Berlin and Vienna. The Three Emperors’ League, it seemed, had been sacrificed on the altar of honest brokerage.