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Horrified by the 1848 revolutions, he thought Frederick William the Flounderer was too weak, offering his services to his conservative brother Prince Wilhelm, while making provocative speeches in the Landtag (the Prussian assembly). But he saw politics with absolute clarity, a skill honed by spells as ambassador to Frankfurt, Paris and Petersburg: ‘Why do great states fight wars today? The only sound basis … is egoism, not romanticism.’ Bismarck learned his essential lesson from Napoleon III: nationalist populism was conservative. ‘Prussia is completely isolated. There’s but one ally for Prussia if she knows how to win and handle them … The German people.’ He would find a way: ‘Politics is less a science than an art.’ He revelled in its risks: ‘This trade teaches that one can be as shrewd as the shrewdest in the world and still go like a child into the dark.’

When Wilhelm succeeded as king, he found the monarchy paralysed, unable to get the Landtag to pass his military budget. The immoderate Bismarck, once unthinkable, had now, by a process of momentous inevitability, become the only choice left. Unlike Napoleon III, Bismarck did not depend on either election or coup, he did not lead a political party; his entire career depended on the favour of one old Hohenzollern officer, Wilhelm, who could dismiss him at any moment. Their relationship was like a stormy twenty-six-year marriage, interspersed with Bismarckian spasms of shouting, weeping and threats of resignation. ‘It’s not easy,’ joked Wilhelm later, ‘to be kaiser under Bismarck.’ This solitary, indefatigable giant was manic, petty, paranoid and vindictive – but the dynamic executor of plans that were the fruit of brutally clear analysis of the alchemy of power.

Bismarck’s plan was bold but not secret: ‘I’ll soon be compelled to undertake … the Prussian government,’ he told Disraeli, visiting London in June 1862. ‘My first care will be to organize the army,’ then ‘I shall seize the pretext to declare war against Austria … and give national unity to Germany under Prussian leadership.’

‘Be careful about that man,’ said Disraeli. ‘He means what he says.’ As minister-president, Bismarck enjoyed shocking Prussian liberals: ‘The great questions of the time will be resolved not by speeches and majority decisions – that was the great mistake of 1848 – but by iron and blood.’

War was risky – Bismarck called it ‘rolling the iron dice’ – but he was a risk-taker: ‘My entire life has been spent gambling for high stakes with other people’s money.’ Bismarck had Jewish confidants but, like many Junkers and many conservative nobles from Russia to France, despised Jews socially and regarded them as harbingers of dangerous liberalism. Yet his schemes required finance. The Rothschilds were close to Austria and France, but he went to dine at the Frankfurt mansion of Mayer Carl von Rothschild, sneering at the ‘real old Jew haggler, tons of silver, golden spoons and forks’, who recommended Gerson Bleichröder, a Rothschild ally. Bleichröder became Bismarck’s banker, diplomatic fixer and arguably one of his few friends.

Bismarck and Wilhelm were aided by the third remarkable Prussian: Alfred Krupp, the Cannon King, founder of a dynasty that would dominate German industry through the rule of Hohenzollerns, Hitler and the European Union.^*

Widow Krupp’s grandson, Alfred’s father, had founded the great steel works in Essen, but he had driven them into the ground, even losing his mansion and being forced to move to a small cottage that stood beside the furnaces. Alfred was as extraordinary as Bismarck, a spidery, stick-thin, neurotic, pointy-faced, hypochondriacal crank who wore a shabby red toupee and was obsessed with steel, technology and weirdly the smell of horse manure.

When his father died in 1826, Alfred, then aged fourteen, brought up ‘with the fear of total ruin’, inherited the works, travelling to Yorkshire to spy on the making of Britain’s finest Sheffield steel. On his return, barely sleeping, constantly ill – ‘I celebrate my birthday in my own way, last year with cough medicine, this one with enemas’ – he single-handedly propelled Krupp: ‘I myself acted as clerk, letter writer, cashier, smith, smelter, coke pounder, nightwatchman at the converting furnace,’ where ‘I succeeded in the important invention of a completely weldable crucible steel.’ First he made money manufacturing spoons for the Austrians, then, riding the railway boom, he started selling his cast-steel axles and springs, and the first weldless steel railway wheels; soon he would be supplying railway track to Europe, America, Asia. Then he tried making rifles with steel.