Otto Von Bismark and other Biographies

I was in Berlin the other week and realized that, aside from World War II, I really knew very little about German history, I knew the name Bismark and that it had some importance but I really had no idea who or why he was important, So in the airport on the way home I picked up a biography of the eponymous Bismark.

I enjoy reading biographies, I’ve read a few of Winston Churchill among others and this particular biography has not disappointed me. However, as I am reading this biography I have become distinctly aware of the process of creating biography. Much of what we know about Bismark, aside from the reported events, comes from the letters that he wrote, others wrote to him, and those that others wrote at the time. In the age before cell phones and internet people wrote letters. I remember that when I was young and went to live in France for a year I used to write letters home and to my friends. There was a weekly ritual whereby I went to the post and mailed a number of letters to my connections near and wide. I don’t think I’ve written a letter since 1995.

On one hand I have made the point with this blog about the permanence of what is posted on line (see post) and also about the fabrication of self (See post), but now without talking out of both sides of my mouth, there is also an alarming impermanence to communication today.  I have no doubt that every email I have ever written has already been deleted by the receivers or that they will be deleted in my lifetime, they are unlikely to be printed and stored in box to be discovered at some future date.

Now I don’t pretend that my life will ever be deemed worthy of a biography so the ephemeral nature of my correspondence is unlikely to seem that alarming and like thousands of other extras my life will be but a drop in the giant world bucket, but consider for a minute how sparse the biography of Otto would have been without access to his correspondence, or the fact that 100 years after his death a stack of letters were discovered and added to the collection of what we know. What would have happened if Otto only corresponded by email? Or even less permanent by text? We know and understand the intimate details of his thinking today because of what he wrote in letters. How will future generations make sense of the past when the only record will be that which has been allowed to be officially recorded and any and all personal correspondence or off the record emailing and texting is deleted.

There is a premise here that biography has value for it’s own sake. Perhaps that is the ultimate pretension; maybe biography is really just a form of entertainment and will be easily replaced by other forms of amusement.  I have always struggled with the value of history, since we rarely really learn from it, and no two events are really identical enough that taking the same course of action will lead to the same result. The march of history is not so rational as to be predictable. Is it interesting? Is it entertaining? Does it help us understand how we got where we are, yes, and that may be valuable itself.

But one of the most enjoyable things about reading biographies is at risk. What comes out in the letters and papers of a lot of these great men and women are their fallibilities. Otto was a hypochondriac, Winston drank a lot, and both were megalomaniacs. I have found great comfort in their imperfections, as much is in how they shaped and responded to the great events of history. How much of this will be lost in the digital age, when we are dependent on the media’s interpretation of their characters.

Perhaps even more pertinent is how much will the characters of public personas be shaped by the media and not a reflection of their true inner journey; if Winston lived today would he have drank so much knowing that the media was documenting every sip, would Otto have lapsed into fits of illness to control the King and the German parliament, if it would have been recorded for posterity. And yet these personal idiosyncrasies made them who they were and in part shape the history of their nations and the world.  While you can argue about whether their impacts were good or bad, the reality is they had significant impacts.

That said every generation has reinterpreted biography and history and the history we know of previous periods was sorely limited by the lack of recorded history and it can be difficult to discern the difference between fact and fiction. We really know very little about the character of Alexander the Great for example, other than what a few dubious sources have told us about him. Historians can’t even agree on his sexuality (although we do know he didn’t speak with an Irish accent except in the head of Oliver Stone). How much more we know about him if he had written a letter or two and then stuffed them in a shoebox.

The digital age has changed the way we view history not only our own story; but the story of our species and our civilization. We are stuck in this bizarre vortex of permanence and impermanence that will shape how the history and the lives of great men and women of the contemporary era and future eras are interpreted and understood.