Although Bismarck kept a revolving door of talented men as secretaries and servitors, he seldom used them for very long and discarded them when they were no longer useful or had crossed the Prince in some manner. The German diplomat Friedrich zu Limburg-Stirum likened Bismarck's use of these men with a tart analogy:

Bismarck is to his ministers the way Don Juan was to his lovers. First he cajoles them, and when he catches them, he lets them go without caring about what happens to them.

This pattern of using and discarding men was partly a function of Bismarck's own habits of rule. As a good Realpolitiker, he kept many irons in the fire and pursued multiple channels of action simultaneously. This meant some men were useful one day, and then of less utility if one scheme did not pay off. The important thing to Bismarck was that he was the spider at the center of the webs he wove. In an 1885 note to Baron August von Firks-Samiten, Bismarck explained why he did not need a successor:

As for why I have not yet provided a successor, dear Firks, that question has often been asked of me. The answer is very simple- I would have to be already dead in my own lifetime.

For Bismarck, the system he created was indispensable without him, only he knew all the details of how it worked and functioned. Having no official successor meant he could not be dismissed summarily and made him even more essential. Bismarck's own vanity meant he never really saw his contemporaries as equals and his acerbic qualities made him many enemies in the court and among elite circles despite his prestige as the unifier of Germany.

There was one exception to Bismarck's utilitarian approach to his subordinates: his son Herbert. Unlike other servitors, family could not be dismissed so easily and Bismarck trusted his own blood more readily than any fellow Junker. Herbert had some aptitude for diplomacy and entered into the Foreign Ministry at a relatively early age and quickly ascended up the ladder in the agency, becoming State Secretary in 1886. There was talk within elite German circles that the elder Bismarck was grooming his son as an heir. Between 1888-89, Herbert acted as the Chancellor's personal representative besides Wilhelm II, and some of Bismarck's enemies clucked that what the father was for Wilhelm I, so Herbert would be for the great Kaiser's grandson. But Herbert by this time was something of a broken man. He had fallen deeply in love with the Princess Elisabeth von Carolath-Beuthen in the early 1880s. The Princess had two major strikes against her. First she was a divorcee ten years Herbert's senior, thus undercutting the prestige of his son. Second, and worse for the Lutheran Bismarck, the Princess was a Catholic. Bismarck threatened and cajoled his son against the match, even bringing Kaiser Wilhelm I into the fray, and Herbert acceded to his father's wishes. But the experience made Herbert cynical and encouraged his alcoholism. He served his father faithfully, but after this episode, could never step outside of his shadow, often admitting only his father knew how the system worked. Herbert could have had a vibrant career in the post-1890 political world, the Bismarck name still carried a lot of weight, but he chose to resign along with his father. In the end, Herbert's promising career became collateral damage to his father's fall from grace.

Sources

Lerman, Katharine A. Bismarck. New York: Longman, 2004.

Pflanze, Otto. Bismarck and the Development of Germany: Volume III. Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 1990.

Steinberg, Jonathan. Bismarck: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.