"We are all on the hit list!" Emperor William II warned his family in 1908 when he learned of the assassination of the Portuguese King Charles I . There have always been assassinations of crowned heads throughout history. But since the 1850s they had become more frequent. Today we speak of the "invention of terrorism" in its modern form (Carola Dietze). The assassins were usually motivated by two revolutionary ideas: the idea of the nation and the idea of freedom. Several bloody deeds failed, while others ended fatally, for example in 1881 for the Russian Tsar Alexander II, in 1898 for the Austrian Empress Elisabeth ("Sisi") or in 1914 for the Austrian Crown Prince and Crown Princess Franz Ferdinand and Sophie.

As the assassination of the Japanese regent II Naosuke or in 1860 President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 prove, terrorism was not a European invention. And it did not only affect crowned heads. Otto von Bismarck also faced repeated assassination attempts and threats.

Death threats against Bismarck

The first verbal attack reached Bismarck at the beginning of 1863 from a Pole who was angered by Prussian policy towards the Polish uprising. At the end of the year, a "displaced Schleswiger" threatened to kill him if Bismarck did not respond to Denmark's efforts to annex Schleswig with war. In July 1864, a "Friend X." by letter announced a poison attack because Bismarck's Schleswig-Holstein policy was contrary to the motto "Up ewig ungedeelt [Forever undivided]". In September 1865, a Briton threatened to "blow Bismarck's brains out" if he dared to come to England. In March 1871, the representatives of the First International and the Freemasons meeting in Lyon called for Bismarck, William I and Helmuth von Moltke to be killed. A good two years later, a Belgian boilermaker offered the Archbishop of Paris Joseph Hippolyte Guibert , to kill the Imperial Chancellor because of the Prussian-German Kulturkampf laws. In July 1881, Bismarck received a letter from Hamburg threatening him and "the Bismarck brood" with extermination for "perpetrating tyranny".

 Empress Elizabeth of Austria-Hungary on the last studio shot before her death, photographed by Ludwig Angerer, retouched by Carl Pietzner (public domain)

The two assassination attempts that were actually carried out show how serious some of Bismarck's enemies were about their intentions. Out of indignation over Prussia's impending war against Austria, the twenty-two-year-old student Ferdinand Cohen-Blind decided to kill the "traitor to Germany" in the spring of 1866. On May 7th, the stepson of a '48 revolutionary intercepted Bismarck in Berlin on the street Unter den Linden and fired a revolver at him three times. Prussia's minister-president threw himself resolutely against the assassin but could not prevent two more shots from being fired. Police officers and soldiers of the 2nd Guards Regiment who happened to be present finally arrested Cohen-Blind.

Bismarck's life was saved by luck and chance. as he was dressed in unusually heavy clothes for the time of year because of an illness he had just overcome. Although the bullets pierced the thick clothing, they glanced off a rib and caused only a painful bruise. When Bismarck arrived at his flat in Wilhelmstrasse after the incident, he greeted his wife and some guests with the words, "My child, today they shot at me, but it's nothing."

 The assassination attempt on Count Bismarck, lithograph by A. Gocht, Neu-Gersdorf (© Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung)

News of the assassination attempt spread through Berlin like wildfire. No sooner had the table been lifted at the Bismarcks' home than King William I arrived to congratulate his head of government on his rescue. That very evening, numerous citizens gathered in front of his house to show their sympathy. But there were also voices, even in the highest circles of the monarchy, that met the nefarious deed with understanding. Crown Princess Victoria described Cohen-Blind as a "well-meaning but misguided and short-sighted wretch". After the student cut his carotid artery in police custody and succumbed to his injury, he was even praised as a martyr in Austria and southern Germany.

Although the assassination attempt was undoubtedly carried out by a loner, Bismarck immediately propagated the thesis of a murder plot. Through Berlin's police chief Wilhelm Stieber , he spent weeks spying on the German émigré scene in London, where Cohen-Blind had grown up. As was to be expected, the investigations were fruitless.

 The murder weapon: a bundle revolver made by the Belgian manufacturer Joseph Chaineux (© Otto von Bismarck Foundation)

Although Bismarck believed that further attacks were possible, he did not initially take any special security precautions. This was almost to be his undoing a few years later. On July 13th, 1874, Eduard Kullmann , a twenty-year-old Catholic journeyman cooper from Magdeburg, fired a pistol at the Imperial Chancellor. Bismarck was in Kissingen for restorative health treatments and was about to travel in an open carriage from his home to the spa treatments. The assassin hoped to end the Kulturkampf by killing Bismarck. But the Imperial Chancellor was only wounded in the right hand and face. The opera singer Jose Lederer , who was standing nearby, was able to seize Kullmann and thus played a decisive role in his immediate arrest. Kullmann was sentenced to fourteen years in prison and then to a further seven years for insubordinate behaviour. In 1888 he died in Amberg prison.

Bismarck got over the horror of the attack in 1874 quite quickly. The "thing" was "not conductive to restorative purposes", but it was apparently part of his position "to be shot from time to time", he said laconically. This cold-bloodedness did not stop him from exploiting Kullmann's assassination politically, like that of Cohen-Blind at the time. "Cast the man out as you like," he raged in the Reichstag at the end of 1874, addressing the Centre Party. "He hangs on your coattails after all!"

 The assassin Eduard Kullmann, photographed the day after the crime in the yard of Bad Kissingen prison by Wilhelm Cronenberg (© Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung)