Otto Von Bismarck was one of the most famous politicians in German and indeed world history. What was one example of his dry wit?

Answer: Born of the land owning Prussian Junkers aristocratic class in 1815, he was a master politician and geopolitics expert who united Germany under a new Reich in 1870.

He was sacked by the impetuous and ever-frenetic Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890, after nearly 20 years as German chancellor, an act that was immortalized in a famous Punch cartoon entitled ‘Dropping the Pilot’.

Bismarck was renowned for his dry wit. He said of the erratic and probably mad Kaiser Wilhelm that ‘He always wants it to be Sunday’ and, rather unkindly, described the kaiser’s wife Donna as ‘a Holstein cow’.

When Bismarck was presented by the king of Prussia with the highest award that Germany could offer, the Grand Cross of the Hohenzollern Order set in diamonds, after the stunning victory in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870, Bismarck remarked, ‘I’d sooner have a horse, or a good barrel of Rhenish wine’.

Source: Dreadnought by Robert K Massie

More at: History

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