GERMANY: Bismarck’s Daughter

A sadness, like the last reverberations of an iron bell, stole into German hearts last week as the Countess Maria Rantzau. only daughter of the great Prince Bismarck, died at Kiel, in her 77th year.

The moment of her birth coincided almost exactly with her father’s entrance into public life. He had been a Deichauptmann; that is, he had been responsible for the care of the dykes along the Elbe. In 1847, one year before Maria was born, he was chosen as substitute for a representative of the lower nobility to attend the Estates-General, which that year assembled at Berlin. To Berlin he went. The rest is too well known. . . .

The life of Maria Bismarck, however, was overshadowed so completely by her father that only where they appeared together is she likely to appear in history at all. They used to sing duets a great deal. Perhaps their singing will be suppressed by historians; for he taught her a great many English, French and German student songs. One was not orthodox:

God made bees, bees made honey;
God made men, men made money;
God made Satan, Satan made sin;
God made a little hole to put Satan in.
Satan said he would not go; God said he should;
Satan said, “If I go, God damn my blood!”

Such were the Gargantuan interludes which Prince Bismarck could conjure about him like a spell. His wife, Johanna von Puttkamer, was of a milder temper. Yet their daughter got on well with her mother, too. In the Princess Bismarck’s absence she presided over the famed Yellow Salon so graciously that a newspaper of the day declared: “She has become a remarkably fine woman, whose wit and intelligence are the theme of general praise.”

In 1878, she married Count Kuno von Rantzau, scion of a distinguished Schleswig-Holstein house. She had been in love with the scintillant young Count Eulenberg. Her father’s triumphs up to that time, after the peace of Vienna, after “1870”, had brought Europeliterally to the feet of the Bismarcks. But typhus fever swept away her lover, so she married Count Rantzu, who later was German Ambassador to Holland.

A few years after the marriage Prince Bismarck humored one of his strangest whims. He commenced to make a fad of weighing himself and measuring his family. The weights he kept to himself. On Dec. 31, 1880, he pasted some statistics on his bedroom wall:

NAME ………………………… HEIGHT

Myself, Prince Bismarck …….6 ft. 2 in.
My eldest son, Count Herbert…….6 ft. 1 1/3 in.
My Youngest son, Count William ….6ft. 0 in.
My son-in-law, Count Rantzau ……5 ft. 10 in.
My wife, Princess Bismarck……….5 ft. 8 in.
My daughter, Countess Rantzau ……5 ft. 8 in.

The average height of my family is thus 5 feet 11 inches, certainly one of the tallest in Europe.