of all classes, he was equally concerned with the interests of commerce and industry (Kölnische Zeitung, Feb. 20, 1906). Some credit for the immense material expansion of Germany under his chancellorship is certainly due to his zeal and self-devotion. This was generously recognized by the emperor in a letter publicly addressed to the chancellor on the 21st of May 1906, immediately after the passage of the Finance Bill. “I am fully conscious,” it ran, “of the conspicuous share in the initiation and realization of this work of reform... which must be ascribed to the statesmanlike skill and self-sacrificing devotion with which you have conducted and promoted those arduous labours.” Rumours had from time to time been rife of a “chancellor crisis” and Bülow’s dismissal; in the Berliner Tageblatt this letter was compared to the “Never!” with which the emperor William I. had replied to Bismarck’s proffered resignation.
On the 6th of June 1905 Count Bülow was raised to the rank of prince (Fürst), on the occasion of the marriage of the crown prince. The coincidence of this date with the fall of M. Delcassé, the French minister for foreign affairs—a triumph for Germany and a humiliation for France—was much commented on at the time (see The Times, June 7, 1905); and the elevation of Bismarck to the rank of prince in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles was recalled. Whatever element of truth there may have been in this, however, the significance of the incident was much exaggerated.
On the 5th of April 1906, while attending a debate in the Reichstag, Prince Bülow was seized with illness, the result of overwork and an attack of influenza, and was carried unconscious from the hall. At first it was thought that the attack would be fatal, and Lord Fitzmaurice in the House of Lords compared the incident with that of the death of Chatham, a compliment much appreciated in Germany. The illness, however, quickly took a favourable turn, and after a month’s rest the chancellor was able to resume his duties. In 1907 Prince Bülow was made the subject of a disgraceful libel, which received more attention than it deserved because it coincided with the Harden-Moltke scandals; his character was, however, completely vindicated, and the libeller, a journalist named Brand, received a term of imprisonment.
The parliamentary skill of Prince Bülow in holding together the heterogeneous elements of which the government majority in the Reichstag was composed, no less than the diplomatic tact with which he from time to time “interpreted” the imperial indiscretions to the world, was put to a rude test by the famous “interview” with the German emperor, published in the London Daily Telegraph of the 28th of October 1908 (see William II, German emperor), which aroused universal reprobation in Germany. Prince Bülow assumed the official responsibility, and tendered his resignation to the emperor, which was not accepted; but the chancellor’s explanation in the Reichstag on the 10th of November showed how keenly he felt his position. He declared his conviction that the disastrous results of the interview would “induce the emperor in future to observe that strict reserve, even in private conversations, which is equally indispensable in the interest of a uniform policy and for the authority of the crown,” adding that, in the contrary case, neither he nor any successor of his could assume the responsibility (The Times, Nov. 11, 1908, p. 9). The attitude of the emperor showed that he had taken the lesson to heart. It was not the imperial indiscretions, but the effect of his budget proposals in breaking up the Liberal-Conservative bloc, on whose support he depended in the Reichstag, that eventually drove Prince Bülow from office (see Germany: History). At the emperor’s request he remained to pilot the mutilated budget through the House; but on the 14th of July 1909 the acceptance of his resignation was announced.
Prince Bülow married, on the 9th of January 1886, Maria Anna Zoe Rosalia Beccadelli di Bologna, Princess Camporeale, whose first marriage with Count Karl von Dönhoff had been dissolved and declared null by the Holy See in 1884. The princess, an accomplished pianist and pupil of Liszt, was a step-daughter of the Italian statesman Minghetti.
See J. Penzler, Graf Bülows Reden nebst urkundlichen Beiträgen zu seiner Politik (Leipzig, 1903).
BÜLOW, DIETRICH HEINRICH, Freiherr von (1757–1807), Prussian soldier and military writer, and brother of General Count F. W. Bülow, entered the Prussian army in 1773. Routine work proved distasteful to him, and he read with avidity the works of the chevalier Folard and other theoretical writers on war, and of Rousseau. After sixteen years’ service he left Prussia, and endeavoured without success to obtain a commission in the Austrian army. He then returned to Prussia, and for some time managed a theatrical company. The failure of this undertaking involved Bülow in heavy losses, and soon afterwards he went to America, where he seems to have been converted to, and to have preached, Swedenborgianism. On his return to Europe he persuaded his brother to engage in a speculation for exporting glass to the United States, which proved a complete failure. After this for some years he made a precarious living in Berlin by literary work, but his debts accumulated, and it was under great disadvantages that he produced his Geist des Neueren Kriegssystems (Hamburg, 1799) and Der Feldzug 1800 (Berlin, 1801). His hopes of military employment were again disappointed, and his brother, the future field marshal, who had stood by him in all his troubles, finally left him. After wandering in France and the smaller German states, he reappeared at Berlin in 1804, where he wrote a revised edition of his Geist des Neueren Kriegssystems (Hamburg, 1805), Lehrsätze des Neueren Kriegs (Berlin, 1805), Geschichte des Prinzen Heinrich von Preussen (Berlin, 1805), Neue Taktik der Neuern wie sie sein sollte (Leipzig, 1805), and Der Feldzug 1805 (Leipzig, 1806). He also edited, with G. H. von Behrenhorst (1733–1814) and others, Annalen des Krieges (Berlin, 1806). These brilliant but unorthodox works, distinguished by an open contempt of the Prussian system, cosmopolitanism hardly to be distinguished from high treason, and the mordant sarcasm of a disappointed man, brought upon Bülow the enmity of the official classes and of the government. He was arrested as insane, but medical examination proved him sane and he was then lodged as a prisoner in Colberg, where he was harshly treated, though Gneisenau obtained some mitigation of his condition. Thence he passed into Russian hands and died in prison at Riga in 1807, probably as a result of ill-treatment.
In Bülow’s writings there is evident a distinct contrast between the spirit of his strategical and that of his tactical ideas. As a strategist (he claimed to be the first of strategists) he reduces to mathematical rules the practice of the great generals of the 18th century, ignoring “friction,” and manœuvring his armies in vacuo. At the same time he professes that his system provides working rules for the armies of his own day, which in point of fact were “armed nations,” infinitely more affected by “friction” than the small dynastic and professional armies of the preceding age. Bülow may therefore be considered as anything but a reformer in the domain of strategy. With more justice he has been styled the “father of modern tactics.” He was the first to recognize that the conditions of swift and decisive war brought about by the French Revolution involved wholly new tactics, and much of his teaching had a profound influence on European warfare of the 19th century. His early training had shown him merely the pedantic minutiae of Frederick’s methods, and, in the absence of any troops capable of illustrating the real linear tactics, he became an enthusiastic supporter of the methods, which (more of necessity than from judgment) the French revolutionary generals had adopted, of fighting in small columns covered by skirmishers. Battles, he maintained, were won by skirmishers. “We must organize disorder,” he said; indeed, every argument of writers of the modern “extended order” school is to be found mutatis mutandis in Bülow, whose system acquired great prominence in view of the mechanical improvements in armament. But his tactics, like his strategy, were vitiated by the absence of “friction,” and their dependence on the realization of an unattainable standard of bravery.
See von Voss, H. von Bülow (Köln, 1806); P. von Bülow, Familienbuch der v. Bülow (Berlin, 1859); Ed. von Bülow, Aus dem Leben Dietrichs v. Bülow, also Vermischte Schriften aus dem Nachlass von Behrenhorst (1845); Ed. von Bülow and von Rüstow, Militärische und vermischte Schriften von Heinrich Dietrich v. Bülow (Leipzig, 1853); Memoirs by Freiherr v. Meerheimb in Allgemeine deutsche
