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( Otto von Bismarck)
Otto von Bismarck in his study in 1886. Bismarck was born in Schönhausen, the wealthy family estate situated west of Berlin in the Prussian Province of Saxony. His father, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck (Schönhausen, November 13, 1771 - November 22, 1845), was a landowner and a former Prussian military officer; his mother, Wilhelmine Luise Mencken (Potsdam, February 24, 1789 - Berlin), the educated daughter of a politician. A.J.P. Taylor later remarked on the importance of this dual heritage although Bismarck physically resembled his father, and appeared as a Prussian Junker to the outside world - an image which he often encouraged by wearing military uniform, even though he was not a regular officer - he was also more cosmopolitan and highly educated than was normal for men of such background. He was fluent in English, and as a young man would often quote Shakespeare or Byron in letters to his wife. Bismarck was educated at the Friedrich-Wilhelm and the Graues Kloster-Gymnasium. Thereafter, at the age of seventeen, he joined the Georg August University of Göttingen, where he spent only a year as a member of the Corps Hannovera before enrolling in the Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. Whilst at Göttingen university, he had become the lifelong friend of an American student John Lothrop Motley, who described Bismarck as Otto v. Rabenmark in his novel Morton's Hope, or the Memoirs of a Provincial (1839). Motley was later an eminent historian.
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