📍Bismarckstraße 1, 39524 Schönhausen (Elbe), Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
1815 – 1898“I was born in 1815 at Schönhausen in the Altmark region of Prussia, on the family estate that had been in Bismarck hands for centuries. The Junker world of my childhood — the Protestant landowners of Brandenburg and Pomerania who formed the backbone of the Prussian officer and administrative class — gave me my values, my manner, and my understanding of power. I went to school in Berlin and studied law at Göttingen and Berlin, but it was the Schönhausen estate and the Pomeranian countryside that formed my character: the directness, the contempt for liberal sentimentality, the conviction that real politics was about power rather than principle. I unified Germany through blood and iron. The estate and the rye fields were always more real to me than the chancelleries.”
🗺️ Approximate location today
📍 Street view today
Sources: Pflanze, O. Bismarck and the Development of Germany (1990), Princeton University Press; Bismarck, O. Reflections and Reminiscences (1898)