Otto Eduard Leopold, Prince of Bismarck, Duke of Lauenburg, more commonly known as Otto von Bismarck, was a Prussian politician who was born April 1, 1815 in Schönhausen, Prussia. Bismarck was born to the Prussian aristocracy class, called Junkers, this is evidenced by the "von" after his name. His father, Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck was a Prussian military officer and Junker estate owner and his mother, Wilhelmine Luise Mencken, came from a family of bureaucrats without titles. Otto was one of three children, his siblings were Bernhard and
Bismarck began his education in Johann Ernst Plamann's Elementary School, and then to Frierich-Wilhelm and Graues Kloster Secondary Schools. He studied law at the University of Göttingen before enrolling in the University of Berlin where he studied from 1833-1835, then he studied agriculture at the University of Greifswald while stationed there in the Army Reserves.2 After Bismarck finished with his university education, he took several minor diplomatic jobs until the age of 24 when he retired to tend his family estate in Kneiphof. In 1847 he married the cousin of one of his close friends, a woman by the name of Johanna von Puttkamer. That same year he was also chosen as a representative of the newly formed Prussian parliament, the Vereinigte Landtag, where he became a royalist and reactionary voice against the liberal, anti-autocratic revolutions of 1848.3
Bismarck was appointed as Prussia’s envoy to the Diet of the German Confederation in Frankfurt by Kaiser Frederick William IV in 1851, at this state of his life he still opposed German unification, but after eight years in Frankfurt, out from under the influence of his ultraconservative friends back in Prussia, his political views began to shift; he began to gain his famous pragmatism and gradually became less reactionary. This shift of thought led him to believe that the only way for Prussia to counter Austria’s influence would b...