Gall's book Bismarck: the White Revolutionary appeared in German in 1980 and in English translation in 1986. It is probably the most searching biography we have. First of all we should note that Gall wrote a 'life'. Germans do not write many biographies - there are almost as many of Bismarck in English as in German. Gall wrote a biography to counter the school of social historians for whom the individual matters little. But in one way he was influenced by them. The book contains many long reflective passages and not much life or action. Crankshaw's dismissive biography (1981) is half as long but twice as lively! Gall's main theme in underlined in the subtitle: he sees Bismarck as a 'white revolutionary', that is as a conservative revolutionary as opposed to a radical or red one. This argument is a rapier thrust at Gall's opponents, who argued that Bismarck was a hide-bound defender of a moribund society and therefore responsible for his country's Jurassic backwardness and for the prolonged ascendancy of the military. Gall points out that the Prussian gentry saw him as subversive and so disowned him: they ought to have known a conservative by sight. He says also that Germany under Bismarck underwent more change than any other European country, and so if he was attempting to preserve a dinosaur in amber he was a colossal failure.
