In 1851 the King appointed him to represent Prussia at the German Diet, which sat at Frankfort. The outlook was gloomy. Prussia had quelled the revolution, but she had lost prestige. Unable to break asunder the German Confederation or to dominate it, she had signed, at Olmütz, in the previous autumn, a compact which acknowledged the supremacy of her old rival, Austria. While the humiliation still rankled, Bismarck entered upon his career. Hitherto not unfriendly to Austria, because he had looked upon her as the extinguisher of the revolution, which he hated most of all, he began, now that the danger was over, to give a free rein to his jealousy of his country’s hereditary competitor. In the Diet, the Austrian representative presided, the rulings were always in Austria’s favor, the majority of the smaller states allowed Austria to guide them. Bismarck at once showed his colleagues that humility was not his rôle. Finding that the Austrian president alone smoked at the sittings, he took out his own cigar and lighted it,--a trifle, but significant. He resisted every encroachment, and demanded the strictest observance of the letter of the law. Gradually he extended Prussia’s influence among the confederates. He unmasked Austria’s insincerity; he showed how honestly Prussia walked in the path of legality; until he slowly created the impression that wickedness was to be expected from one, and virtue from the other.
During seven years Bismarck held this outpost, winning no outward victory, but storing a vast amount of knowledge about all the states of the Confederation, their rulers and public men, which was subsequently invaluable to him. His dispatches to the Prussian Secretary of State, his reports to the King, form a body of diplomatic correspondence unmatched in fulness, vigor, directness, and insight. With him, there was no ambiguity, no diplomatic circumlocution, no German prolixity. He sketched in indelible outlines the portraits, corporal or mental, of his colleagues. He criticised the policy of Prussia with a brusqueness which must have startled his superior. He reviewed at longer range the political tendencies of Europe. Officially, he kept strictly within the limits of his instructions; but his own personality represented more than he could yet officially declare,--Prussia’s ambition to become the leader of Germany. In all his dispatches, and in all places where caution did not prescribe silence, he reiterated his Cato warning, “Austria must be ousted from Germany.”