Bismarck: The Man and the Statesman one of the few I should like to recall from the dead. It is a very good exercise for an historian to stray into biography - a field seemingly so similar and yet fundamentally different. Perhaps no historian can really handle individual psychology or make an individual the centre of his book. All the same I think my "Bismarck" is the best on him ever written". Taylor's Bismarck is not the Junker and iron Chancellor but a complicated, urban intellectual, "the clever, sophisticated son of a clever, sophisticated mother, masquerading all his life as his heavy, earthen father". Instead of
Chancellor the directly elected federal parliament), every four years on the beginning of the electoral period after general elections. Between general elections, the Federal Chancellor (together with the whole cabinet) can only be removed from office by a ' ("constructive motion of no confidence") which consists in the candidacy of an opposition candidate for the office of Chancellor in the '. If this candidate gets a majority of the entire membership of the ", he or she will be sworn in immediately as new Federal Chancellor. The current German " is Angela Merkel of the CDU (Christian Democratic Union). The former