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 of Germany (1949–present) the office of Chancellor has fallen vacant, which happens if the Chancellor dies or resigns, or if a newly elected "Bundestag" ("Federal Diet", the German Parliament) meets for the first time, the Chancellor is elected by a majority of the members of the "Bundestag" upon the proposal of the President ("Bundespräsident", literally "Federal President") ("1st voting phase"). This vote is one of the few cases in which a decision requires a majority of all elected members of the "Bundestag", not just a majority of those assembled at the time. This is referred to as the "Kanzlermehrheit" ("chancellor majority"), and is