The name is older than the Bismarcks and considerably more modest in origin. In 1763 Count Frederick of Lippe-Biesterfeld (1706-1781), who liked to hunt in the Sachsenwald, had a lodge built among the trees and called it Friedrichsruh - Frederick's Rest. After his death the property changed hands repeatedly. By the early nineteenth century somebody had rebuilt it as a country inn and guesthouse, and when the Berlin-Hamburg railway line opened alongside it, the place found its true nineteenth-century vocation: a day out. Hamburg families rode the train into the forest, ate a good lunch, walked among the beeches and rode home again. That is what stood here in 1871 - not a palace, not a castle, but a popular roadside hotel in a big wood.

After the defeat of France and the unification of Germany in 1871, Kaiser Wilhelm I made his chancellor a gift: the Sachsenwald, the largest continuous forest in what is now Schleswig-Holstein. Otto von Bismarck took the country inn, had it restored as a manor house, and kept the name. He did not need a grander one. In March 1890 the new emperor, Wilhelm II, dismissed him and handed him a consolation prize - the ducal title of Lauenburg - which Bismarck accepted and then never once used. He retreated here for the last eight years of his life, receiving journalists, dictating memoirs, and nursing a grievance against the young monarch that never cooled. He died at Friedrichsruh on 30 July 1898.

The mausoleum went up quickly. The architect Ferdinand Schorbach finished the neo-Romanesque chapel on the Schneckenberg, a low rise just outside Friedrichsruh, in the spring of 1899, and on 16 March the coffins of Bismarck and his wife Johanna were carried up from Varzin and laid in marble sarcophagi. The inscription on his was his own choice, and it is the sharpest thing in the building: "Ein treuer deutscher Diener Kaiser Wilhelms I." - A faithful German servant of Emperor Wilhelm I. Note the numeral. The man who had been fired by Wilhelm II spent his last testament naming the grandfather instead. Firstborn Bismarck sons and their wives lie in the crypt beneath the chapel, which is not open to visitors. The chapel above it is.

The 1945 bombing left the manor a ruin. Rebuilding fell to Otto Christian Archibald von Bismarck (1897-1975), and the estate passed in 1976 to his son Ferdinand (1930-2019), who ran the forest for more than four decades. Ferdinand's wife Elisabeth turned part of the Schlosspark into something the old chancellor would have found baffling: in 1988 the family opened a butterfly garden there, with heated greenhouses full of tropical species a short walk from the grave of the Iron Chancellor. About 6,000 hectares of the Sachsenwald are still worked as forest, and roughly 4,500 of those, along with the house and park, remain in Bismarck hands.

Friedrichsruh is not a stately home you tour room by room - the manor is a private residence. What is open is arguably more interesting. The old railway station building now houses the Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung, a federal foundation established by decision of the Bundestag in 1997 with an unusual mandate written into it: not to venerate Bismarck but to produce a "historisch-kritische Würdigung", a historically critical appreciation, of the statesman. A few hundred metres away, the Bismarck-Museum holds the family's memorabilia and personal effects, including Anton von Werner's 1885 painting of the proclamation of the German Empire; the foundation managed it on loan from 2009 and bought it outright with federal money in November 2021. Add the mausoleum and the butterflies, and a village of a few hundred people offers a fairly complete argument about how a nation should remember a founder it has never entirely made peace with.