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Bertha von Suttner
Baroness
Bertha Felicie Sophie von Suttner (June 9, 1843-June 21, 1914),
born Countess Kinsky in Prague, was the posthumous daughter of
a field marshal and the granddaughter, on her mother's side,
of a cavalry captain. Raised by her mother under the
aegis of a guardian who was a member of the
Austrian court, she was the product of an aristocratic society
whose militaristic traditions she accepted without question for the first
half of her life and vigorously opposed for the last
half.
As a girl and young adult, Bertha studied languages
and music (at one time aspiring to an operatic career),
read voraciously, and enjoyed an active social life enlivened by
travel.
At thirty, feeling she could no longer impose on
her mother's dwindling funds, she took a position in Vienna
as teacher-companion to the four daughters of the Suttner household.
Here she met her future husband, the youngest son of
the family. In 1876 she left for Paris to become
Alfred Nobel´s secretary but returned, after only a brief stay,
to marry Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner. Because of the
Suttners' strong disapproval of the marriage, the young couple left
immediately for the Caucasus where for nine years they earned
an often precarious living by giving lessons in languages and
music and eventually, and more successfully, by writing.
During this period
the Baroness produced Es Löwos, a poetic description of their
life together; four novels; and her first serious book, Inventarium
einer Seele [Inventory of a Soul], in which she took
stock of her thoughts and ideas on what she and
her husband had been reading together, especially in evolutionist authors
such as Darwin and Spencer; included is the concept of
a society that would achieve progress though achieving peace.
In
1885, welcomed by the Baron's now relenting family, the Suttners
returned to Austria where Bertha von Suttner wrote most of
her books, including her many novels. Their life was oriented
almost solely toward the literary until, through a friend, they
learned about the International Arbitration and Peace Association1 in London
and about similar groups on the Continent, organizations that had
as an actual working objective what they had now both
accepted as an ideal: arbitration and peace in place of
armed force. Baroness von Suttner immediately added material on this
to her second serious book, Das Maschinenzeitalter [The Machine Age]
which, when published early in 1889, was much discussed and
reviewed. This book, criticizing many aspects of the times, was
among the first to foretell the results of exaggerated nationalism
and armaments.
Wanting to «be of service to the Peace
League... [by writing] a book which should propagate its ideas»,
Bertha von Suttner went to work at once on a
novel whose heroine suffers all the horrors of war; the
wars involved were those of the author's own day on
which she did careful research. The effect of Die Waffen
nieder [Lay Down Your Arms], published late in 1889, was
consequently so real and the implied indictment of militarism so
telling that the impact made on the reading public was
tremendous. And from this time on, its author became an
active leader in the peace movement, devoting a great part
of her time, her energy, and her writing to the
cause of peace - attending peace meetings and international congresses,
helping to establish peace groups, recruiting members, lecturing, corresponding with
people all over the world to promote peace projects.
In 1891
she helped form a Venetian peace group, initiated the Austrian
Peace Society of which she was for a long time
the president, attended her first international peace congress, and started
the fund needed to establish the Bern Peace Bureau.
In 1892,
with A. H. Fried she initiated the peace journal Die
Waffen Nieder, remaining its editor until the end of 1899
when it was replaced by the Friedenswarte (edited by Fried)
to which she regularly contributed comments on current events (Randglossen
zur Zeitgeschichte) until she died. Also in 1892 she promised
Alfred Nobel to keep him informed on the progress of
the peace movement and, if possible, to convince him of
its effectiveness. No doubt she felt that she was beginning
to succeed when she received a letter from him in
January of 1893, telling her about a peace prize he
hoped to found, one which, after his death in 1896,
showed he had indeed established .
Bertha von Suttner, along with
her husband, worked hard to gain support for the Czar's
Manifesto and the Hague Peace Conference of 1899, arranging public
meetings, forming committees, lecturing. She sent accounts of the Conference
itself to the Neue Freie Presse and to other papers,
in other countries, and in the following year wrote articles
and initiated meetings to popularize the idea of the Permanent
Court of Arbitration set up by the Conference.
Although grief-stricken
after her husband's death in 1902, she determined to carry
on the work which they had so often done together
and which he had asked her to continue.
She now
left her quiet retirement in Vienna only on peace missions,
which often included arduous speaking tours. She continued to write,
but only for the cause of peace. By 1905 when
she received the Nobel Peace Prize - at a fortuitous
time financially - she was widely thought of as sharing
the leadership of the peace movement with the venerable.
In the years that followed she played a prominent part
in the Anglo-German Friendship Committee formed at the 1905 Peace
Congress to further Anglo-German conciliation; she warned all who would
listen about the dangers of militarizing China and of using
the rapidly developing aviation as a military instrument; she contributed
lectures, articles, and interviews to the International Club set up
at the 1907 Hague Peace Conference to promote the movement's
objectives among the Conference delegates and the general public; she
spoke at the 1908 Peace Congress in London; and she
repeated again and again that «Europe is one» and that
uniting it was the only way to prevent the world
catastrophe which seemed to be coming.
Her last major effort,
made in 1912 when she was almost seventy, was a
second lecture tour in the United States, the first having
followed her attending the International Peace Congress of 1904 in
Boston.
In August of 1913, already affected by beginning illness,
the Baroness spoke at the International Peace Congress at The
Hague where she was greatly honored as the «generalissimo» of
the peace movement. In May of 1914 she was still
able to take an interest in preparations being made for
the twenty-first Peace Congress, planned for Vienna in September. But
her illness - suspected cancer - developed rapidly thereafter, and
she died on June 21, 1914, two months before the
erupting of the world war she had warned and struggled
against.
In accordance with her wishes, she was cremated at
Gotha and her ashes left there in the columbarium. The
war and its immediate aftermath put an end not only
to the plans of the peace movement for the congress
in Vienna but to its plans for a monument to
Bertha von Suttner |
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