BERTHA VON SUTTNER-The first woman to be awarded the Peace Prize, wrote one of the nineteenth century’s most influential books

BERTHA VON SUTTNER

Born: 9 June 1843, Goltz-Kinský Palace, Prague, Czechia

Died: 21 June 1914 (age 71 years), Vienna, Austria

The first woman to be awarded the Peace Prize, wrote one of the nineteenth century’s most influential books

The year 1905 marks the centenary of Bertha von Suttnerís Nobel Peace Prize Award, a welcome opportunity to commemorate this very remarkable Austrian novelist, early peace activist and first woman to receive this prestigious award. With the support of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Foreign Affairs a variety of events, ranging from symposia to concerts, lectures and an exhibition, will recall and extensively explore the life and work of Bertha von Suttner. Events will take place in Austria as well as in many countries abroad to commemorate Suttnerís outstanding commitment for peace, exemplified by her groundbreaking novel Die Waffen nieder (Lay Down Your Arms) which became a world success in 1889 and paved the way for her Nobel Prize Award in 1905. Peace and human rights questions are just as urgent today as they were one hundred years ago, when Bertha von Suttner addressed them in her books. These questions will play a prominent role in the commemoratory events of 2005. Books and the commemoration of positive historic role models cannot prevent armed conflicts but the courage and foresight of personalities such as Bertha von Suttner do deserve our attention ñ if we want to make a difference.

For the Austrian Foreign Ministry this anniversary presented a welcome opportunity to ask the distinguished journalist and author Hella Pick, who was born in Austria and fled to London after Hitler take-over, to write an essay on the remarkable life of Baroness von Suttner.

Lay Down Your Arms. That was the superficially simple and yet inherently complex message that Bertha von Suttner battled for decades to translate into an effective movement to end military conflict and secure the peaceful resolution of international disputes. Instead of glorifying war, she demanded of decision-makers, adopt pacifism as a noble cause, settle disputes by negotiation and in international law courts, and in place of soldiers hold up the peacemakers as heroes. She never gave up the struggle. Indeed her confidence in the cause of peace was rarely dented even though wars punctuated much of her life and she knew in the weeks before her death in 1914 that the odds were stacked against her; that a World War had become virtually inevitable.

In 1905 she received the Nobel Peace Prize which had been launched in 1901. She was the first woman to be recognised in this way; indeed there have been only six other women in all the years that followed to be singled out for this treasured award. Bertha von Suttner had certainly earned the prize. Her contribution to the Peace Movement had been enormous.

Much to her disappointment, the Norwegian Committee passed her over until 1905 when some of her admirers shamed its members into recognising her immense contribution to the peace movement. She had turned the annual Congresses of the Peace-Movement into major events on the international calendar and had been the moving spirit behind the creation of the Inter-Parliamentary Union. She had travelled far and wide to plead with world leaders for their support, had made countless speeches and written millions of words.

By the time the Nobel Prize came to her she was 62 years old, widowed and with little money. She could have treated this distinction as a crowning point of her endeavours. But in fact she used it as a mere staging post in an ongoing, ever more passionate crusade to bring the world to its senses and avert a catastrophic war. She died in 1914 a few days before the outbreak of a world war that seemed to deny everything that she had held precious.

Yet had she still been alive this doughty fighter would not have given up. On the contrary true to character she would have reinforced her efforts to create a powerful peace movement and to develop international institutions capable of maintaining peace. Today she would applaud the existence of the United Nations, the European Union, the Council of Europe, the International Court in the Hague and War Crimes Tribunals as fi rm evidence that her ideas are gaining ground.

Every generation produces a handful of visionaries who impose themselves on societies. Bertha von Suttner undoubtedly belonged to this select group of men and women. Like her near contemporary, Theodor Herzl, she had a dream and like him also had the common sense to realise that the movers and shakers of this world had to be enlisted if any of it was to be translated into reality. Also like Herzl, Suttner lacked financial resources and was always in search of money to finance her endeavours.

Often ridiculed in her own time, Suttnerís near-religious commitment to pacifism was rooted in a touching interpretation of Darwinís theory of evolution. Still a relatively new concept, she had convinced herself that the laws of evolution would inexorably steer mankind into a better future. One of the eternal truth she declared in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, is that the future will always be one degree better than the past. The world is not static. Happiness is created and developed in peace and one of the eternal rights is the individual right to

live… It is sanctified by the ancient commandment ‘thou shalt not kill. Even if up to the present time the military organisation of our society has been founded on a denial of the possibility of peace, a contempt for the value of human life and an acceptance of the urge to kill, it would

 

be utterly wrong to deny the possibility of change. The old system, she asserted, was doomed to failure. Suttner, often caricatured as die Friedens bertha, was utterly convinced that judicial peace between nations would eventually become securely embedded in the conduct of international relations. As she saw it technical inventions, improved

communications, economic interdependence were part of a process of internationalisation and unification that would win out over war and  the destruction of humanity and would be transformed into visible, living and effective forms of peaceful management of international relations. Having come to know the United States and some of its leaders, she became firmly convinced that American idealism was so potent that the country could be counted on to become the leading champion for world-wide change for the better.

It is easy to be cynical about Suttner belief that the forces of good were certain, eventually, to vanquish evil. Indeed in her own time, she was more often ridiculed than followed or admired. Yet few who came into contact with her could fail to recognise that here was an extraordinary human being. Even though she was the product of 19th century Habsburg aristocracy brought up in the conventions of that society, in middle age she had stepped far outside that mould to turn into an indefatigable peace campaigner. As a young woman she would have been the last to think that she would at the age of 46 emerge into public life and become widely known throughout Europe and the United States. Nor did she envisage that she would fight against anti-Semitism and for women emancipation and would write countless articles and a long series of novels, including her bestseller Die Waffen nieder! (LayDown Your Arms!) using her writing gifts and vivid imagination to drive home her message against the use of force and the horrors of war.

The arguments that Suttner used to underpin her ideas were far ahead of her time. She wanted European nations to unite for peace; she argued for free trade associations, for limits to national sovereignty by allowing international law to determine violations of human rights. Above all she understood that extremism in all its manifestations, even in religion, poisons society and must be opposed. Daringly in the context of her background and her times, Bertha also made herself an advocate of women rights, arguing that they deserved full equality in society and in their relationships with men. She thought that women would instinctively make themselves champions of peace.

Curiously for an individual with such progressive ideas, Suttner never displayed much understanding for democratic ideas, and did not see that the old order was collapsing. Her mind-set was such that she clung to monarchs and their power brokers and to the intellectual elites but felt little need to bring her message direct to the grassroots. She never developed into a populist.

 

Even though she was born Countess Kinsky, she was nevertheless treated as an outsider by the Kinsky family and failed in her many efforts to be accepted by them as an equal. Her father, a Field-Marshall, had died before her birth. Her mother was only a cavalry officers daughter and therefore carried no weight in the family. Moreover she lost in gaming most of the little money she had. Bertha was an attractive young woman, spirited and resourceful and even with limited resources always well dressed. Yet a number of attempts to marry her off to wealthy suitors came to nothing. Indeed there were early signs that Bertha would try to compensate for her lowly state within the Habsburg Empireís aristocratic establishment by a show of independence. She determined to educate herself, learning languages, training her voice in then mistaken – hope of becoming a singer, reading widely and travelling as much as her mother’s limited funds allowed.

Still single at the age of 30, Bertha decided that she had no alternative but to do what was expected of women in her predicament which was to become a governess. Thus in 1883 she accepted a post to look after the four young daughters of the wealthy, well connected Baron Karl Gundaccar Freiherr von Suttner.

Her arrival in the sumptuous Suttner household in Vienna had unforeseen consequences. The Suttners also had three sons, among them Arthur, a young man of 23 years who seems to have charmed all who came into contact with him. Bertha and Arthur fell in love; but tried to keep it secret in part because of their difference in age but mainly because it was clear to both that Baron Suttner would not permit a match with the governess ñ even if that governess was a Countess Kinsky.

For three years, the pair maintained their secret idyll. But then Arthur’s mother divined the relationship between her son and the governess, and made it clear to Bertha that she must find another post, as far away as possible from Vienna. The solution came after Baroness Suttner saw an advertisement for a Secretary/Housekeeper in Paris to a “very wealthy, highly cultivated gentleman.”

 

Among Arthur’s close friends and collaborators there were several Jews. But this was not the only reason why they linked the eradication of antisemitism with the pursuit of disarmament. Already when the couple were living in the Caucasus, they had been deeply shocked by the wave of pogroms in Russia. When they returned to Austria they saw that anti-Semitism was not only directed against the impoverished Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe but also against the assimilated Jewish intelligentsia. Given their liberal outlook and crusading spirit, they decided that the fight against anti-Semitism required an organisational approach just as much as the campaign to convince the world of the virtues of pacifism. Bertha however left it primarily to her husband to set up in Vienna the so-called “anti association” (Anti-Verein).

Launched in 1891 it had as its sponsors a group of prominent Austrians, both Jews and non-Jews. The same kind of optimism that guided the Suttners in their pacifism also led them to believe that anti-Semitism in Austria was in its death throes and that the “anti-association” would merely speed up a process that had already begun. This assumption was all the more surprising since Vienna’s political scene at that time was dominated by men such as Georg Ritter von Schoenerer and Karl Lueger who coupled their far-right nationalism with calls for racial purity and outspoken anti-Semitism. Bertha thought that publication of a journal devoted to exposing the wrongs of anti-Semitism would prove a useful tool for the “anti-association”. Far and wide, she appealed for money. Finally a sponsor ñ Baron Friedrich Leitenberger ñ was found and in 1892, the weekly “Freies Blatt”

was launched. Theodor Herzl, invited to contribute, refused. He argued that the “anti-association” had arrived on the scene far too late. Though Herzl had not yet formed his ideas for the establishment of a Jewish state he had already concluded that anti-Semitism had to be fought with far more radical measures than the Suttners, with their belief in the persuasiveness of the written word, envisaged. After the publication of Herzl’s “Der Judenstaat” (the Jewish State) in 1896, Herzl was even more discouraging about the Suttners “anti-association.” He qualified the group’s activities as comical, and though he expressed admiration for Bertha, he thought she was utterly mistaken in the way she and her husband were tackling the anti-Semitism issue. Even she recognised that their work might be futile after the Emperor Franz Joseph yielded to pressure and endorsed Karl Lueger’s controversial election as Mayor of Vienna.

The Freies Blatt ceased publication in 1896 and in 1900 the Anti-Verein, having run out of money, was dissolved. Arthur turned into a convinced Zionist. Bertha was far more lukewarm in her reaction to Herzl’s Zionism, though she tried to help him when he sought an audience with the Russian Tsar. She recognised that Herzl was trying to create a better world. But she regarded nationalism as the arch-enemy of peace. Rather than encouraging the creation of a Jewish state, Bertha leaned towards

assimilation as a solution to the Jewish question. This was also a reflection of her confidence that a new breed of Europeans, committed to liberal ideas and peace, were certain to emerge and triumph. She touched on these ideas in a couple of her later novels.

The award seemed to reinvigorate Bertha. She put all her energies into the search for high level support for the peace movement and above all for more money to fund its activities. She complained that the Rothschilds were funding all manner of benevolent activities, but showed no generosity to the pacifists. And she looked to Andrew Carnegie as a replacement for Alfred Nobel to provide financial backing for the peace movement. She toured Europe, giving lectures, attending congresses, writing, talking to the press.

In 1911, deeply depressed by the threatening situation in the Balkans, she decided on another lecture tour in the United States. The faltering peace movement needed moral and financial help from America. Though restricted, because of her stoutness, in her physical movements

she toured across the United States, and was buoyed by large audiences

and the warm reception she was given. They called her an “angel of peace.” On her return to Europe Bertha could not ignore the signs of impending conflict in the Balkans. Yet she never despaired of her cause. On her 70th birthday her close friends organised a celebration. But there were no official awards in recognition of her work and the Kinsky family maintained its distance. Suttner herself marked the birthday with an optimistic article in the Neue Freie Presse in which she argued that the Balkan war might well be the last war of all. She failed to realise that the Habsburg monarchy was in its death throes. She emphasised what happiness it was to be alive and wrote that she regretted the inevitable approach of death.

Bertha von Suttner ignored sign of ill-health and continued to write and even to travel and attend meetings until shortly before her death on June 21, 1914. In a final letter to Alfred Fried she praised him for the preparations he had made for the next peace congress. I congratulate us and pacifism “it will be a brilliant congress!” Delirious in her last hours, she cried: ‘Lay down your Arms! Tell it to all!’ (Die Waffen nieder! Sagt es Allen!)