“Lay down your arms! Say many – many…” These were the last words of Barbara von Suttner on her deathbed. And thus one of the most famous representatives of the peace movement died in Vienna on June 21, 1914. Only a few days later, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia and the First World War began to take its course. This was a war that Bertha von Suttner had long-since warned against.
But who was this woman who became famous through the publication of her anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms? Bertha von Suttner was an author, journalist, pacifist, the first female recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize and was far ahead of her time with many of her demands.
Countess Bertha Sophia Felicita Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau was born on June 9, 1843 in Prague into noble military family. Her life was thoroughly marked by contradictions and particularities: working as a tutor to the daughters of the Baron, Bertha von Suttner fell in love with the son of the Baron, Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner, seven years her junior. After the secret relationship came to light, she left Vienna and the Suttner family and travel to Paris. Following a period in which she worked as a secretary for Alfred Nobel, with whom she remained associated for years, Arthur and Bertha secretly married in Vienna in 1876, despite the objections of the family. Following this, they left Vienna together to begin a new life in Georgia. Both worked as writers and Bertha von Suttner made her international breakthrough in 1889 with her bestseller Lay Down Your Arms!. With her novel, which was one of the first to describe the sad reality of the European battlefields, she wanted to be of service to the peace movement and simultaneously became an icon of this movement.
Her role as a pacifist, which she assumed at the age of almost 50, was certainly not an easy one. Many saw her as a naive utopian, which caused her to be mocked as “peace Bertha”. This happened not only because she was a woman, but also because her progressive ideas opposed the prevailing nationalism and militarism. Due to the advancing technologies, also in the area of weapon technology, she saw no other resort than to do away with war as a political tool. To do so, she called for the establishment of international arbitration courts, which were actually realized in the form of the Hague Tribunal at the first Hague Conference in 1899. It is seen as a predecessor to today’s International Court of Justice in the Hague. Her call for a league of nations, connected with the arbitration courts, stood diametrically opposed to nationalist idea and was thus seen as her broadest peace utopia.
Her death on June 21, 1914 spared her from having to experience the horrors of the First World War. This meant, however, that she also could not experience how her demands were met in 1920 in the form of the League of Nations and as lesson from the First World War. In a speech on the occasion of the fourth anniversary of her death, Stefan Zweig said: “But it was precisely this woman, of whom they said she had nothing more to say to the world than her three words, who got to the roots of the matter with the deepest thoughts of the present… she was never afraid to call for what seemed unachievable. She knew the deep tragedy of the idea she represented better than any other, the nearly annihilating tragedy of pacifism, that it never seems contemporary, obsolete in times of peace, lunacy in times of war, powerless in peace and helpless in war. Nevertheless, she took up this cause for herself, a Don Quixote for the rest of her life, fighting windmills. But today, we know, shuddering, what she always knew, that these windmills do not grind wind, but instead the bones of the youth of Europe.”
Bertha von Suttner was a pioneer in her era and showed that social movements could achieve things. In 1905, she became the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her long years of dedication.
