Bertha Von Suttner

When I was requested by the Committee of the International Arbitration and Peace Association, of which I have the honour to be a Member, to undertake the translation of the novel entitled Die Wafen Nieder, I considered it my duty to consent and I have found the labour truly a delight. Baroness Suttners striking tale has had so great a success on the Continent of Europe that it seems singular that no complete translation into English should yet have appeared. An incomplete version was published some time since in the United States, without the sanction of the authoress but it gives no just idea of the work. Apart from its value as a work of fiction-great as that is the book has a transcendent interest for the Society with which I am connected from its bearing on the question of war in generaland of the present state of Europe in particular. We English speaking people, whether in England, in the Colonies, or in the United States, being ourselves in no immediate danger of seeing our homes invaded, and our cities laid under contribution by hostile armies, are apt to forget how terribly the remembrance of such calamities, and the constant threat of their recurrence, haunt the lives of our Continental brethren.

Reproduction of the original.

Austrian writer and peace activist Bertha von Suttner was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. As founder of the Austrian and German Peace Associations and the author of a number of novels and several works on peace, von Suttner's name became synonymous worldwide with peace activism and protest against old world order. Ironically, her death eight days before the outbreak of World War I was seen by her contemporaries as a symbolic end of the possibility for world peace. In Bertha von Suttner, Brigitte Hamann has written the most comprehensive biography of the celebrated journalist - translated into English by Ann Dubsky - tracing not only von Suttner's life and work but spanning the political and social frontier of Austria on the eve of World War I. Von Suttner's novel Die Waffen Nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), published in 1899, was a bestseller and brought her international acclaim. Indeed, Tolstoy compared her technique of rallying readers to her cause to that of Harriet Beecher Stowe in Uncle Tom's Cabin for the emancipation of American slaves. Her lectures on peace and disarmament took her throughout Europe and the United States, where she formed close friendships with Andrew Carnegie, Alfred Nobel, Theodor Herzl, and Albert I of Monaco. As her conviction to initiate peace movements deepened, so her books became more impassioned. Her dictum, "universal sisterhood is necessary before the universal brotherhood is possible", demonstrated that her concerns extended beyond the peace movement to include women's issues and many social causes, making von Suttner's work quite relevant at the close of the twentieth century.

Bertha von Suttner was a pioneer in the peace movement at the end of the 19th century, while Alfred Nobel earned his fortune on the invention of dynamite. This book tells the gripping story of their relationship and how she came to influence him in his decision to establish the Nobel Peace Prize, "the most prestigious prize in the world," according to the Oxford Dictionary of Contemporary History. Their correspondence of more than ninety letters, written with intensity and elegance, is the main source of this work. Young Bertha Kinsky, as her maiden name is, came from Austria to work as a secretary for Alfred Nobel in Paris in 1875. This was the beginning of a friendship that would last for more than twenty years, until Nobel's death in 1896. In "The Woman behind the Nobel Peace Prize," we follow the ups and downs of their professional and private lives, and see how their stories and thinking interlink. Von Suttner, full of vitality, went from living the the nonchalant life of a young aristocrat to became a dedicated peace activist and author - a story of personal growth and female emanicipation. Nobel, an engimatic character who combined technical passion with a literary interest, increasingly looked for ways to support peaceful solutions as an alternative to war, and von Suttner prodded him on through the stages of the writing of his last will. The reader is also taken on a journey through a Europe in an era of fundamental changes - the decline of the aristocracy and the rise of the bourgeoisie, the explosion of industrialization and the stark contrast of militarism and a peace-movement full of optimism in "La Belle Epoque." But most of all, this is a moving story that sheds new light on the origins of the Nobel Peace Prize, in which the woman behind gets her rightful place. The author Anne Synnøve Simensen developed her interest in the topic when she worked at the Nobel Peace Prize Centre in Oslo. First published by the Norwegian publishing company Cappelen Damm (2012), this is a revised and amplified edition for an English-speaking audience.

Reproduction of the original.