Bertha von Suttner

Bertha von Suttner: The Novelist Who Invented the Peace Prize

She answered a newspaper advertisement. The employer was a wealthy forty-two-year-old Swedish chemist in Paris who wanted a secretary and household manager, and the job lasted, by the Nobel Peace Center's account, eight days. Then she ran off to marry a baron's son and vanished into the Caucasus. But Bertha von Suttner and Alfred Nobel wrote to each other for the rest of his life, and out of that correspondence came the most famous prize in the world — which she then won.

A Countess Without Money

She was born in Prague on 9 June 1843, into the Austrian-Bohemian nobility as Countess Kinsky von Chinic und Tettau. The title was old and the money was not there. This is the central fact of her early life: she had the education, the languages and the social access of the aristocracy, and none of the income, which in the nineteenth century left a woman very few respectable options.

At thirty she took one of them and became a tutor to the Suttner family in Vienna.

Eight Days in Paris

In 1876 she went to Paris to work for Alfred Nobel. Accounts differ on how long she stayed — the Nobel Foundation says a few months, the Nobel Peace Center says eight days — but everyone agrees it ended abruptly. Arthur von Suttner, the youngest son of her Viennese employers, wrote to say he could not live without her. She left the job.

The professional relationship failed and the friendship did not. Nobel and von Suttner corresponded for two decades, and it was through those letters that Europe's most successful manufacturer of explosives was introduced to Europe's growing peace movement. He was not easily moved. "Inform me, convince me," he told her, "and then I shall do something great for the movement." She spent twenty years informing him.

The Elopement

She and Arthur married in secret against his family's wishes and left for Georgia, in the Caucasus, where they lived in effective exile on the edge of the Russian empire. It was a long way from the salons of Vienna, and the distance appears to have clarified things.

She had been raised inside the class that supplies Europe's officer corps. She came back writing against it.

Lay Down Your Arms

*Die Waffen nieder!* was published in Dresden by Edgar Pierson in 1889. Von Suttner chose fiction deliberately, believing a novel would reach an audience that pamphlets never would, and she was right: thirty-seven German editions appeared before 1905, and the book was translated into sixteen languages — English in 1892, Italian in 1897, Spanish in 1905, along with Czech, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian and Swedish.

The book is narrated by Martha Althaus, an Austrian countess, across four wars. She is widowed at nineteen in the Second Italian War of Independence, which begins her conversion. Her second husband, Baron Friedrich Tilling, is a serving Austrian officer who fights in the Second Schleswig War and the Austro-Prussian War and then resigns to join her campaigning. Her siblings die of cholera bred by wartime conditions; her father dies of grief. In the Franco-Prussian War, Friedrich is shot after being mistaken for a Prussian spy.

The structure is the argument. War is not shown as a battlefield but as a machine that arrives repeatedly in the same drawing room and removes the people in it. It remained the most important German-language literary work on war until *All Quiet on the Western Front* in 1929. Von Suttner founded a monthly magazine under the same title and published a sequel, *Marthas Kinder*, in 1903; it was filmed in 1914 and again in 1952.

Generalissimo of the Peace Movement

The novel made her famous, and she converted the fame into organisation with remarkable speed. She founded the Austrian Peace Society in 1891. She became a fixture of the international peace congresses and served as honorary president of the Permanent International Peace Bureau in Berne. By the early 1900s the movement was calling her its "generalissimo" — a military rank, applied to a pacifist, only half in joke.

She was also a feminist who saw the two causes as one problem. "Perhaps," she wrote, "the universal sisterhood is necessary before the universal brotherhood is possible." And she argued for European unity, decades early, as the practical mechanism by which the continent's wars might be prevented rather than merely deplored.

The Prize, and the Will Behind It

Nobel died in 1896. His will established prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature — and peace, a category with no obvious connection to a chemist's interests and every connection to the woman who had been arguing with him by post since 1876. Many historians credit her influence with the decision. She had, in her own words to him, believed that "what we have given, you and I, is going to live on."

In 1905, nine years after his death, the Norwegian Nobel Committee gave her the Peace Prize, citing her "audacity to oppose the horrors of war." She was the first woman to receive it. She had been nominated every year since the prize began in 1901. Until 1975 only three women won it at all, and she remains the only one of those who did not share it with a man.

Why Bertha Is Called a Genius

The distinctive faculty is strategic rather than literary: she understood, earlier and more clearly than anyone in her movement, that pacifism was losing because it was being argued rather than felt, and that the way to change a continent's mind about war was to put a reader inside a family that war keeps visiting. Choosing the novel was a deliberate tactical decision, stated as such, and it worked on a scale no peace pamphlet approached — thirty-seven German editions and sixteen languages inside sixteen years. She then did the second, unglamorous half: built the Austrian Peace Society, worked the international congresses, and spent twenty years patiently converting the richest arms-adjacent industrialist in Europe by letter. The result was an institution that has outlived every organisation she founded and every book she wrote.

The counter-case should be put plainly. *Die Waffen nieder!* is not read today as literature; its reputation is historical, and its didacticism is the reason it worked and the reason it dated. Her influence on Nobel's will is credited by historians rather than documented by the will itself — the causal claim is probable, not proven, and it is the single largest pillar of her reputation. Her aristocratic access was a real advantage that most reformers lacked. And the harshest verdict is the one history delivered: she died in Vienna on 21 June 1914, days before the assassination at Sarajevo, having spent twenty-five years arguing that Europe was about to destroy itself, and having failed to prevent it. Whether that is failure or vindication depends entirely on how long a view one takes.

Legacy

She did not live to see the war she had spent her life describing. The organisations she built were swept aside by it within weeks.

What survived was the prize. Every December in Oslo, the Nobel Peace Prize is awarded because a Swedish chemist was talked into it over twenty years by a Bohemian countess who had once worked for him, briefly, before leaving to get married. It remains the most durable argument she ever made.

Achievements

• Nobel Peace Prize — 1905
• Genres: utopian and dystopian fiction and feminist science fiction