Who was this woman and what made her so extraordinary? Where can we still find her portrait in everyday life? What was her life like and when did she receive the Nobel Peace Prize? In Austria, it is known from the former thousand schilling bill. She can currently be seen on the €2 coins minted in Austria. Bertha Sophia Felicitas Baroness von Suttner was born in Prague on June 9, 1843. She came from a Bohemian aristocratic family and was born Countess Kinsky.
She achieved worldwide fame as a writer, the first female Nobel Peace Prize winner (1905) and pacifist. But this was not something she was born with.
A life full of highs and lows
On the contrary, her life was characterized by many ups and downs. Her father married a commoner and died before his daughter was born. The mother gambled away her entire inheritance. The plan to marry the daughter off richly did not work out.
At the age of thirty, Bertha was still unmarried and took a job as a governess for the Suttner family in Vienna. There she taught the four daughters music and language and fell in love with the family’s youngest son, who was born around Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner, seven years his junior. As a result she was dismissed.
She went to Paris and took a job as private secretary to the wealthy industrialist Alfred Nobel (Swedish inventor, chemist and namesake of the Nobel Prize). But her great love for Arthur remained. The couple married secretly in Vienna, he was then disinherited and they went to Georgia together. There she began to write out of financial necessity.
Her tireless fight against war and violence earned her the Nobel Peace Prize
After almost ten years, the two returned to Vienna; Bertha was now a recognized writer. She remained in contact with Alfred Nobel all those years, he was her great patron. Her novel “Lay Down Your Arms“, which made her world-famous, was published in 1889. She traveled the world as a
On June 21, 1914, exactly one week before the shots were fired in Sarajevo, she succumbed to cancer. Fortunately, she did not live to see the outbreak of the First World War, which she had repeatedly warned about.
Time Travel Tip: A memorial to Bertha von Suttner was erected in the Bertha von Suttner-Hof in the 4th district. It is a pedestal with a group of figures by the sculptor Siegfried Charoux
Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bertha_von_Suttner.png?uselang=de
