Bertha von Suttner
Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicitas von Suttner was a Bohemian noblewoman, pacifist and novelist. In 1905, she became the second female Nobel laureate, the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Austrian and Czech laureate.
Early life
Bertha Kinský was born on 9 June 1843 at Kinský Palace in the Obecní dvůr district of Prague. Her parents were the Austrian Lieutenant general Franz Michael de Paula Josef Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau, who died at the age of 75 before Bertha was born, and Sophie Wilhelmine von Körner, who was more than 45 years younger than her husband.Her father was a member of the ancient and illustrious House of Kinsky via descent from Count Wilhelm Kinsky, being the younger son of Count Franz Ferdinand Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau and Princess Maria Christina Anna von und zu Liechtenstein, youngest but one daughter of Prince Emanuel of Liechtenstein. Bertha's mother came from a family that belonged to an untitled nobility of significantly lower status. She was the daughter of Joseph von Körner, a captain of the cavalry in the Habsburg Imperial Army, and a distant relative of the poet Theodor Körner. Through her mother, Bertha was also related to Theodor Körner, Edler von Siegringen, namesake and great-nephew of the poet, who later served as the 4th President of Austria.
Bertha faced exclusion from the Austrian high nobility due to her "mixed" descent; for instance, only those with an unblemished aristocratic pedigree going back to their great-great-grandparents were eligible for presentation at the imperial court. She was additionally disadvantaged because her father, as a third son, had no great estates or other financial resources to bequeath. Bertha was baptised at Prague's Church of Our Lady of the Snows – not a traditional choice for the aristocracy.
Soon after Bertha's birth, her mother moved to live in Brno near Bertha's guardian, Landgrave Friedrich Michael zu Fürstenberg-Taikowitz. Bertha's older brother, Count Arthur Franz Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau, was sent to a military school at the age of six and subsequently had little contact with the family. In 1855, Bertha's maternal aunt Charlotte Büschel, née von Körner, and her daughter Elvira joined the household. Elviras father had been a private scholar and her official guardian, after the death of her father, became. She was of a similar age as Bertha and interested in intellectual pursuits, introducing her cousin to literature and philosophy. In addition to such studies, Bertha gained proficiency in French, Italian and English as an adolescent under the supervision of a succession of private tutors. She also became an accomplished amateur pianist and singer.
Bertha's mother and aunt, regarding themselves as clairvoyant, went to gamble at Wiesbaden in the summer of 1856, hoping to return with a fortune. Their losses proved so heavy that they were forced to move to Vienna. During this trip, Bertha received a marriage proposal from Prince Philipp zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, third son of Prince, Minister of State of the Duchy of Nassau and Franziska, which was declined due to Bertha's young age. The family once again returned to Wiesbaden in 1859. The second trip proved similarly unsuccessful, and they had to relocate to a small property in Klosterneuburg. Shortly afterwards, Bertha wrote her first published work, the novella Erdenträume im Monde, which appeared in Die Deutsche Frau. Continuing poor financial circumstances led Bertha to a brief engagement to the wealthy Gustav, Baron Heine von Geldern, 31 years her senior and a member of the banking family Heine, whom she came to find unattractive and finally rejected. Her memoirs record her disgusted response to the older man's attempt to kiss her.
In 1864, the family spent the summer at Bad Homburg, a fashionable gambling destination among the aristocracy of the era. Bertha befriended the Georgian aristocrat Ekaterine Dadiani, Princess of Mingrelia and met Tsar Alexander II, to whom she was very distantly related. Seeking a career as an opera singer as an alternative to marrying into money, she undertook an intensive course of lessons, working on her voice for over four hours a day. Despite tuition from the eminent Gilbert Duprez in Paris in 1867 and from Pauline Viardot in Baden-Baden in 1868, she never secured a professional engagement. She suffered from stage fright and was unable to project well in performance. In the summer of 1872, she became engaged to Prince Adolf zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, son of Prince Alexander zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein and Countess Amalie Luise von Bentheim-Tecklenburg-Rheda. However, Prince Adolf died at sea that October while travelling to America to escape his debts.
Tutor in the Suttner household, life in Georgia
In 1866 both Landgrave Fürstenberg and Elvira died, and Bertha felt increasingly constrained by her mother's eccentricity and the family's poor financial circumstances.In 1873, she found employment as a tutor at the house of Karl Gundaccar Freiherr von Suttner and his wife, Karola Knolz. They had seven children, including four girls. The Suttner family lived in the Innere Stadt of Vienna three seasons of the year, and spent the summer at in Lower Austria, at that time part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
Bertha became companion to the four girls and had an affectionate relationship with her four young students, who nicknamed her "Boulotte" due to her size, a name she would later adopt as a literary pseudonym in the form "B. Oulot".
She soon fell in love with the youngest son of Karl, seven years her junior, Baron . They were engaged but unable to marry due to his parents' disapproval. In 1876, with the encouragement of her employers, she answered a newspaper advertisement which led to her briefly becoming secretary and housekeeper to Alfred Nobel in Paris. In the few weeks of her employment, she and Nobel developed a friendship, and Nobel may have made romantic overtures. However, she remained committed to Arthur and returned shortly to Vienna to marry him in secrecy, in the church of St. Aegyd in Gumpendorf. As a consequence Arthur von Suttner was desinherited by his family and lost the title of Freiherr.
The newlywed couple eloped to Mingrelia in western Georgia, Russian Empire, near the Black Sea, where she hoped to make use of her connection to the former ruling House of Dadiani and Ekaterine, who had once invited her to visit. On their arrival, they were entertained by Prince Niko. The couple settled in Kutaisi, where they found work teaching languages and music to the children of the local aristocracy. However, they experienced considerable hardship despite their social connections, living in a simple three-roomed wooden house. Their situation worsened in 1877 on the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War, although Arthur worked as a reporter on the conflict for the Neue Freie Presse. Suttner also wrote frequently for the Austrian press in this period and worked on her early novels, including Es Löwos, a romanticised account of her life with Arthur. In the aftermath of the war, Arthur attempted to set up a timber business, but it was unsuccessful.
Arthur and Bertha von Suttner
Arthur and Bertha von Suttner were largely socially isolated in Georgia; their poverty restricted their engagement with high society, and neither ever became fluent speakers of Mingrelian or Georgian. To support themselves, both began writing as a career. While Arthur's writing during this period is dominated by local themes, Suttner's was not similarly influenced by Georgian culture.In August 1882, Ekaterine Dadiani died. Soon afterwards, the couple decided to leave Mingrelia and move to Tbilisi. There, Arthur took whatever work he could, while Suttner largely concentrated on her writing. She became a correspondent of the German writer and philosopher Michael Georg Conrad, she eventually contributed an article to the 1885 edition of his publication Die Gesellschaft. The piece, entitled "Truth and Lies", is a polemic in favour of the naturalism of Émile Zola. Her first significant political work, Inventarium einer Seele, was published in Leipzig in 1883. In this work, Suttner takes a pro-disarmament, progressive stance, arguing for the inevitability of world peace due to technological advancement; a possibility also considered by her friend Nobel due to the increasingly deterrent effect of more powerful weapons.
In 1884, Suttner's mother died, leaving the couple with further debts. Arthur had befriended a Georgian journalist in Tbilisi only known as "M" and the couple agreed to collaborate with him on a translation of the Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther Skin. Suttner was to improve M.'s literal translation of the Georgian to French, and Arthur to translate the French to German. This method proved arduous, and they worked only for few hours each day. Arthur published several articles on the work in the Georgian press, and Mihály Zichy prepared some illustrations for the publication, but M. failed to make the expected payment, and after the Bulgarian Crisis began in 1885 the couple felt increasingly unsafe in Georgian society, which was becoming more hostile to Austrians due to Russian influence. They finally reconciled with Arthur's family and in May 1885 could return to Austria, where the couple lived at Harmannsdorf Castle in Lower Austria.
Bertha found refuge in her marriage with Arthur, of which she remarked that "the third field of my feelings and moods lay within our married happiness. In this was my peculiarly inalienable home, my refuge for all possible conditions of life, and so the leaves of my diary are full not only of political domestic records of all kinds, but also of memoranda of our gay little jokes, our confidential enjoyable walks, our uplifting reading, our hours of music together, and our evening games of chess. To us personally nothing could happen. We had each other – that was everything."