This Book Will Be Banned

A monument in Berlin pays tribute to many of the authors whose works were censored and banned by Nazis.

Years ago, when I began work on Peace at Last, I believed that a historical novel about Bertha von Suttner, the first female Nobel Peace Prize laureate, risked little controversy and would appeal to a broad and receptive readership. Recent developments in the United States and elsewhere, however, suggest otherwise. Today, despite the book’s explicit appeals to reason and compassion, I’m fairly certain it will be banned in certain states and foreign countries.

To explain why, let’s unpack the passive “will be banned” and identify the various actors who would call for its censorship. 

For starters, there’s the American gun lobby, which has been pushing an agenda of violence, vengeance, and vigilantism under the alleged cover of “God-given” constitutional rights. A book celebrating a brave woman who demanded international disarmament and diplomacy over violence would pose a threat to the mostly-male hawks and warmongers still dominating the political discourse of the day. Numerous newspaper and magazine journalists have recently written about enraged readers who verbally harassed and physically threatened them over their views on gun rights and/or regulation. Meanwhile, the epidemic of shootings in the United States claims more and more innocent lives. 

Bertha von Suttner was no stranger to knee-jerk reactionaries. “Large groups of our readers would feel hurt or offended by the contents of your book,” replied the first editor to reject her manuscript for Lay Down Your Arms! and its bold calls for disarmament. She wrote in her Memoirs: “So I tried with another editor: the same result. And the same with others—unanimous rejections. One of the editors responded: ‘Despite all of its merits, publishing this novel in a military country would be very much out of the question.’” 

In this political cartoon, Mars, the god of war, mocks Bertha von Suttner’s pacifism.

Suttner eventually found a willing though hesitant publisher in Edgar Pierson. “Pierson advised that I should give the manuscript to some experienced statesman to look over and strike out everything that might give offense,” she wrote. “I cried out in indignation at such a demand. … To revise it under the guidelines of that most contemptible of all arts—the art of suiting everybody! No. I’d rather burn it in the stove first!” 

To both Suttner’s and Pierson’s surprise, the published novel attracted a large global readership. Some major American newspapers even serialized the book during the early days of World War I. Other newspapers responded to the book with belittling reviews and caricatures. Despite its popularity (and probably because of it), Suttner’s work was, in the end, banned and burned. Nazi censors and other fascists hurled her books onto bonfires and destroyed many of her personal effects. Their goal was to erase the influential pacifist from history. Given how few people today are aware of her achievements, they largely succeeded.   

In addition to gun-control advocates, the modern American Republican party has also targeted the GLBTQ+ community for censorship, forbidding access to transgender health care and, like Russia, criminalizing material that might be construed as promoting non-traditional lifestyles. Suttner was no stranger to controversy on these fronts, either. Publishing under the pseudonym B. Oulot, she adopted the persona of a male narrator in her novella Es Löwos, an intimate portrayal of a gender-equitable relationship. The title itself resists any strict translation from the German and imagines a creature that is neither a male lion nor a lioness. At one point, Suttner even outlines a grammar for this namesake animal—well over a century ahead of those promoting non-binary pronouns and transgendered identities:

So I created a new pronoun. The necessary inflections fell into place:

Nominative: Es. (Contemporary American equivalent: They.)

Genitive: Ems. (Their.)

Dative: Em. (Them.)

Accusative: En. (Them.)

For example: Es is coming. I will comb Ems mane. That belongs to Em. I love En.

(From Es Löwos, working translation by Hugh Coyle and Liz Sheedy) 

Then as now, many (mostly conservative male) readers were horrified by the suggestion of variable gender roles and pronouns. Likewise, Suttner’s proto-feminist attitude and her frank discussions of sexual intimacy shocked some critics. “One does not expose such privacies to the multitude!” one complained, to which Suttner responded, “As if one writes for the multitude!” Instead, she envisioned an audience of sympathetic readers, “those in whom a string tuned to the same note is vibrating.”

Suttner’s long-term friendship with Nobel suggests that he, too, felt similar vibrations upon reading her work. An intensely private lifelong bachelor, his love life remains a shrouded mystery. Historians have proposed numerous theories to explain Nobel’s enigmatic relationships with women (Suttner included), from an early case of syphilis and the side effects of its treatment to latent homosexual tendencies. A museum curator shared an anecdote with me of a scholar who was told outright that she could not make any reference, pro or con, to Nobel’s sexual preference at a Russian historian’s conference. (NB: The Nobel family has deep ties in Russia, and Alfred spent part of his youth in St. Petersburg.) 

An “empty library” beneath Bebelplatz in Berlin marks the site of a major Nazi book-burning bonfire.

Radical right-wing school boards in various U.S. states have already banned books for merely acknowledging homosexuality. Fearing the right-wing censorship panels now spreading like a plague across the United States, some publishers have enacted preemptive strategies and asked authors to “clean up” manuscripts, removing any material that might provoke controversy. Classics, too, have fallen prey to the revisionists’ red pens. In crafting a fictional narrative based on well-documented research, I feel I can neither dismiss nor overlook the possibility that Alfred Nobel was gay. The complexity of his character will remain intact despite the complaints of some prudish overseers.

From its strong central message of disarmament to its depictions of non-normative sexualities, Peace at Last seems destined to follow in the footsteps of Suttner’s work and rankle its own crowd of authoritarian detractors. Though I had originally envisioned a novel that might pull together opposing political parties, the rising levels of polarity dividing the world today present an ever more daunting challenge. 

“Persist, persist, and continue to persist,” Suttner once wrote in response to the many threats endangering the pacifist movement of the 19th century. Her stubborn defiance still shines brightly and provides a beacon of light and hope for those of us working to preserve and promote her peace-seeking legacy. 

“The Subject of America”

“I wish to dwell for a moment on the subject of America,” said Bertha von Suttner in her acceptance speech for the 1905 Nobel Peace Prize. “This land of limitless opportunities is marked by its ability to carry out new and daring plans of enormous imagination and scope, while often using the simplest methods. In other words, it is a nation idealistic in its concepts and practical in its execution of them. We feel that the modern peace movement has every chance in America of attracting strong support and of finding a clear formula for the implementation of its aims.”

Bertha in New York City

Bertha had every reason to be optimistic about both the United States and its role in the global peace movement. During a three-week trip to America in 1904, she met with various leaders of the pacifist movement and came away especially impressed by the forward progress of women on such issues as suffrage and the abolition of slavery. On a subsequent visit in 1912, she told a large audience in San Francisco, “When people speak to me of the future, I tell them, ‘Go to America and look at the future, for there it has already arrived. They are fifty years ahead of us ethically.’” 

Bertha compared the United States of the early 1900s to Europe and saw stark contrasts. “Alarm is general everywhere,” she said of her home continent, “and no one can give a rational cause. In America, the reverse is true.” She noted achievements in welfare and civil rights before observing that “in my city (Vienna), they are putting guns into the public schools and making the curriculum less and less liberal, more and more militant.”

Sadly, the United States today more closely resembles Europe in those anxious years prior to the start of World War I. Patriotism and militarism go hand in hand, and every national holiday now seems like an excuse to exalt the armed forces and celebrate physical strength over moral and ethical spirit. The lust for vengeance supersedes rational justice; guns are a fetish. Political parties work toward their own preservation, often at the expense of the people’s will. 

Today, July 4, is Independence Day in the United States, a commemoration of the ratification of the Declaration of Independence by the Second Continental Congress. In essence, it signaled the birth of a new nation and a radically different form of government. “If the United States has a mission,” Bertha observed in 1912, “it is to develop the principle of the Brotherhood of Man into a living, palpable force.” True to her lifelong calls for disarmament, she ventured a step farther. “The one half of humanity that has never borne arms is today ready to blaze into this living, palpable force. Perhaps the Universal Sisterhood is necessary before the Universal Brotherhood is possible.”

Bertha was an honored guest at San Francisco’s Century Club during her 1912 visit.

On this Independence Day, I find myself, like Bertha as she approached her 70th birthday, still clinging to the promise of a better world. The greatness that she once saw in America seems, sadly, almost unrecognizable now, especially in light of recent events that threaten to reverse the country’s progress on human rights. The struggle for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” continues to be just that—a struggle. Even so, I find strength in her enduring spirit and in her faith in the American dream. Our work toward its realization continues.

The Past, Present, and Future of the Peace Movement

No matter how the current situation in Ukraine evolves, the global peace movement faces new and increasingly difficult challenges in the years ahead. A renewed arms race had already begun, with nations ramping up military spending in order to defend themselves against the delusional ambitions of madmen. The high costs of weapons manufacturing and troop readiness, including renewed calls for nuclear capability, will further jeopardize spending in other areas such as refugee resettlement, education expansion, infrastructure development, agricultural growth, medical research, support for the arts, and climate change responses, just to name a few. These aren’t just “peacetime” activities; they are essential to improving the quality of life around the globe and preventing the sorts of stress and anxiety that authoritarians exploit for their own selfish and irrational purposes. Welfare or warfare: the ideal civilization can’t cry poverty in response to one while signing blank checks for the other.

Studio Portrait of Jan Bloch given to Alfred Fried

None of this is new to us. In addition to the ghastly toll in human lives and livelihoods, the economic devastation that armed conflict requires in terms of preparation, engagement, and reconstruction renders it a catastrophe for the winners as well as the losers. The Polish railroad industrialist Jan Bloch confirmed this hypothesis in his six-volume, data-filled treatise The War of the Future in its Technical, Economic and Political Relations (Budushchaya voina i yeyo ekonomicheskie posledstviya). Published just before the end of the 19th Century, peacemakers around the globe (and even a few political leaders, including Tsar Nicholas II of Russia) embraced the book as proof that a brighter future, one not overshadowed by the constant threat of war, lay ahead in the 20th century. The book’s influence energized efforts to convene the momentous 1899 Peace Conference in the Hague.

Bertha von Suttner, one of the most notable organizers and attendees at that conference, had already anticipated Bloch’s positivist philosophy in her earlier book The Machine Age (Das Maschinenzeitalter). Originally published under the pseudonym “Jemand,” (meaning “someone” or “anyone,” since she knew that few readers of the time would pay much attention to a woman writing about such serious topics), Bertha imagined a speaker in the future reflecting on the past—reflecting on her present, in other words. “Oh, the bad old days!” she sets out in the introduction, though she saw much to appreciate and celebrate in 1887, particularly in the ways that science was supplanting superstition. In a last-minute revision to the book’s first edition, Bertha inserted news of the 19th Century’s burgeoning peace movement, about which she had just learned in the salons of Paris. Spoiler alert: She would soon thereafter become one of that international movement’s most prominent leaders.  

The Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands

As a promoter of peace, Bertha did much more than provide simplistic platitudes or meme-worthy quotes in her numerous essays, books, speeches, and articles. She founded and sustained numerous peace societies throughout Europe. With her many allies, she proposed a confederation of nations (much like the League of Nations, the UN, and later the EU) that would help bring peoples together rather than distance them from one another. Likewise, she was one of the leading proponents of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Justice (previously the Permanent Court of Arbitration), which currently resides in the Peace Palace, built in the Hague by Andrew Carnegie at the request of Bertha and her contemporaries. These tangible accomplishments not only earned her the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905; they had guided Alfred Nobel in outlining the basic prerequisites for that award.

International courts have become crucial players during the crisis in Ukraine, particularly as they determine when, where, and by whom various human-rights abuses and war crimes have been committed. Sadly, however, justice only prevails when all parties agree to abide by established law. Although it is a signatory member of the Court of Justice, Russia—along with the United States, it should be noted—claims exceptionalism and refuses to be bound by its jurisdiction. Declarations of being “above the law” or “beyond prosecution” (or, in the economic context, “too big to fail”) only serve to embolden dictators and authoritarian regimes. When warmongers aren’t held accountable for their actions, the prospects for a more peaceable and civilized world diminish for all of us.

The third edition of The Machine Age

We stand at a moment in history when we risk falling back into “the bad old days” of the past, pouring money into the coffers of the military-industrial complex while mass-producing coffins for the many innocent victims of armed conflict. Coordinated economic sanctions have proven to be somewhat effective as a form of punishment, if not as a deterrent, but it remains to be seen how they might affect the global balance of power in the long run. Meanwhile, demands for vengeance and violent retribution ring out loudly alongside pleas for justice and peaceful resolution. As a consequence, we risk compromising our investment in human rights and freedoms around the globe. 

It’s tempting to imagine ourselves, as Bertha did, looking back on these days from ten or twenty years in the future and seeing hopeful promises fulfilled. The dark fog of war, however, obscures any clear view into the weeks, days, and even hours ahead of us. It steals the future and stains the present. No matter how the situation in Ukraine plays out, we must, as citizens of the world, strengthen our commitment to establishing and maintaining peace whenever and wherever possible, and most especially in the here and now. This may come at a greater cost than ever before, both at home and abroad, but the losses we suffer in the future will be far greater if we succumb to the warlike ways of the past.

On Book-Banning

The news of escalating tensions in Europe continues to be dispiriting.

Likewise, debates over book-banning (such as recent U.S. school districts banning books on slavery, gay/lesbian culture, and the Holocaust, among other topics) and authoritarian attempts to rewrite history (such as Vladimir Putin’s efforts to distort and deny Ukraine’s independence) continue to challenge our attempts to see the past clearly and navigate a rational and fact-based path into a more peaceful and prosperous future.

This, too, is not new.

Here’s a quote from Bertha von Suttner’s 1887 book Das Maschinenalter (later renamed Das Maschinenzeitalter, which roughly translates into The Machine Age, though no English translation of the book currently exists), in which she imagined speaking about her present (the 19th century) from a vantage point in the future (the 20th century). She originally published the book anonymously, knowing all too well that a philosophy book written by a woman would not, at that time, be taken seriously.

The Fuse for the Powder-Keg

Like many around the world, I’ve been holding my breath as I monitor the news and worry, more than ever before in my lifetime, that the western world is hurtling toward all-out war with Russia over Ukraine. While NATO leaders struggle to keep diplomatic lines open in the hopes of finding peaceful paths forward, Vladimir Putin seems intent on finding some justification, even a manufactured provocation, for the invasion and overthrow of an independent neighboring country.

The world has been here before, and it ended horribly. 

A political cartoon from the German newspaper Lustige Blatter depicts Bertha von Suttner trying to coax Mars, the god of war, down from his pedestal.

In March of 1914, just three months before her death and the outbreak of World War I, Bertha von Suttner wrote, “It is a sinister and disgraceful activity that currently dominates international politics and journalism. Nothing but mutual suspicions, accusations, agitation. Well, that is an adequate chorus for the proliferating cannons, the airplanes that test-drop bombs, and for war ministries that always demand more.” 

Just a month later, Bertha wrote, “The all-sided suggestion of the (not a) coming world war does not want to stop. At present—in view of the official peace declarations of the Russian politicians about the Russian danger —it has become quiet; on the other hand, Romania is put up as the latest spectre of terror. … This is now the subject of long and broad discussion; once again a welcome fuse has been found for the European powder keg that is longing for explosion.”

Passages such as these haunt me as I continue work on a new revision of Peace at Last. I am also reminded of a recollection by the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, who wrote in his memoir The World of Yesterday of an encounter with Bertha in May of 1913:

Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig

“Next day I happened to meet Bertha von Suttner, the generous and magnificent Cassandra of our times. An aristocrat from one of the first families in the land, in her early youth she had seen the horrors of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 come close to their hereditary castle in Bohemia. With the passion of a Florence Nightingale, she saw only one task in life for herself—preventing a second war, preventing war in general. She wrote a novel entitled Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!), which was an international success; she organized countless pacifist meetings, and the great triumph of her life was that she aroused the conscience of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite. He was induced to make up for the damage his invention had caused by setting up the Nobel Peace Prize to foster international understanding. She came toward me in a state of great agitation. ‘People don’t realize what’s going on,’ she cried out loud in the street, although she usually spoke in quiet, kindly, and composed tones. War was so close, and they were hiding everything from us and keeping it secret as usual. ‘Why don’t you young people do something? It’s more your business than anyone’s! Resist! Close ranks! Don’t keep leaving everything up to a few old women like us. No one listens to us!’

“I told her that I was going to Paris, and perhaps we could try to draw up a joint manifesto there.

“‘Why perhaps?’ she urged me. ‘Things look worse than ever. The wheels have begun turning.’ Uneasy as I was myself, I had difficulty in calming her down.”

Life on Earth has changed dramatically over the course of COVID pandemic. To burden humanity with a world war of any size at this time, especially as climate change continues to alter ecosystems around the globe, would prove disastrous. Our hopes and dreams for the future have already been compromised; the costs and consequences of war might reduce them to impossible fantasies.   

“Whenever, in conversation with younger friends, I mention something that happened to me before the First World War,” wrote Zweig during the Second World War, “their startled questions make me realize how much of what I still take for granted as reality has become either past history or unimaginable to them. And a lurking instinct in me says that they are right; all the bridges are broken between today, yesterday, and the day before yesterday.”

I remain hopeful that somehow we will find a peaceful way to preserve such bridges between past and present, present and future.

SOURCES:
The background image at the top is a still from the 1914 Danish film version of Lay Down Your Arms!, shown globally, about which I will write more in the months ahead.
Brinker-Gabeler, Gisela, ed. Kämpferin für den Frieden: Bertha von Suttner. Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1982. Pages 167–168.
Zweig, Stefan. The World of Yesterday, translated by Althea Bell, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, Nebraska, 2013. Original title Die Welt von Gestern, Williams Verlag, Zurich, 1942. Pages xiii and 231–232.

A New Perspective

This past summer I attended the German school at Middlebury College as a Kathryn Wasserman Davis Peace Fellow. In keeping with the program’s complete immersion philosophy, I spoke, wrote, and read nearly everything in German for seven weeks. Classes in grammar, culture, and literature broadened my knowledge of the language in both content and context. Extracurricular activities enriched my understanding of Germanic history, philosophy, film, and music. My goal throughout was straightforward: to strengthen my ability to read historical research materials by and about Bertha von Suttner in the original language and, when necessary, render a satisfactory English translation. It should come as no surprise that one of my final projects was a ten-minute presentation (auf Deutsch) about Bertha’s life and achievements. 

It should also come as no surprise that I’ve returned to Peace at Last and its related projects with new ideas and perspectives. Now, I’m not much of a fan of “writers writing about writing,” as it too often veers into simplistic instruction or mystical self-aggrandizement. I’ve been doing this long enough to appreciate the varying needs and strategies of individual writers and individual projects. I’ve also learned to distinguish between writing and publishing and, further, to try to keep those two worlds apart for as long as possible when undertaking a project. 

My initial inspiration for Peace at Last inextricably linked Alfred Nobel and Bertha von Suttner, and I felt strongly that their stories, at least in the overarching context of the establishment of the Peace Prize, could not and should not be told apart from one another. That resulted in a “first final” draft approaching 500,000 words, which, according to friends who are agents or editors, was an absolute non-starter for publication. I’ve since cut the manuscript in half, and from there continued to chop away whole sections and chapters. Spoiler alert: the two stand-alone excerpts that have already been published (“Koppargruva” and “The Iron Tower”) no longer appear as complete chapters in the current manuscript.

Having spent a summer away from that manuscript, I approached the ongoing revision process with renewed energy and confidence. As a result, I’ve split the manuscript in two once again. As things now stand, Bertha and Alfred have their own separate books. To justify that drastic change, I had to be sure that each of the two resulting novels would have its own, distinct narrative arc while preserving the idealistic spirit that motivated both characters. In other words, the two books couldn’t simply tell the same story from two different points of view. Bertha’s bold and persistent optimism in a male-dominated society, even within the pacifist movement, interested me from the start, and so I’ve chosen to focus on her book first and will continue to use the provisional title Peace at Last. Alfred’s book will likely focus on his internal battles with chronic melancholia, lifelong “bachelorhood,” and guilt over his younger brother’s death.

“There will always be conflict, but I’ll remind you that love, kindness, and support are also part of human nature. My challenge to you is to bring about a mindset of preparing for peace instead of preparing for war.”

– Kathryn Wasserman Davis

I’ll continue to write and post here about both Alfred and Bertha, but for the weeks and months ahead, Bertha will be my primary focus. I look forward to sharing new insights and ideas about her and her work, particularly as they relate to events unfolding around the world today. Kathryn Wasserman Davis challenged her namesake scholars to “bring about a mindset of preparing for peace instead of preparing for war.” I remain hopeful that my continuing work on Peace at Last will meet that challenge.

“Wealthy Gentleman Seeks Mature Lady”

For over a century, biographers of both Alfred Nobel and Bertha von Suttner have searched far and wide for the initial catalyst that drew them together: his newspaper advertisement in a Viennese newspaper for a secretary/housekeeper at his home in Paris. The only available clue for historians was Bertha’s account of the job posting in her memoirs: “A very wealthy, cultured, elderly gentleman, living in Paris, desires to find a lady also of mature years, familiar with languages, as secretary and manager of his household.”

At the time of the advertisement’s publication, Bertha’s secret affair with Artur Suttner, the son of her employer, had just been discovered by his disapproving parents. Having been asked to relinquish her position as governess to Arthur’s younger sisters, the job posting provided a rare opportunity for a woman of her talents. It would also keep Bertha and Artur far apart, which would have pleased his parents immensely.

A few years ago, I sat down for coffee at the Nobelmuseet in Stockholm with curator Ulf Larsson, whose fascinating book Alfred Nobel: Networks of Innovation provides a wealth of information and images from an exhibit of the same name. When I asked him about the sought-after advertisement, he replied that someone might have found it after all, but that it remained both unverified and inconclusive. Most scholars agreed that it had probably appeared in the Neue Freie Presse, but searches through that paper’s archives (my own included) had turned up nothing. Having unsuccessfully chased down many such ambiguous leads during my own research, I moved on to other topics.

My recent conversations with peace studies scholar Peter van den Dungen reignited my curiosity about this purported secretarial advertisement. In 2019, the Swedish journalist Ingrid Carlberg published a new biography of Alfred Nobel, Nobel: Den gåtfulle Alfred, hans värld och hans priser (Nobel: The Enigmatic Alfred, His World and His Prizes). The book features new and in-depth research from her travels across multiple countries. Over the course of several pages, she documents her own unsuccessful efforts to find the advertisement that Bertha had described. By process of elimination, however, she settles instead on something from the Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt more closely resembling a personal ad: “A wealthy elderly gentleman in need of spiritual stimulation seeks acquaintance with an educated beautiful girl or widow, whom he is willing to support with advice and deeds. A marriage may not be excluded. Reply under ‘Good luck’” Carlberg concludes, “This ad is more likely than the one Bertha von Suttner reproduced. … So while awaiting the critical review that is the basis of all truth-seeking activity, not just science, I venture the claim that (this) ad may actually be the right one.”

This ad, on an intuitive level at least, didn’t sound to me at all like Alfred. Likewise, it didn’t sound like anything that Bertha might have considered worthy of a response. She was madly in love with Artur and had demonstrated on numerous past occasions a strong and stubborn sense of self in matters of the heart. What she wanted was work, not romance.

Knowing that the world’s information databases have been growing almost exponentially day by day, I decided to hop down the proverbial rabbit hole once again. I reconnected with Ulf Larsson and reminded him of our conversation years ago. In his reply, he sent along a digital file of what might—or might not—be the advertisement in question. “A historian in Oslo received it from someone in Sweden some 15 years ago,” he wrote, “but no one remembers the source anymore. So I am not sure which newspaper it was and have not been able to check it.”

Here is the transcription of the German ad followed by a translation into English:

Gesuch.
Vermögender, hoch gebildeter äl-
terer Herr, in Paris wohnhaf,
such, wegen Anstellung einer
Sekretärin-Hausvorsteherin,
mit einer sprachkundigen Dame
im reifen Alter Kontakt.

Request.
Wealthy, well-educated elderly gentleman, living in Paris, seeks contact with a language-proficient lady of mature age for employment as a secretary-head of household.

[NOTE: While the original advertisement contains two errors (wohnhaf should be wohnhaft, and such should be sucht), my friend and professional translator Patricia Paige-Pfennig notes that the composition of the ad demonstrates a high level of sophistication and linguistic accuracy. Because of that, she believes that the errors are, in fact, typos. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Alfred purposefully introduced the errors himself in the hopes that any successful applicant would be both bold and confident enough to point them out. I once worked for someone who did things like that all the time. That, to me, sounds a lot more like Alfred than the ad mentioned by Carlberg above!]

This advertisement matches Bertha’s description so accurately that at first I worried someone had mocked it up as an illustration. This had been done previously with the apocryphal newspaper headline “The Merchant of Death is Dead,” a premature death announcement claimed by many biographical sources to have motivated Alfred to establish the Peace Prize.

Equipped with this physical specimen, however, the task of locating the original source—and thereby providing proper authentication—became much easier. Diving back into Vienna’s newspaper archives, I found that the style of the post matches the typeface and set-up of classified advertisements in the popular newspaper, Neues Wiener Tagblatt. It most likely appeared within the “Kleine Anzeigen” (small advertisements) section under the category “Dienst und Arbeit” (Services and Work). The number in the lower-right-hand corner also matches the newspaper’s tracking system for similar postings.

Via his own independent path of inquiry, Peter van den Dungen had come to some of the same conclusions. As with proper scientific experimentation, we were able to produce the same results under different conditions, thereby moving closer and closer toward proving a hypothesis and providing final authentication.

Unfortunately, as of this writing, the online archives for Neues Wiener Tagblatt are incomplete. Fearing that the issues I’ve been searching for had been lost or destroyed, I contacted the research department at the Oesterreichische Nationalbibliothek. A few days later, librarian Daniela Köck responded that the particular volumes I was seeking had simply been overlooked in the digitization process. In fact, she now had the physical copies right there on her desk for my perusal and would request that they be scanned and properly archived.

I’m eager to complete this last step of authentication so that historians (and historical novelists such as myself) will at last have a more definitive time line for these important initial interactions between Alfred and Bertha. If only we could find the letters that she and he exchanged between Vienna and Paris as a result of this ad… For now at least, fiction (or, as some might call it, narrative nonfiction) will have to suffice to bridge the remaining gaps in their stories.

In Search of a Photograph

In 1912, at the age of sixty-nine and seven years after she became the first woman awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, Bertha von Suttner traveled across the Atlantic Ocean for her second speaking tour of the United States. Such a voyage by ship would have been perilous enough for a woman of her age and faltering health, but news of the sinking of the Titanic, a tragedy in which 1,500 passengers died in the icy waters just a month earlier, would have surely added to her anxiety. 

Countless reports in newspapers large and small documented her months-long journey from New York City to San Francisco and back again. Thousands packed into the Chautauqua, New York, amphitheater to hear her speak. At smaller venues in smaller towns, Bertha met with groups of mostly women for luncheons and local presentations. Along the way, she was also invited to spend some time on a golf course with U.S. President William Howard Taft, who confided to her that on the matter of world peace, “We share the same platform.”  

Bertha’s U.S. tour sets the stage for the above photograph, an image of her that (I thought) I had never seen before. As good fortune would have it, an historical archive was offering the physical 8×10 print for a relatively small price—relative, at least, to the hundreds of dollars charged per use for digitized versions of similar photographs at major stock companies such as Getty and Alamy. The seller included a scan of the back of the photograph, which showed that it had once belonged to the Pacific Bureau of the Newspaper Enterprise Association (N.E.A.).

I shared this information with the international peace studies scholar Peter van den Dungen, who promptly replied that the image appeared to be a detail from a photo originally used in Gisela Brinker-Gabler’s 1982 biography, Bertha von Suttner: Kämpferin für den Frieden (page 104). That grainy reproduction shows up in several later publications, but the image I have (yes, reader, I purchased it!) is significantly clearer and includes only Bertha’s face in the frame. 

Based on Peter’s information, I was able to locate the photo he had described as it originally appeared. It accompanied a newspaper article about a reception Bertha attended on June 28, 1912, in San Francisco with Phoebe Hearst, the mother of media mogul William Randolph Hearst. With this much clearer image at hand, I could detect slight differences suggesting that I had acquired a completely different photograph, one taken moments before or after the group shot.

It’s worth noting that the photograph I have is not just a reprinted version of a scanned image. It’s an historical artifact, complete with markings and imperfections that reveal both its age and original usage. White ink outlines Bertha’s head, a common practice in newspapers of that time to remove distracting backgrounds. The photo retoucher also used darker ink to highlight Bertha’s eyebrows, eyes, and mouth, adding the contrast necessary to ensure a sharper image in print. Think of it as primitive Photoshopping. In addition, the image appears to be “flopped,” turned on its vertical axis so that Bertha looks to the left instead of the right. In preparing a final image for sharing, I have employed a few photo-editing tricks of my own to repair and restore the image. (Please contact me directly if you would like a higher-resolution digital file of the final enhanced image.)

After several days of searching through newspaper archives, I finally found the altered version of Bertha’s image alongside the newspaper story below. Apparently, the story and the image were sent to multiple Scripps-McRae-owned newspapers, as many subscribed to content-providing services such as the Newspaper Enterprise Association. 

“Through the voice of women will come international peace,” Bertha proclaimed in a speech given just days after this photograph was taken. I’m honored to amplify that voice once more in our own militaristic times, and to do so alongside this newly discovered photograph of her.

On the 75th Anniversary of the United Nations

Today the world celebrates the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, an international alliance forged in the crucible of World War II to prevent future military cataclysms. The preamble to the UN Charter lists four guiding aspirations:

• to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war, which twice in our lifetime has brought untold sorrow to mankind
• to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small
• to establish conditions under which justice and respect for the obligations arising from treaties and other sources of international law can be maintained
• to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom

President Harry Truman watches as U.S. delegate Edward R. Stettinius signs the UN Charter

The United Nations succeeded the League of Nations, formed after the first World War in 1920. Though U.S. President Woodrow Wilson would receive a Nobel Peace Prize for his fundamental role in developing the league, the United States never joined as an official member. During the second World War, U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill envisioned a stronger global organization and developed the Atlantic Charter, the seed from which the UN Charter sprang. Years later, the Nobel Peace Prize committee first acknowledged the role of the UN by honoring Ralph Bunche, a U.S. diplomat who helped bring about peace in the Middle East after the original negotiator was killed by extremists. Bunche was also the first person of color to become a Peace Prize laureate.

Interestingly, Woodrow Wilson and Bertha von Suttner spent some time together at Skibo, the luxurious Scottish castle owned by the American pacifist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie. Woodrow was then president of Princeton University; Bertha had hopes of convincing Carnegie to become her new patron after the death of Alfred Nobel some years earlier. It’s not hard to imagine Bertha bending Woodrow’s ear about peace during the long carriage ride from the train station to Carnegie’s countryside estate. In fact, their signatures appear, one atop the other, in Skibo’s guest registry.

At the Fourth World’s Peace Congress in Bern, Switzerland, in 1892, Bertha had co-sponsored a proposal concerning “the formation of a confederation of states on the basis of the solidarity of their interests.” She and her co-signers invited “all the societies in the world, especially at the time of political elections, to draw attention to the necessity of a permanent congress of nations, to which every international question should be submitted, so that every conflict may be settled by law and not by force.” Their vision would eventually be realized not only in the League of Nations and the United Nations but also in the establishment of the International Criminal Court and the International Court of Arbitration. These latter organizations are both housed in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands, a grand building funded in large part by Carnegie at the request of Suttner and her pacifist colleagues.

The Peace Palace in The Hague, the Netherlands

All of the efforts noted above evolved from centuries of philosophical inquiry, most notably, perhaps, from the written works of Hugo Grotius and Immanuel Kant. They also stand as a testament to the value of shared knowledge, received and transmitted through time. Imagine how our world leaders today might fulfill the goals of the U.N. charter if they educated themselves more deeply in the history and philosophy of pacifism. Such inquiries can inspire us all as we work together toward a more peaceful coexistence around the globe.

BONUS: Hear Sir Laurence Olivier read aloud the preamble to the UN Charter.

The Ignoble Nominees

Replicas of the Nobel Peace Prize inside the Nobelinstitutt building in Oslo, Norway.

This year, the Norwegian Nobel Prize Committee reports that they have received 318 valid nominations for the 2020 Nobel Peace Prize. Per the committee’s standing rules, they will not publicly confirm, identify, or discuss any of these candidates for fifty years, a guideline that they likewise expect the wide range of nominating officials to honor. These stipulations, as well as details of the decision-making process itself, are clearly spelled out on the agency’s Web site. Even so, whenever the annual awards season nears, various parties begin to boast about their nominations and declaim the likelihood, pro or con, of their becoming one of the distinguished laureates. The prize itself becomes a political tool, an opportunity to promote self over society in ways that run counter to Nobel’s core ideals.

When Nobel envisioned the peace prize in his last will and testament, he established three criteria directly linked to the ongoing work of Bertha von Suttner and her contemporary pacifists: “fraternity between nations,” “the abolition and reduction of standing armies,” and “the holding and promotion of peace congresses.” Future Nobel wannabes can quickly estimate their eligibility by evaluating their own efforts toward these three goals. Not surprisingly, perhaps, many who outwardly crave such a high honor are often among the least deserving. Any male U.S. politician who brags about developing new weapons of mass destruction, for example, might just as well campaign for the title of highest-scoring female South American soccer star. Such behavior not only demonstrates both disregard and disrespect for Nobel’s clearly stated wishes; it demeans the efforts of legitimate peacemakers around the globe.

The Peace Prize decision-making process. Nominations must be made by February 1.

Still, critics continue to point out that none of the five Nobel awards has avoided controversy of some sort during their history. The achievements of female scientists, such as Marie Curie, have long been shadowed by male counterparts; theories based on racist assumptions, such as eugenics, have been discredited over time. Likewise, some peace prize laureates, despite showing good faith and promise in their initial peacemaking efforts, eventually failed in their efforts or fell back upon more violent solutions in response to events around them. One recent article by Graeme Wood in The Atlantic suggested that, because of this, the world should abandon the peace prize altogether, though this seems akin to shutting down an entire university after one or two scholarship recipients courted scandal after graduation, a common enough occurrence.

Most people around the world continue to anticipate the annual announcements of the Nobel awards as opportunities to restore our faith in humanity, especially in dark and dire times such as these. We look forward to hearing about new discoveries and initiatives in various fields that might, as Nobel envisioned, “confer the greatest benefit on mankind.” We reject nihilism and, instead, embrace the idealism of young peacemakers, such as Malala Yousafzi and Nadia Murad, whose enduring optimism helped them transform personal trauma into societal progress.

Personally, I welcome the announcement of a surprise laureate, someone who has toiled until now in relative silence and obscurity. The world stands ready to receive these new heroes, peace pioneers who inspire hope and progress and don’t tempt us down the dark path to cynicism. As historian Burton Feldman reflects in his book The Nobel Prize: A History of Genius, Controversy, and Prestige: “The peace movement is dedicated to the greater good, not private glory.” The more pompous Nobel wannabes of the world would do well to remember that. 

(The charts above appear on the Web site of the Nobel Prize Organization, which you are encouraged to visit by clicking here.)