Baroness Bertha Sophie Felicitas von Suttner was an Austrian noblewoman, pacifist, and novelist. She was born on June 9, 1843, and died on June 21, 1914. Originally named Countess Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau, she became the second woman to win a Nobel Prize in 1905, following Marie Curie, who won in 1903. This made her the first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize and the first Austrian to be honored with a Nobel Prize.

Early life

Bertha Kinský was born on June 9, 1843, at Kinský Palace in the Obecní dvůr district of Prague. Her father was Franz Michael de Paula Josef Graf Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau, an Austrian lieutenant general who died in 1843 when Bertha was not yet born. Her mother was Sophie Wilhelmine von Körner, who was born in 1815 and was more than 45 years younger than her husband.

Bertha’s father belonged to the ancient and respected House of Kinsky, a family descended from Count Wilhelm Kinsky. He was the younger son of Count Franz Ferdinand Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau and Princess Maria Christina Anna von und zu Liechtenstein, who was the youngest but one daughter of Prince Emanuel of Liechtenstein. Bertha’s mother came from a family with noble status, though not as high as her husband’s. Her mother was the daughter of Joseph von Körner, a cavalry captain in the Habsburg Imperial Army, and was a distant relative of the poet Theodor Körner. Through her mother, Bertha was also related to Theodor Körner, Edler von Siegringen, a great-nephew of the poet who later became the 4th President of Austria.

Bertha faced challenges in being accepted by the Austrian high nobility because of her mixed heritage. Only those with a pure aristocratic family line going back to their great-great-grandparents were allowed to present themselves at the imperial court. Her father, as a third son, did not inherit large estates or wealth, which further limited her opportunities. Bertha was baptized at Prague’s Church of Our Lady of the Snows, a location less commonly chosen by the aristocracy.

Soon after Bertha’s birth, her mother moved to Brno to live 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 age six and had little contact with the family afterward. In 1855, Bertha’s maternal aunt Charlotte (Lotte) Büschel, née von Körner, and her daughter Elvira joined the household. Elvira’s father had been a private scholar, and after his death, her official guardian became Count Johann Carl August von Huyn. Elvira was about the same age as Bertha and introduced her to literature and philosophy. Bertha also studied French, Italian, and English as a teenager with private tutors. She became skilled in playing the piano and singing.

Bertha’s mother and aunt believed they had special abilities and traveled to Wiesbaden in the summer of 1856 to gamble, hoping to gain wealth. However, they lost so much money they had to move to Vienna. During this trip, Bertha received a marriage proposal from Prince Philipp zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Berleburg, a third son of a noble family, but the proposal was declined because Bertha was too young. The family returned to Wiesbaden in 1859 but faced similar financial difficulties, forcing them to move to a small property in Klosterneuburg. Shortly after, Bertha wrote her first published work, the novella Erdenträume im Monde, which appeared in Die Deutsche Frau.

Due to ongoing financial struggles, Bertha briefly became engaged to Gustav, Baron Heine von Geldern, a wealthy man 31 years her senior and a member of the banking Heine family. However, she later rejected him because she found him unattractive. Her memoirs describe her strong dislike of the situation.

In 1864, the family spent the summer in Bad Homburg, a popular gambling destination for aristocrats. Bertha met Ekaterine Dadiani, a Georgian aristocrat and princess, and also met Tsar Alexander II, to whom she was very distantly related. Seeking a career as an opera singer instead of marrying for money, Bertha trained intensively, practicing her voice for over four hours daily. She studied with notable teachers such as Gilbert Duprez in Paris in 1867 and Pauline Viardot in Baden-Baden in 1868. However, she never secured a professional singing role due to stage fright and difficulty projecting her voice.

In the summer of 1872, Bertha became engaged to Prince Adolf Karl Franz zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein, the fifth son of a noble family. However, Prince Adolf died at sea in October of that year while traveling to America to escape his debts.

Tutor in the Suttner household, life in Georgia

In 1866, Landgrave Fürstenberg (Bertha's guardian) and Elvira died. Bertha, now 23 years old, felt more restricted because of her mother's unusual behavior and the family's financial problems.

In 1873, she became a tutor for Karl Gundaccar Freiherr von Suttner and his wife, Karola Knolz. They had seven children, including four girls aged 15 to 20. The Suttner family lived in Vienna's Innere Stadt for three seasons and spent summers at Castle Harmannsdorf in Lower Austria, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time.

Bertha became a companion to the four girls and formed a close relationship with them. The girls called her "Boulotte" because of her size. Later, she used "B. Oulot" as a pseudonym for her writing.

She fell in love with the youngest son, Baron Arthur Gundaccar von Suttner, who was seven years younger. They planned to marry, but Arthur's parents did not approve. In 1876, with her employers' support, Bertha responded to a newspaper ad and briefly worked as a secretary and housekeeper for Alfred Nobel in Paris. During her short time there, she and Nobel became friends, and he may have shown romantic interest. However, she stayed committed to Arthur and returned to Vienna to marry him secretly in the church of St. Aegyd in Gumpendorf. As a result, Arthur was cut off from his family's inheritance.

The newlywed couple ran away to Mingrelia in western Georgia, part of the Russian Empire near the Black Sea. Bertha hoped to use her connection with the Dadiani family and Ekaterine, who had invited her before. Upon arrival, they were welcomed by Prince Niko. They settled in Kutaisi, where they taught languages and music to local aristocrats' children. Despite their connections, they faced many hardships, living in a small three-room wooden house. Their situation worsened in 1877 when the Russo-Turkish War began. Arthur worked as a reporter for the Neue Freie Presse, and Bertha wrote for Austrian newspapers and worked on her early novels, including Es Löwos, which was a romanticized version of her life with Arthur. After the war, Arthur tried to start a timber business, but it failed.

Arthur and Bertha von Suttner

Arthur and Bertha von Suttner faced challenges in Georgia because they were poor and not part of high society. They could not speak Mingrelian or Georgian fluently, which limited their interactions. To earn money, both began writing. Arthur focused on local themes in his work, while Bertha’s writing was not strongly influenced by Georgian culture.

In August 1882, Ekaterine Dadiani died. Soon after, the couple left Mingrelia and moved to Tbilisi. There, Arthur worked in accounting, construction, and wallpaper design, while Bertha focused on writing. She became a correspondent for the German writer Michael Georg Conrad and contributed an article titled "Truth and Lies" to his 1885 publication Die Gesellschaft. The article supported the naturalism of Émile Zola. Bertha’s first major political work, Inventarium einer Seele ("Inventory of the Soul"), was published in Leipzig in 1883. In this book, she argued that technological progress would lead to world peace, a view also shared by her friend Alfred Nobel, who believed stronger weapons might reduce conflicts.

In 1884, Bertha’s mother died, adding to the couple’s financial struggles. Arthur had become friends with a Georgian journalist known only as "M" and collaborated with him to translate the Georgian epic The Knight in the Panther Skin. Bertha improved M.’s literal translation from Georgian to French, while Arthur translated the French version into German. This process was slow, and they worked only a few hours each day. Arthur wrote articles about the project in Georgian newspapers, and Mihály Zichy created illustrations for the publication. However, M. did not pay as expected, and after the Bulgarian Crisis began in 1885, the couple felt unsafe in Georgia, where Austrians faced growing hostility due to Russian influence. They reunited with Arthur’s family and returned to Austria in May 1885, living at Harmannsdorf Castle in Lower Austria.

Bertha found comfort in her marriage to Arthur. She wrote that their relationship was her "peculiarly inalienable home," where she recorded both political events and personal moments in her diary. She described their shared joys, such as jokes, walks, reading, music, and chess games, as sources of strength. She believed that their bond protected them from life’s challenges.

Peace activism

After returning to Austria, Suttner continued her work as a journalist and focused on issues related to peace and war. She wrote letters to the French philosopher Ernest Renan and was influenced by the International Arbitration and Peace Association, which was started by Hodgson Pratt in 1880.

In 1889, Suttner became a key leader in the peace movement after publishing her pacifist novel, Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!). This book made her one of the most important figures in the Austrian peace movement. It was published in 37 editions and translated into 15 languages. She saw the creation of the Inter-Parliamentary Union and wrote an editorial in the Neue Freie Presse in 1891 calling for the Austrian pacifist group, the Gesellschaft der Friedensfreunde. Suttner became the chair of this group and also started the German Peace Society the next year. She was the editor of the international pacifist journal Die Waffen nieder! from 1892 to 1899. In 1897, she gave Emperor Franz Joseph I a list of signatures asking for an International Court of Justice. She also attended the First Hague Convention in 1899 with the help of Theodor Herzl, who paid for her trip as a reporter for the Zionist newspaper Die Welt.

After her husband died in 1902, Suttner sold Harmannsdorf Castle and moved back to Vienna. In 1904, she spoke at the International Congress of Women in Berlin and traveled for seven months in the United States, attending a peace congress in Boston and meeting President Theodore Roosevelt.

Though she only met Alfred Nobel briefly, she wrote to him until his death in 1896. It is believed that Suttner greatly influenced his decision to include a peace prize in his will. Bertha von Suttner received the Nobel Peace Prize on December 10, 1905. The award ceremony took place on April 18, 1906, in Kristiania, now called Oslo, Norway.

In 1907, Suttner was the only woman at the Second Hague Peace Conference, which focused on the laws of war. She criticized the conference and warned that war was coming. When she accepted her Nobel Prize a year earlier, she said: "Will Europe become a place of ruins and failure, or can we avoid this danger and move toward a peaceful future? The Second Hague Conference should discuss these bigger questions, not just the rules of war at sea or the bombing of cities."

Around this time, she met Anna Bernhardine Eckstein, another German peace advocate who influenced the Second Hague Conference. A year later, she attended the International Peace Congress in London, where she met Caroline Playne, an English anti-war activist who later wrote Suttner’s first biography.

Before World War I, Suttner continued to oppose the building of weapons. In 1911, she joined the advisory council of the Carnegie Peace Foundation. In her final months, while fighting cancer, she helped plan a peace conference to be held in September 1914. However, the conference never happened because she died of cancer on June 21, 1914. Seven days later, Franz Ferdinand, the heir to Austria’s throne, was killed, starting World War I.

Suttner’s belief in peace was shaped by the writings of Immanuel Kant, Henry Thomas Buckle, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin, and Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy praised Die Waffen nieder!). She saw peace as a natural state disrupted by war and militarism. She argued that the right to peace could be claimed under international law and was important in the context of Darwin’s ideas about history. A historian once described Suttner as "a most perceptive and adept political commentator."

Writing

To help her writing career and share her beliefs, she used her relationships with wealthy people, like Alfred Nobel, to meet leaders from around the world. She also gained attention for her books. To earn more money from her writing, she used a male name at the beginning of her career. She also worked as a journalist to share her ideas and promote her books, events, and causes.

As Tolstoy and others have noted, Suttner and Harriet Beecher Stowe had similar goals. Both women used their writing to share ideas, not just for entertainment or to push strong opinions. For Suttner, peace and treating all people with respect were her main goals.

Suttner also wrote about other topics, like religion and equal rights for men and women.

Two main religious issues she wrote about were the showy and grand parts of some religious practices and the idea that war is right if it is for God. She criticized the idea that leaders use religion to justify war, saying it makes the state more important than individuals. She believed dying in battle was not more meaningful than other ways of dying. Her book Lay Down Your Arms discusses these ideas.

This kind of thinking also leads to fighting over religious differences, which Suttner and her husband, Arthur, refused to accept. Arthur started the League Against Anti-Semitism to fight against violence against Jewish people in Europe. The Suttner family believed in accepting all people and all religions. Suttner wrote in her memoirs that "religion was neighborly love, not neighborly hatred." She believed hatred, whether against other nations or religions, hurt the kindness of humanity.

Suttner is often seen as a leader in the movement for women's rights.

She broke through barriers for women by writing and working as an activist. In a society where women were not encouraged to speak openly, she became a strong leader. However, she did not join the movement for women to vote because she did not have enough time. Instead, she worked with women in the peace movement and stayed connected to the suffrage movement. She took part in the 1904 "International Women's Conference" in Berlin. She believed that peace could only be achieved if men and women worked together and believed in equal rights for all genders. She wrote, "The tasks involved in mankind's continuing ennoblement are such that they can only be fulfilled through fair and equal cooperation between the sexes."

In Lay Down Your Arms, the main character, Martha, often argues with her father about gender roles. Martha does not want her son to play with toy soldiers or be taught to value war. Her father tries to push her into traditional female roles, saying her son will not need a woman’s approval and that she should marry again.

Suttner did not only believe in equality for women but also showed how sexism affects both men and women. For example, Martha is placed in a traditional female role, and another character, Tilling, is placed in a traditional male role. Tilling says, "We men have to repress the instinct of self-preservation. Soldiers have also to repress the compassion, the sympathy for the gigantic trouble which invades both friend and foe; for next to cowardice, what is most disgraceful to us is all sentimentality, all that is emotional."

Death

Bertha von Suttner died in Vienna on June 21, 1914, shortly before the start of the First World War. In 1907, she wrote in her will that after her death, her body should be moved to the German city of Gotha for cremation. She also requested that her urn, containing her ashes, remain in Gotha. Her ashes were placed in the local columbarium. The city of Gotha honors her memory by naming streets after her, including Bertha-von-Suttner-Platz and Bertha-von-Suttner-Straße.

Legacy

Suttner's work had a significant impact on people involved in the peace movement.

She has also been honored on several coins and stamps.

In 2025, the European Central Bank announced two themes for the future redesign of Euro banknotes: "European culture" and "Rivers and birds." They also announced that von Suttner had been chosen to appear on the obverse of 200 euro banknotes if the "European culture" theme is selected.