Karen Lee: Hi everyone, my name is Karen.
Natalie Alexander: And I’m Natalie, and welcome to The Next Page, the podcast of the UN Library and Archives Geneva!
Karen Lee: Today’s episode is a history one, but this time we look at a particular person from our past…
Natalie Alexander: yes! This episode is actually a companion to an online event we are holding today at the Library & Archives, as part of what we call the HiSTORIES series, where we dive into the League of Nations Archives and take time to learn about some of the issues, people and moments in our history that have shaped and are connected to our present.
And this latest event is about an extraordinary woman who many haven’t heard of: Bertha von Suttner.
Karen Lee: You’re right I did not know her…
Natalie Alexander: She was instrumental in the 19th century peace movement, and one of the speakers in the event joins us for this episode - Professor Hope Elizabeth May, she’s a professor of philosophy at Central Michigan University in the United States, and created the Bertha von Suttner project, that is uncovering more about her through current research and translations of her written works.
Karen Lee: Ah, so she was a writer?
Natalie Alexander: Yes, among other things as you’ll find out! This is an intro to the life of Bertha von Suttner. Hope you’ll find some inspiration to keep moving forward and serving others in some way with your own passions. Here we go.
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Natalie Alexander: Dr. Hope Elizabeth May, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Thank you for having me Natalie. It's an honor to speak with you.
Natalie Alexander: We're really excited to have you on the podcast. I would love to begin the conversation with a little bit more about yourself. You're a philosopher, you hold a PhD and a Juris. Doctor degree in law, you teach on a range of subjects, from ancient philosophy to peace, justice, human rights and more. Could you tell us a little bit more about yourself? How did you come to find yourself working in these fields? And why is this important to you?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Sure, so I began my serious academic work in philosophy, in ancient Greek philosophy. And philosophy can be very abstract, there's a lot of thought experiments, hypotheticals, and so forth, and I was always drawn to the applicability of philosophy. And so, I decided to go to law school after receiving my PhD.
And in law school, I took a class called International Law and Weapons of Mass Destruction and I would be remiss if I didn't note where we are chronologically; on Friday, January 22nd, 2021, a treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons will enter into force, I think that's a very historic and exciting treaty. And so, the class that I took was really focused on an opinion of the International Court of Justice, 25 years ago, on the legality of the threat or use of nuclear weapons.
I learned about the International Court of Justice and we talked about the International Criminal Court as well, and I just felt compelled to go to The Hague to look at the International Criminal Court. And there I learned about the Peace Palace. The peace movement of the 19th century and the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. None of this was taught to me in any of my formal education, and I was sort of shocked that I didn't know this story.
The Peace Palace is very important, and the story of the Peace Palace is very important to Bertha von Suttner. The Peace Palace is actually on a street called Carnegieplein, named after Andrew Carnegie, who gave the money to build the Peace Palace. But I was just sort of shocked that I didn't know these stories and I just did a deep dive into the history. And there's a book on the 1899 Hague Peace Conferences – an excellent book by Arthur Eyffinger – and there I learned about this woman, Bertha von Suttner, who was at the 1899 Hague Peace Conference and was doing a lot of work on the Peace Through Law movement beforehand. And so that got me interested in Bertha, but in terms of like my broader interests, I'm really interested in an area of philosophy called moral philosophy or ethical theory, and the ancient Greeks were very interested in what are called the “virtues.”
So, I'm just drawn to sort of value-oriented ideas, and of course the peace through law, movement, internationalism, etc. that's a really nice application of these ideas.
Natalie Alexander: Amazing and so you've launched straight in. We're talking today about a particular personality that you are researching as part of your work. It's the Austrian peace activist Bertha von Suttner. But even though your work is very much tied to her, many people may not know who she is. I, for sure did not know about Bertha before I joined to work at the UN Library & Archives in Geneva. So, for those who don't know her, could you share like a brief introduction, who was she and what did she stand for?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Right, so Bertha... I think you know the simplest thing that sort of draws people in is that she was the first woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and that was, in 1905. Point number two, she inspired Nobel to create the Peace Prize. So, Nobel created a number of prizes, but the Peace Prize is probably the most prestigious and well known. So, that's who she is. So, what is she doing that gets her this Peace Prize in 1905? You have to go back to her earlier life and basically what she did – and this is, I think Natalie, neither you nor I learned about her... and you know, I'm an American citizen, and I think that part of the reason is that a lot of our history education ignores things that happened before international history, before World War II. So, we don't really talk about World War I, and we absolutely don't talk about the peace movement before World War I, and so this is sort of left out of our formal education. But in any case, she is this activist, working on the peace through law movement that preceded World War I. So, you're at the United Nations Library in Geneva and of course, the United Nations is something that is created after World War I, and we sort of have this amnesia about these structures that were built before World War I, such as the Permanent Court of Arbitration and the Hague Peace conferences of the late 1800s.
But in any case, she's a peace activist and what that meant at the time... what does it mean to be a peace activist? It's very specific. It's “peace through law”, and that is the movement at the time was really focused on creating a new international court.
So again, I think it was just today I saw on the Facebook feed for the UN Geneva Library that you had something on the Permanent Court of International Justice, which was the court of the League of Nations – not the first international court, the Permanent Court of Arbitration, which is the result of this peace movement. And so, Bertha, who is she? She's working to create this new court and it was in fact created and she was there when it was created. And I want to say also that this court was created as the result of the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. But really, she started working on the movement 10 years before that. So, she writes a book in 1889 called Die Waffen nieder! which is German for “lay down your arms” and that book really catapults her into the sort of leadership of the Peace Through Law movement.
And so, 10 years later when states were meeting to organize the world – and by the way, that was a phrase of the movement, “organize the world”, that the world is just not organized to have a process other than armed conflict for states to solve their disputes. So, we need to organize the world that begins with creating this court. And so, she had been working on that and in 1899 it happens, she's there, and away we go.
Natalie Alexander: Amazing, so working on this event with you at the Library and kind of digging into some of the archives and what she's been a part of with our colleagues... I mean, it's kind of mind blowing the amount of things she was doing in one lifetime. She was an author you mentioned, she wrote the bestselling novel Lay Down Your Arms, as well as several other books, and actively contributed to the peace movement. Could you maybe walk us through just a few major contributions or accomplishments and what they meant for the world at that point in time, just to kind of give us an understanding of her work in these decades that you refer to?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Right, so she learns about the Peace Movement really in mid-life, and right after learning about that, she writes this, this book Die Waffen nieder! in 1889.
And that book, as I said, sort of propels her into the leadership of the Peace Through Law movement. So, she begins to attend these International Peace Conferences and also the Inter-parliamentary Union, which had been created in the 1890s, I believe. She starts to attend those meetings, and she starts to network with parliamentarians and what we would now call, NGO activists. In 1891, she founds the Austrian Peace Society. So, she organizes the Austrian Peace society – she's the president of it, it has thousands of members. So that's 1891, and again, this is all before the 1899 Hague Peace Conference.
Another amazing thing that she does is, right before the 1899 Hague Peace Conference – and the 1899 Hague Peace Conference was called by Czar Nicholas II, and in 1898, you start to see the sort of vision that Czar Nicholas is laying out for this conference, and his foreign minister, Count Mikhail Nikolayevich Muravyov is publishing these calls and announcements that there's going to be this meeting. And I think it's so amazing that in 1898, Count Muravyov meets with Bertha von Suttner – they have a meeting in Vienna.
So, it's like the foreign Minister Russia meeting with this woman who by that time is clearly a mover and shaker in the Peace Movement... her book was well known by that time. The 1899 Hague Peace Conference happens, as I said, it establishes the Permanent Court of Arbitration which still exists to this day. It's housed in the Peace Palace, the Peace Palace was built for that court. So, it's 1899, she wins the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905.
And she just does a lot of speaking and in the United States, she comes in 1912 and does this tour and she realizes that she's getting old... that's kind of like her last tour and then she dies in 1914, just prior to World War I.
So, that's sort of like a timeline of her life. The way that she learns about the Peace Movement... she learns about it mid-life, in her 40s. She stumbles upon it, like many of us do with things, she stumbles upon it and she feels she has to do something. And you know, a lot of us have this sense when we hear something, like we hear a travesty of justice, we’re outraged. Well, in this case she hears about a movement and she feels compelled to do something to help it.
And what can she do? She can write! And so that's why she writes Die Waffen nieder! It's like her contribution to this thing that already exists. But what she says repeatedly is that she writes this, and then she becomes a peace activist. She's not a peace activist and writes Die Waffen nieder! She writes Die Waffen nieder! and then becomes a peace activist, and she uses the language of being “swept up” into the movement, she starts to go to these congresses, and she starts to meet these people.
And I think many of us know what this is like, who work on the international community, right? There's a lot of people doing things we get swept up, all these networking and she just gets swept up. But she's a writer, she's not a pacifist. She's a writer and she's writing like philosophical novels, and she stops that because she really can't. And so, she becomes a full-blown peace activist and tries to make a living out of it. She was compelled. It's not like she had to do this – this was her whole being and she speaks that way in her memoirs.
And I think we all have a sense of what that must be like, like the feeling of you have to do this and come what may, and she did!
I'll share if I can find it... it's like 1913, so right before World War I, and she happens to meet Stefan Zweig in the street and Stefan Zweig reports:
“She approached me very excitedly. ‘People don't understand what is happening’, she screamed very loudly on the street. Although she normally spoke so gently, so kindly and calmly. ‘That was the war already and they have hidden everything from us again and kept it in secret. Why don't you do something you, young people? It concerns most of all fight back get together. Don't always leave everything to a few old women nobody listens to.’”
Natalie Alexander: A call to the young generation!
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Absolutely, absolutely. And so, one of her mottos was "Hail to the future!” So yeah, absolutely calling to the younger generation. Alfred Freed was 28 years her junior, so that's at the very end of her life, she has that encounter.
Natalie Alexander: Yeah wow, when you were explaining some of the things she was doing, I was kind of picturing in my head what it must have been like visually for her. And I can kind of picture her working with different people, learning, writing, debating. Can you walk us through perhaps some key relationships or gatherings that she was a part of, to kind of see how the Peace Movement was organized at that time?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: I'll just focus on the 1899 Hague Peace conference. So, there were two Hague peace conferences, the 1899 and then the 1907. Both are extremely important for this quote, “Organizing of the world”.
And by this time, by 1899, she's a well-known personality amongst Peace Through Law activists. And so, one of the things she does at that conference is she opens up a salon in her hotel room and she basically... today I think we would call it like a side event, you know, around a UN gathering.
But you know, this is before the term NGO and there were absolutely NGOs then. So, the Austrian Peace Society would be an NGO. So, she creates a space for journalists, politicians, peace activists, academics to network and discuss ideas. And she does, I don't have the quote in front of me, but I know that on one occasion she says something that these informal spaces are so much more important than the actual plenary sessions of these organized meetings. Oh, she was absolutely there in those informal spaces – those were the only places that she really could be as a woman and doing what she could do, educating networking, connecting, getting newspapers to publish certain things. And the other thing about the 1899 Hague Peace Conference is that the press was not allowed in the plenary sessions and the peace activists were really upset about this.
And so, Bertha felt it her job to do whatever she could to educate the public about what was going on. She felt this was a sea change, this was a paradigm shift in international relations, and the people need to know about it. And so, she keeps a diary – which she did publish – of the 1899 Hague Peace Conference.
It didn't really sell well at the time, but she's doing what she can do. And so, she is writing a lot of letters, she has an incredible correspondence. You have it there at your Library – there's thousands of letters that she writes, and that's how she's keeping her up to speed with the movement. And she saw states, you know, sort of like evading their responsibilities, and she was always trying to educate the public and agitate them to do something to hold states accountable.
Natalie Alexander: Is it true that she was the only woman representative at The Hague Peace Conference?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Right, when the 1899 Hague Peace Conference opened on May 18th, she was the only woman in the sort of like opening session, that's correct. There were other women peace activists who were there, such as Lenore Selenka, who organized a demonstration on May 15th of women around the world to support the goals of the conference. So, she's the only woman allowed in the opening session. But there were other women peace activists there that that she is networking with... not a lot, but they're there.
Natalie Alexander: Yeah, I just find that incredible at the time that she was there working with of course others. Do you have any like anecdotes of what her work was like, what she was like as a person that you could share?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Sure, so someone referred to her as the “Generalissimo” of the Peace Movement. She was just extremely persistent. That's one of her mottos, “persist, persist, and continue to persist”. Her imagination, and I use that word imagination not in the sense of like fantasy, no. What she could imagine was very sort of obvious and real to her, and that was a world which was more organized, such that we would shed ourselves of this barbaric way of solving disputes.
So, she was very persistent and an anecdote that I'm glad to share and I would like to recommend the biography of Bertha von Suttner by Brigitte Hamann, it's a really nice book to expose you to who she was. You know, her husband dies in 1902, so you have like the 1899 Hague Peace Conference and then her husband, who was just like her best friend and they worked together dies in 1902. So, he's not alive when she gets the Nobel Peace Prize, and she was always poor. I'm going to read the passage now, so this is an anecdote, I've mentioned that in 1912 she goes to the United States, and she had a lengthy correspondence with her very close friend, an heir apparent, and that would be Alfred Freed, and so at the Archives there in Geneva, Bertha's papers are in the Freed-Suttner archives, and so Alfred Freed was, I think, 28 years younger than she was, and he had read Die Waffen nieder! and wanted to work for the peace cause. So, this is some correspondence with Alfred Freed, where she's explaining that she's going to go to the United States on a freight steamer.
And Freed expresses concern about this decision: “The choice of a freight steamer for the crossing, embarking second class on Whitsunday are not the signs of a grand and comfortable tour, more like an impoverished undertaking interlarded with privations which you really don't have to put up with.
That's being reckless, Baroness! The tour has to be first class, or you shouldn't dare undertake it if you arrive in New York on a freighter, you'll be discredited.”
And Suttner's response: “Nonsense. I'm not going on a joyride. I'm making a last crusade for the cause.”
Natalie Alexander: Amazing!
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: I just adore that, so that's on page 292, at least in the English translation of Bertha's biography by Brigitte Hamann, the chapter is called Before the Great War.
Natalie Alexander: Amazing, thank you for sharing that. Now, on books... I mean, she wrote more than one book across her lifetime. Could you share a little bit more now about your Bertha von Suttner project, because some of the work that you do is in working to translate these books into English so more people can learn about the subject.
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Yes, thank you for that question. So actually, most of her books have not been translated into anything. I mean the one book that is translated into many languages is this book Die Waffen nieder! of 1889. That is translated into many, many languages. And it was at the time and in fact, these days, both in the Netherlands and in the Czech Republic, they have issued new translations of that book, in contemporary Dutch and Czech. So that just happened in the last couple of years. So, that's the book that people sort of associate with Bertha. But there's so much that is not translated into English. Not only the books that she wrote, the pamphlets that she wrote, the essays that she wrote, but also, much of her diary and her correspondence, etc. It's more than enough for one lifetime, so one of the things that the Bertha von Suttner Project does is translate these things and then publish them in due course.
So, what we did a couple of years ago was translate an essay that she writes in 1912 called the “Barbarization of the Sky”. This had never been translated into English, and this is a little pamphlet that is so prescient, you could apply the same arguments to nuclear weapons. In the sense that when Bertha writes this, she sees a new weapon emerge: the airplane. She's not the only one, other peace activists see this, and they're absolutely urging the states not to allow this, to ban this weapon the airplane, because it will just change the nature of warfare. And today, we just take for granted that war is done in the air. But also, what I learned what I learned from having this essay translated is that she writes this because at these earlier Hague Peace Conferences, both the 1899 and the 1907 Hague Peace Conferences, the states agreed to put a moratorium on dropping explosives... and at that time, it was from balloons. And the states agreed that this is not a good idea to be dropping things from balloons. We can go into the arguments, but she noted that the states made these declarations, these commitments, and they were walking away from them and we needed to hold them accountable. So, it's a small essay, “The Barbarization of the Sky”, very prescient.
Natalie Alexander: Yeah, and then she does have other books and so the project that you're working on, where can people go to find out more?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Right, the project is actually an initiative of the Cora di Brazzà foundation. So, where people can go if you're interested in learning more, the website is berthavonsuttner.com. There on the research tab, what we've tried to do is collect a lot of material in English – essays and speeches that she gives and put them on the website there.
So, that's a really nice source to see some of her work. And the Bertha von Suttner Project will be publishing some new translations. You know, it's very time consuming to do these things, and so yes.
Natalie Alexander: But that's amazing, and as the project looks at Bertha's work and kind of the movement she was involved in, kind of researching and translating her work from the past and seeing what it means today must be really interesting. Is this kind of one of the goals of the project to be able to understand our past and all of these works and to be able to know what this mean for us today? Why should we care, basically?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Yeah, that's a great question. And as I mentioned before, I study, and I teach ancient Greek philosophy and I asked the same questions sometimes. Why am I reading these thinkers from 2000 years ago? Why is that relevant? And so, with Bertha, it's a little bit different. I want to go back to what I said about the imagination.
There's many reasons why we should do this. So of course, one is to have a more accurate picture of the past, and so much history is focused on war and atrocities. That of course is important, and so the sort of line that is said is that we need to learn about the past, so we don't repeat it.
But we also need to learn about what I call “positive history”, the stories of international cooperation, the development of the normative framework that is still being worked on and developed in the intergenerational and international project. And you know, Bertha is just a way to enter the forest of what I call positive history.
Number two, with the imagination! The story is actually an anecdote from her time at the 1899 Hague Peace Conference, and again, it's about the imagination. And she has written Die Waffen nieder! and she meets the son of a delegate. I think it's a delegate from Sweden and the son has read her book – he’s a young man, like 18 years old – and he says something like, “Before reading your book and before seeing this conference happened, I just imagined for myself a career in the military... but now that I see creating something different in the world, I imagine doing something different, like being an international judge.”
I just think that's so compelling, right? And so again, why should we learn about her and it's not just her, it's this whole ecosystem of personalities, ideas that we are still working on today and you really can't understand where we are today, if you don't understand where it came from. But more importantly, the Bertha von Suttner Project in the Cora di Brazzà foundation of which it is a part, really wants to unearth the stories of these individuals because that's where the gold is. I mean, it's these individuals who have this fortitude, this sort of vision for the future, the will to actualize it.
And these are sort of treasures that we all need, each and every one of us. And so that's why, I mean, it is actually right out of ancient Greek philosophy that you know, we need role models of the virtues in order to develop them. And so, Bertha and her friends are just a wonderful treasure trove of those virtues and moral energies that we need to be in touch with as much as possible.
Natalie Alexander: We've been working together for the event and I think there's something that you mentioned that I think is quite powerful... she worked so hard in what she believed in and kind of passed it onto the generations that were coming after her. So, it's kind of like this development, this progress that helps us to be connected.
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Yeah, she uses this expression, that I think it's so powerful and I use it and I see my students grabbing onto it and this is the expression of the red thread. And in her memoirs, she addresses a critic – and her memoirs are wonderful to read, and you can download them from the Bertha von Suttner project. She addresses the critic of the memoirs, that is, she imagines someone saying why are you publishing this? Because all of this has already been published in the newspapers, we already know this. And she says it may be true that all of this was published in the newspapers, but one thing that escapes the public is the “red thread”, the connecting narrative of all of these events. And she says even I didn't see it until I started keeping a diary, and I started to see all of these linkages of persons and events, and there is a thread.
And so that red thread is something that, going back to the past and being connected to the past, I call the “red thread of positive history”. So, we can do a red thread of atrocities, right? And our education seems to for some reason to be focused on that... we need not be just focused on that. Of course, that’s important, but there's also a red thread of positive history, and you can trace it from Bertha up to where we are right now with the Treaty of Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons about to enter into force in three days.
Natalie Alexander: Thank you for pointing that out! To remember how far we have come is something really important. Bertha really was a person that through her work as you've explained, was strongly involved in building peace through multilateralism or cooperation at the time. So, what can we understand from her contribution that will help us today, as we are moving through change in multilateralism?
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: Right, multilateralism, as you doubtless know, is a complex and dynamic term, in terms of it being a sort of vision and a common project or states to work on. She absolutely stressed the importance of trust and cooperation. Multilateralism also involves the project of International Justice and International Courts. And, of course, she is there ushering in the Permanent Court of Arbitration. Did she think that that was the end all be all, and that was the only court necessary? No, she did not. In 1907, the Korean delegation to the 1907 Hague Peace Conference, they couldn't get in – it's a long story for another day. She meets with the Korean delegate and they have a complaint that their treaties are not being respected, and they're told that the current court that exists is not the right forum for them to raise their complaint. And so, Bertha says something like, well, we need to create the kind of court where they can be heard. So, she saw that the building of these international institutions was absolutely necessary for the proper organization of the world, and we don’t have the term “NGO” at the time because that arises out of the UN Charter, but she's absolutely organizing ordinary people to agitate, to write, to lobby as much as they can the public consciousness and, if possible, parliamentarians [which is] not possible all the time. But I think that’s an amazing thing because at that time, in 1898, women do not have a formal political voice, but there she is getting women to do what they can, and they did! And I just want to leave with this, it really comes out in the book that I mentioned by Brigitte Hamann... Bertha was for most of her life, very poor, and she was always sort of asking people to help her go to these conferences and congresses, and she struggled. There's a chapter in the Hamann book called All Too Human Chapter, chapter nine, where she says: “Fame for the future, oh what it looks like at close range.”
So, in other words, maybe I'll be famous because of the Nobel Peace Prize, and what I've done, but the sort of day-to-day grind of this work is really exhausting and sometimes disheartening.
I'll close with one of my favorite quotes by her, which is: “Doubts arose in me, but I chased those doubts away.”
Natalie Alexander: Incredible. Thank you so much for joining us Hope, it was such a pleasure to talk to you and to build upon the event that we're having at the Library on Bertha.
Dr. Hope Elizabeth May: It's been a pleasure and an honor. Thank you so much for all of your hard work, Natalie.
Natalie Alexander: You too, thank you so much!
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