Bertha von Suttner

Page 480

“…The first woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize was Baroness Bertha von Suttner, a Czech-Austrian pacifist, journalist and novelist. Born Bertha Felicitas Sophie on 9 June 1843, in Prague, Bohemia, she boasted a proud military heritage. She was the daughter of a distinguished Austrian lieutenant general. Bertha was the second woman to win a Nobel Prize – Marie Curie being the first, two years earlier in 1903 – and the first Austrian Nobel laureate.

Her mother, Sophie von Korner, was an astonishing fifty years her father’s junior. When her father died, he was seventy-five years old. Bertha was born posthumously and was brought up by her mother and remained under the guardianship of Friedrich Zu Furstenberg, a member of the Austrian court. Her elder brother, Arthur, was sent to a military boarding school at the age of six and had little contact with his family thereafter. Bertha’s early years were rich with education, voracious reading and travel. She evinced a strong interest in music, particularly singing, and learnt several languages – English, German, Italian and French. But though she enjoyed these trappings of her social milieu, having been born into an aristocratic family, she was of the unlanded nobility: Financial worries would haunt her, and she would face hardship at various stages of her life. Her mother had no means of sustaining the family comfortably and squandered what money she had by gambling and poor management of the family’s already depleted resources…” ~