PEACE: Bertha von Suttner - 1905 - Prague, Czech Republic
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Metro2
N 50° 05.251 E 014° 25.266
33U E 458587 N 5548522
Bertha von Suttner, In 1905 became the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.
Waymark Code: WMPKEY
Location: Hlavní město Praha, Czechia
Date Posted: 09/13/2015
Views: 49
This memorial features a small protruding bust of von Suttner and text in Czech and English. The English portion reads:
"THE FIRST
WOMAN
NOBEL PRIZE
WINNER BERTHA
VON SUTTNER
OF THE KINSKY
FAMILY BORN
JUNE 9 1845
IN PRAGUE'
The plaque is located in an alcove open to the public without charge beside the entrance to the National Gallery in Prague.
Wikipedia (
visit link) adds:
"Bertha Felicitas Sophie Freifrau von Suttner (Baroness Bertha von Suttner, née Countess Kinsky, Gräfin Kinsky von Wchinitz und Tettau; 9 June 1843 – 21 June 1914) was an Czech-Austrian pacifist and novelist. In 1905 she was the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, thus being the second female Nobel laureate after Marie Curie's 1903 award, and the first Austrian laureate...
Though her personal contact with Alfred Nobel had been brief, she corresponded with him until his death in 1896, and it is believed that she was a major influence in his decision to include a peace prize among those prizes provided in his will, which she received in the fifth term on 10 December 1905. The bestowal took place on 18 April 1906 in Kristiania.
In 1907 Suttner attended the Second Hague Peace Conference, which however mainly negotiated on aspects of law of war. On the eve of World War I, she continued to advise against international armament. In 1911 she became a member of the advisory council of the Carnegie Peace Foundation. On 21 June 1914, a few weeks before war broke out, she succumbed to cancer. She had planned to attend the next Universal Peace Congress, which was scheduled to take place in Vienna in the autumn.
In the comprehensive socio-cultural debate of her day, Suttner's pacifism was influenced by the writings of Immanuel Kant, Henry Thomas Buckle, Herbert Spencer, Charles Darwin and Leo Tolstoy (Tolstoy praised Die Waffen nieder!) conceiving peace as jusnuralistic original state impaired by the human aberrance of war and militarism. Therefore, a right to peace has to be demandable under international law and is necessary in the sense of an evolutionary (Darwinist) conception of history. Suttner was also an accomplished journalist, with one historian stating her work revealed her as "a most perceptive and adept political commentator"'