Bertha von Suttner as a Peace Activist and an Early Modernist Public Mediator

Bertha von Suttner is widely recognised as a standard bearer of the pacifist movement in Germany and Austria around 1900. From the end of the 19th century until her death in 1914, Suttner actively participated in peace demonstrations and pacifist conventions. Her activist efforts and her groundbreaking anti-war novel "Lay Down Your Arms!" (1889, "Die Waffen nieder!") established her fame and eventually made her the first woman ever to receive the Nobel Peace Prize (1905). However, the literature seems to have paid less attention to the fact that Suttner was also a celebrated public speaker. As one of the first public figures, and particularly one of the first writers, to go on speaking tours (which saw her travelling through Europe and the US), Suttner rapidly acquired a 'celebrity' status. Retrospectively, she is to be regarded as one of the forerunners of a broader tendency toward public speaking among German literati in the first half of the 20th century. In this paper, I aim to show how the collective mass culture and the individualist celebrity culture, both pre-eminently modernist phenomena, converged in the modernist writer's speech. To this end, I broadly define the speech as a microcosmic act and as a practice that interacts with other genres as well as other medial configurations. Many of these high-modernist developments in speech culture were anticipated by Bertha von Suttner's speeches. Recognising that rhetoric and speeches are overlapping yet non-equivalent entities, I will specifically reflect on the instances in which both entities became compatible with one another. As can be observed in Suttner's speeches, rhetoric came to serve as a set of rules that was pragmatically employed by modernist speakers, also by those who were fundamentally opposed to rhetoric in se. Perhaps not surprisingly, women's ability to stand up for their (pacifist or other) ideals in a public sphere that became increasingly accessible carried a considerable emancipatory potential.status: publishe