Memoirs of Bertha von Suttner: The Records of an Eventful Life (Vol. 2 of 2)Suttner, Bertha von
History
Memoirs of Bertha von Suttner: The Records of an Eventful Life (Vol. 2 of 2)
Suttner, Bertha von
Peace; Suttner, Bertha von, 1843-1914; Women -- Austria -- Biography
“I drink to the feminine Volapük of the future, which all by itself,
if men continue to want to kill one another, will permit the women of
all countries to utter the cry, _Die Waffen nieder!_ For the first
time in thirty-five years we have felt the soul of the people here
vibrating. I drink to that soul to-day!”
At the same banquet Émile Chasles, Inspector General of Public
Instruction in France, delivered a speech which closed with these
words: “I salute the spirit of internationalism, which rises above the
quarrels of men and governs nations with the aim of drawing them
together.”
We made an excursion to Prague, the city of my birth. The Concordia
Union had invited me to deliver a lecture. Before this affair, which
took place at eight o’clock in the evening in the mirror room of the
Deutsches Haus, we were invited to dinner at Professor Jodl’s. The
famous philosopher—a friend of my friend Carneri—was then a docent in
the University of Prague, while he is now a light in our Vienna
Hochschule. It was a pleasant little meal, with few but choice guests.
The professor’s young wife, Margarete, was a fascinating housewife, who
had already won my heart, because I knew her as the liberal-minded
translator of Olive Schreiner’s stories. This same Olive Schreiner, in
her “Peter Halket,” has said a wonderful thing,—a thing that expresses
beautifully my profoundest belief: “With the rising and setting of the
sun, with the revolving flight of the planets, our fellowship grows and
grows.... The earth is ours.”
Since I was to speak in a literary union, I had chosen the subject of
peace literature, and as I was in Bohemia, I cited also Bohemian
authors,—the two great poets Vrchlicky and Swatopluck Czech. In my
absolute innocence I had no suspicion of the fact that it was something
unheard of in Prague, so torn by national jealousies, to praise Czech
geniuses in the Deutsches Haus. For a moment a certain feeling of
restraint seems to have manifested itself in the hall, but when the
splendid verses of the two princes of Czech poetry—paraphrased rather
than translated into German by Friedrich Adler—rang out, the German
auditors were disarmed and the ill-humor passed off. There is no field
which would be better adapted to bringing about reconciliation between
two contending factions than the field of supernational pacification.
At the banquet which followed the lecture I made the acquaintance of
many interesting people, and particularly of the theatrical manager
Angelo Neumann, and his wife, Johanna Buska. The latter was very much
after the style of Sarah Bernhardt,—so delicate, so thin, so
golden-voiced, so exquisitely elegant, and so many-sided in her art.
There is no leading part in the repertory, from the naïve to the heroic,
the sentimental, and the coquettish, which la Busca had not played and
made the most of. That evening she recited a poem which Friedrich Adler
had composed as a rejoinder to Carducci’s “Ode to War.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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