Organisiert die Welt! Leben und Werk des Friedens-Nobelpreisträgers Alfred Hermann Fried (1864-1921)

Abstract

First comprehensive biography of the Austrian Nobel-peace-prize-winner of 1911 Alfred Hermann Fried, mainly based on an extensive utilization of the Fried-estate in the League of Nations archives in Geneva/Swiss and his oeuvre. Alfred H. Fried, first son of a poor family of Hungarian Jews living in Vienna, left school at the age of 14 and began a bookseller-training, after which the ambitious and sensitive young man founded a publishing house in Berlin. After the first setbacks his interest in peace-working arose 1891 through the activities of Bertha von Suttner and led to a lifelong friendship with her and a lifelong engagement for peace as well. He founded the German Peace Society in 1892, worked as peace-journalist and freelance and became the founder of a new scientific peace theory. Nevertheless his social position and his position inside the German peace movement did in no ways correspond with his efforts. Already 1893 he was kicked off the DFG and only when he returned to Vienna in 1903 the situation slowly changed. In 1911 his theory of a peace based on organisation between nations which he mainly fought for in his own journal Die Friedens-Warte brought him half of the Nobel-peace-prize and the honorary doctor of the university of Leyden 1913. At the beginning of the first world war Fried moved to Bern/Swiss and became one of the most famous German speaking voices of peace. But when peace came in 1918 the economic crash of Austria took his little savings and forced him to return to Vienna. Poor and without a home he died in May 1921 of a pneumonia and left his third wife Therese with enormous debts. The political changes in Austria and Germany up to 1933 led to a new, more radical point of view inside the peace-societies. Fried and his work was soon forgotten and not before the 70th of the twenties century did some peace historians recognize the meaning of Fried an his theories even for our age.