The idea for this book arose in 1984 when I was writing my master’s thesis on the novel Die Waffen nieder! by Bertha von Suttner. As I did background research on von Suttner’s life and her influence, I kept finding references to the name of Alfred Hermann Fried, who at one point was portrayed as her secretary and occasionally as an equal or even fellow leader in the campaign for peace. But he was also sometimes viewed as her counterpart.
Although I did not do any further research for a couple of years, I followed the book market in the expectation that Bertha von Suttner’s great popularity as well as the issues relating to the policies of peace that suffused the 1980s would sooner or later lead to an exhaustive biography of Alfred Fried. However, my expectations were not fulfilled. In addition to the biographies that already existed on Georg Friedrich Nicolai,1 Ludwig Quidde,2 and Baron d’Estournelles de Constant,3 there were new works on Bertha von Suttner,4 Otto Umfrid5 and Count Kessler,6 but research on Fried remained nonexistent. In 1987, the only works on Fried that I came across were the older essays by Hans Wehberg,7 the unfortunately worthless, biographical work of Doris Dauber,8 and a short biographical sketch by Dieter Riesenberger in the volume Wider den Krieg9 (Against War). A year later a short biography of Fried by Wolfgang Stenke10 appeared in the Nobel Prize edition of Michael Neumann. But after that there was nothing more.11
Why Alfred H. Fried deserves special attention may be explained first by the fact that there is hardly a book about German pacifism of the imperial era that does not quote from his works and second that any engagement with the intentions and aims of pacifism in these decades always necessitates an engagement with Fried’s theories. The fact that he was apparently acknowledged as a leading pacifist in German-speaking countries and yet never held a leading position in the German Peace Society (Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft) makes the question of Fried’s personality and his career all the more interesting.
This book will chronicle the life of Alfred H. Fried from his familial roots in Hungary’s liberal Jewish bourgeoisie, his first experiences in school and his subsequent education, the period of futile attempts to establish himself as a publisher and journalist in Berlin, his gradual, successful professional establishment in Vienna, his prominent yet vulnerable position in Swiss exile, and his death in post-war Vienna.
Fried, the eldest son of an impoverished Jewish family, was an academic failure at the Gymnasium (College Preparatory School); he was industrious and ambitious, but at the same time he was also very spirited and not very adaptable. Only shortly before the First World War, at well over 40 years of age, did he achieve the social advancement that he sought. But the outbreak of the war destroyed all hopes and forced him to emigrate to Switzerland. When he died in the Rudolf Hospital in Vienna after the war, he was destitute and both physically and emotionally homeless; he seemed to have worked in vain as the world grew further distant from his ideas of peace than ever before. There were a few people who preserved his memory even in the turbulent Weimar period, but his ideas seemed to have lost all relevance at least from the time of the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War in the 1950s.
Fried may set an example for us today. He advocated for peace journalism and he sought to have peace societies establish and disseminate clearly defined concepts and positions.
But not least of all, it is the unconditionality with which he also voiced his opinion, even in times of war, against a world “in the green fog”14 that connects him to the long chain of freedom fighters from the 1848 revolution to the resistance fighters under National Socialism to the individuals and groups persecuted in recent decades for their “different opinions.” When Sandi Cooper writes, “To be a pacifist in the political culture of Wilhelminian Germany was akin to professing communism in Cold War America,” one recalls the resurgent discrimination against peace forums and groups in the 1980s in Germany. It is precisely in this context that Fried should (and will) remain a possible role model for our contemporaries.
Even a hundred years later, many of the discussions that the pacifists of that era participated in have not lost their relevance. The question of the “correct” kind of response and of the possible deployment of the German military is just as controversial now as 1) the long desired improvements within the United Nations, 2) the structure of the European constitution, and 3) the extent to which the proposition of absolute nonviolence should be generally binding on pacifists.15
Wolf Zuelzer, Der Fall Nicolai (Frankfurt a. M., 1981).
Utz-Friedebert Taube, Ludwig Quidde. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des demokratischen Gedankens in Deutschland (Kallmünz, 1963).
Adolf Wild, Baron d’Estournelles de Constant (1852–1924). Das Wirken eines Friedensnobelpreisträgers für die deutsch-französische Verständigung und europäische Einigung (Hamburg, 1973).
Brigitte Hamann, Bertha von Suttner. Ein Leben für den Frieden (Munich, 1986). And later Harald Steffahn, Bertha von Suttner (Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1998).
Christoph Mauch / Tobias Brenner, Für eine Welt ohne Krieg. Otto Umfrid und die Anfänge der Friedensbewegung. With a foreword by Walter Jens (Schönaich, 1987).
Peter Grupp, Harry Graf Kessler 1868–1937. Eine Biographie (Munich, 1995).
Hans Wehberg, “Alfred H. Fried,” in Die Führer der deutschen Friedensbewegung (1890 bis 1923), ed. Hans Wehberg (Leipzig, 1924).
Doris Dauber, Alfred Hermann Fried und sein Pazifismus (Diss., Leipzig, 1924).
Dieter Riesenberger, “Alfred Hermann Fried (1864–1921). Die Überwindung des Krieges durch zwischenstaatliche Organisation,” in Wider den Krieg. Große Pazifisten von Immanuel Kant bis Heinrich Böll, eds. Christiane Rajewsky, Dieter Riesenberger (Munich, 1987), 54ff.
Wolfgang Stenke, “Alfred Hermann Fried – ein Pazifist der Tat,” in Der Friedens-Nobelpreis von 1901 bis heute, ed. Michael Neumann, vol. 2, Der Friedens-Nobelpreis von 1905 bis 1916 (Zug, 1988), 168–179.
Two years after I completed my dissertation, which was published online through the University of Bremen, another biography of Fried was published: Walter Göhring, Verdrängt und vergessen. Friedensnobelpreisträger Alfred Hermann Fried (Vienna, 2006).
Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism. Waging War on War in Europe 1815–1914 (New York/Oxford, 1991), 9.
This opinion is also shared by Friedrich Karl-Scheer who urges that one should take another look at the accusation of “methodological syncretism” (which had been leveled at Fried) in light of the modern, interdisciplinary, and goal-oriented scholarship on peace. Cf. his Die deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (1892–1933), 2nd, improved ed. (Frankfurt a. M., 1983), 133ff.
This expression, which may have originated with Orson Welles, was used repeatedly by Fried in his diaries to characterize the war-time atmosphere that confounded the thinking and behavior of the population. Cf. Kriegs-Tagebuch, I, 217 and IV, 213.
Cf., among others, the article “Streit in der Friedensbewegung: Frieden schaffen mit Waffen?” ZivilCourage 1, (February, 2004): 4ff.
Fried, Kriegs-Tagebuch I, 471.
Petra Schönemann-Behrens
September 2011