Bertha von Kinsky was born in Prague from Austrian nobility in 1843. Banished from Viennese society due to family scandals, she became Alfred Nobel's secretary, housekeeper and confidant in Paris for a few weeks in 1876. This began a lifelong relationship, mostly epistolary, that may or may not have had a romantic component, and is the subject of this movie. She later married Baron Arthur von Suttner. By initiative of her husband, she spent time in he Caucasus and was a witness of some bloody skirmishes of the Russo-Turkish war of 1877-8. She served in field hospitals and developed a lifelong horror of war that she put in writing in the pacifist novel Lay Down your Arms in 1889. The novel was a hit, translated to more than ten languages and still in print. It made Bertha a leader of the pacifist movement in Europe.
Nobel is credited with the invention of dynamite and other explosives derived from nitroglycerin. As many before and after him, he claimed that his discoveries were a deterrent: they would make war so destructive it would be abandoned as a way to settle disputes between countries. He was accused (perhaps justly) of war profiteering, but then there were many others making fortunes from Europe's incessant wars or from their preparatives.
Bertha won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1905, which enhanced her public profile as a pacifist. In spite of her writings and the efforts of the antiwar movement, Europe's enthusiasm for war was unabated and WWI began a few months after her death in 1914.
I liked this movie. It is an unpretentious, unpreachy history lesson. Acting is excellent as is cinematography and reconstruction of time and place. Script and direction tell the tale straightforwardly, without repetitions or omissions. The original title (A Love for Peace) is somewhat mistranslated as Madame Nobel, which Bertha never was.
