Bertha Von Suttner

Lay Down Your Arms Bertha Von Suttner

"Both Beecher Stowe and von Suttner were neither simply writers of popular entertainment nor authors of tendentious propaganda... They used entertainment for idealistic purposes.." --Leo Tolstoy

Lay Down Your Arms--The Autobiography of Martha von Tilling, originally published as Die Waffen nieder!, is a novel in which Bertha von Suttner challenged the belligerent nationalism of her native Austro-Hungarian Empire. After it was translated into English by the eminent Victorian medical scholar Timothy Holmes (1825-1907), it became an international anti-war bestseller of the nineteenth century, and contributed to the growth of the peace movement in the period before World War I.