Alfred Nobel – Kärlek och Dynamit

In 1875, the Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, inventor of dynamite, having amassed a vast fortune after overcoming a series of setbacks, was looking for a multilingual secretary. Thus, Bertha Kinsky, a penniless Austrian aristocrat earning her living as a governess, arrived at his Parisian townhouse. But their close bond, forged from intellectual complicity, was short-lived: Bertha returned to Vienna to marry Arthur von Suttner, the son of her former employers. Fleeing the scandal, the couple went into exile in Georgia, where the young woman witnessed the horrors of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-1878. Becoming a journalist and writer, she achieved resounding success with the pacifist novel *Lay Down Your Arms!*, and then rose to the vice-presidency of the International Peace Bureau, founded in 1891. While Alfred worked on developing smokeless gunpowder-which led to him being monitored by the French secret police-Bertha tirelessly tried, letter after letter, to win him over to her cause. The last wishes of her friend, who died at the end of 1896, confirmed the high opinion she held of him: they stipulated the creation of annual prizes to honor those who had "brought the greatest benefit to humanity" in the fields of chemistry, physics, medicine, literature, and... peace.