Alfred Fried

Origins and early life

Alfred Hermann Fried was born in Vienna on 11 November 1864, a self-taught Viennese Jewish bookseller and publisher who left school at fifteen to work in a bookshop and never took a degree.

Work and career

He moved to Berlin in 1883 and opened a shop of his own there in 1887. When Bertha von Suttner published her anti-war novel Lay Down Your Arms in 1889 he wrote to her, and in 1892 the two began a magazine under the same title, which he later continued as Die Friedenswarte, the Peace Watch; in the same year he co-founded the German Peace Society. His argument set him apart from most of the peace movement of his day. Wars, he held, were not caused by wickedness and would not be ended by preaching against them: they were the symptom of a world of states with no shared institutions, and the cure was to build the missing machinery — arbitration courts, international law, standing conferences, a documented record of the ties already binding countries together.

He called this organizing pacifism, and worked at it in practice as much as in print, collaborating in 1909 with Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine on the Annuaire de la Vie Internationale, a yearbook of the world's international bodies. He also became one of the movement's best-known Esperantists, publishing a textbook of the language in 1903 and a German–Esperanto dictionary.

Later years

He shared the 1911 Nobel Peace Prize with Tobias Asser, spent the First World War in neutral Switzerland still arguing his case, and died in Vienna on 4 May 1921, months after the League of Nations he had spent his life arguing for held its first assembly in Geneva.