ISN’T IT IRONIC?
ALFRED NOBEL, MANUFACTURER OF DYNAMITE, SUPPORTER OF WORLD PEACE.
Yes,
Nobel had a fine sense of irony. He supported Bertha von Suttner’s peace
movement, but when she asked him to endorse her programmatic book DOWN WITH
ARMS, he replied: That’s a little cruel.
Where am I supposed to sell my new powder if world peace breaks out?
When
he met with the Dynamiteurs, as he
called the directors and administrators of the Society for Dynamite (yes, such
a club existed!), he ardently wished for
a new Mephistopheles to heat up the fire for those evil-doers (malfaisants). Well, maybe that was hypocrisy rather than irony.
He was writing this to a pacifist after all.
You are a veritable
Amazon, to make war on war, he tells Suttner.
From
another letter to her: I feel old and
worm-eaten…I want to finish a certain business I have in hand before retiring to the
Hotel des Invalides, a Paris hospital built in 1680 for veterans.
Best
example of Nobel’s irony? His “autobiography”:
A humane physician
should have terminated my wretched half-life when I made my bawling entrance
into life. Greatest merit: keeping my nails clean and burdening no one.
Greatest failing: no family, no good mood, no good stomach. Greatest and only
request: Don’t bury me alive. Greatest sin: Did not worship Mammon. Most
significant events in my life: None.
(Translated
from E. Biedermann, Der Briefwechsel
zwischen Alfred Nobel und Bertha von Suttner)
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