The Danish anti-war film Ned med Vaabnene! was to be premiered at the Third International Peace  Conference in Vienna in September 1914. Nordisk had acquired the rights to Suttner’s bestseller, and Carl Theodor Dreyer wrote the script for director Holger-Madsen. The film’s prologue, showing Suttner at her desk in Vienna, was shot in April 1914, shortly before her death that June. Ned med Vaabnene! depicts an officer’s family and the growing consciousness of the protagonist, Martha von Althaus, for the pacifist cause; it presents impressive war scenes and tableaux of wounded soldiers. As predicted by Suttner, the film was banned in several countries by the censors. In Germany it was only released during the November Revolution of 1918-19, when for two short months some distributors sympathized with the strong anti-war sentiments of the Revolution and handled such topics, with the slogan “new films for new times”.

Madeleine Bernstorff