‘… and tomorrow we will start cheerily canvassing for peace.’

She did this primarily within the confines of the Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein (AÖFV; General Austrian Women’s Association), from which she had resigned in 1914 but with which she continued to have close ties.

Within the first women’s movement in Austria the AÖFV was the most vocal wing in its support of the peace initiatives during the First World War. In addition to issuing numerous publications promoting these initiatives, it organized several peace conventions in Vienna in November and December 1917. Mathilde Hanzel, who attended these meetings, also joined the association’s Peace Party, which was founded in 1917.

In a letter to her husband dated 23 January 1918 she describes one of these meetings: ‘[…] and then I went to the peace convention called by the General Austrian Women’s Association. […] so great was the enthusiasm of the audience that they drummed with their feet, making the large auditorium thunder. […] I of course joined the Peace Party, to which in my heart I have always belonged, paying my dues (1 K(rone)instead of 2 K), and also bought a pretty badge, a little length of white ribbon with ‘Peace Agreement’ printed on it in green, which I wear, of course. In the tram it was eyed thoughtfully but without comment.’

Mathilde Hanzel also took part in an initiative known as ‘Drei Heller für den Frieden’ (Three Pennies for Peace), organized by Der Abend, a newspaper that was, as historian Petronilla Ehrenpreis has described, critical of the government, ‘constantly clashed with the censorship authorities and was intermittently banned’. At the end of October 1917 ‘it called on its readers to send postcards to the editor in support of demands for a peace agreement in line with foreign minister Czernin’s proposals’. She wrote about this to her husband on 23 October 1917: ‘Darling, today in the Abend there was an appeal to vote for an immediate peace agreement as proposed by Count Czernin. I immediately voted for it […] and tomorrow we will start cheerily canvassing for peace. At last!’

In her letters to her husband Mathilde Hanzel repeatedly gives detailed accounts of her pacifist ideas and active support of peace initiatives. However, these topics only ever appear in her side of the correspondence; Ottokar Hanzel never comments on them. And in one of Mathilde Hanzel’s letters she writes: ‘You don’t want to talk about peace, so be it […].’ As an officer, her husband held fast to the attitudes befitting his rank which made talk about peace difficult to reconcile with the officially demanded values of honour and duty, concepts that he repeatedly touches on in his letters.

Translation: Sophie Kidd