Henry Dunant - Return To Public Memory

Return To Public Memory

In September 1895, Georg Baumberger, the chief editor of the St. Gall newspaper Die Ostschweiz, wrote an article about the Red Cross founder, whom he had met and conversed with during a walk in Heiden a month earlier. The article entitled "Henri Dunant, the founder of the Red Cross", appeared in the German Illustrated Magazine Über Land und Meer, and the article was soon reprinted in other publications throughout Europe. The article struck a chord, and he received renewed attention and support. He received the Swiss Binet-Fendt Prize and a note from Pope Leo XIII. Because of support from Russian tsarist widow Maria Feodorovna and other donations, his financial situation improved remarkably.

In 1897, Rudolf Müller, who was now working as a teacher in Stuttgart, wrote a book about the origins of the Red Cross, altering the official history to stress Dunant's role. The book also contained the text of A Memory of Solferino. Dunant began an exchange of correspondence with Bertha von Suttner and wrote numerous articles and writings. He was especially active in writing about women's rights, and in 1897 facilitated the founding of a "Green Cross" women's organization whose only section was briefly active in Brussels.

Read more about this topic:  Henry Dunant

Famous quotes containing the words return to, return, public and/or memory:

    “Or ever the silver cord be loosed, or the golden bowl be broken, or
    the pitcher be broken at the fountain, or the wheel broken at the
    cistern.
    Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was: and the spirit
    shall return unto God who gave it.
    Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity.”
    —Bible: Hebrew Ecclesiastes (l. XII, 6–7)

    “Each work of art excludes the world, concentrates attention on itself. For the time it is the only thing worth doing—to do just that; be it a sonnet, a statue, a landscape, an outline head of Caesar, or an oration. Presently we return to the sight of another that globes itself into a whole as did the first, for example, a beautiful garden; and nothing seems worth doing in life but laying out a garden.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “There is no private life which has not been determined by a wider public life.”
    —George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    “For my name and memory I leave it to men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages.”
    —Francis Bacon (1561–1626)