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Hilde Spiel was the grande dame of 20th century Austrian literature. She was born in Vienna and studied philosophy at the city's university. She left Vienna for England in 1936 amid rising anti-Semitism and because of her opposition to the clerico-fascist Austrian regime, but returned after World War Two and had a distinguished and prolific career as the cultural correspondent for the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, The Guardian and The New Statesman. Spiel wrote novels, works of cultural history, volumes of essays and literary criticism and translated the works of modern British writers including W.H. Auden, Virginia Woolf, Graham Greene and Tom Stoppard. Christine Shuttleworth grew up in London, the daughter of the German-language writers Hilde Spiel and Peter de Mendelssohn, who emigrated there in 1936. A graduate of Somerville College, Oxford, she has served as executive editor of the international journal The Indexer. She has translated several books by Hilde Spiel: Fanny von Arnstein, Daughter of the Enlightenment; The Dark and the Bright, Memoirs 1911-1989; and Return to Vienna. Among her other translations are Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht: The Story of a Friendship by Erdmut Wizisla and Human Space by O. F. Bollnow. Michael Z. Wise spent five years as a Vienna-based correspondent for Reuters and The Washington Post. He is author of Capital Dilemma: Germany's Search for a New Architecture of Democracy.
Von Arnstein represents one of the most fascinating and paradoxical eras in modern Jewish history ... For an American Jewish reader, Fanny von Arnstein is fascinating above all as a cautionary tale -- and a reminder of our luck at having avoided the excruciating choices that Fanny, and so many Jews like her, had to face. - Adam Kirsch, Tablet Magazine This book is indispensable for those interested in the history of culture, the role of women, and the transition of the Jewish community out of the ghetto toward the center of European life. - Leon Botstein, President of Bard College, author of Judentum und Modernitat and co-editor of Vienna: Jews and the City of Music In capturing the fascination of Fanny von Arnstein and her times, Hilde Spiel provides both a finely drawn portrait of a defining figure of her era, but also of the times themselves. - John Kornblum, former U.S. Ambassador to Germany
