Charity Works and World War I
She was deeply involved in a variety of social and political issues and founded charities to support the poor, blind and deaf people where she took an active role herself.
During World War I she ran a military hospital in her Palais while her husband was a field marshal on the eastern front. When the Revolution broke out in 1918, all of her family fled the city, but Gisela remained and took part in the 1919 elections for the Weimar National Assembly where women above the age of 20 were allowed to vote for the first time.
Such was the esteem in which she was held that she was commonly known as the Good Angel from Vienna and unsurprisingly, she became patron for a number of institutions, such as the Giselabahn (a train running from Salzburg to Tirol), the still active paddle steamer Gisela on the Traunsee and the Gisela Gymnasium in Munich.
Read more about this topic: Archduchess Gisela Of Austria
Famous quotes containing the words charity, works, world and/or war:
“Having levelled my palace, don’t erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.”
—Emily Brontë (1818–1848)
“A creative writer must study carefully the works of his rivals, including the Almighty. He must possess the inborn capacity not only of recombining but of re-creating the given world. In order to do this adequately, avoiding duplication of labor, the artist should know the given world.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)
“He remained in the grip of a certain devil whom the modern world knows as self-consciousness, and whom the mediaeval, with dimmer vision, worshipped as asceticism.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)
“We are constantly thinking of the great war ... which saved the Union ... but it was a war that did a great deal more than that. It created in this country what had never existed before—a national consciousness. It was not the salvation of the Union, it was the rebirth of the Union.”
—Woodrow Wilson (1856–1924)