The \u201cfirst shot of the Great War,\u201d wrote the great historian AJP Taylor in his celebrated (and still in print) The First World War: An Illustrated History<\/em> (1963), was fired by a Bosnian grammar-school boy named Gavrilo Princip in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The \u201cfirst victims\u201d of that war, according to other authors and Austrian monuments, were the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary (the Habsburg Monarchy), and, accidentally, his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg.<\/p>\n These are metaphors, of course \u2013 there was no war when the infamous Sarajevo assassination<\/a> took place, and there would not be one for another month. Moreover, if anyone bears blame for war\u2019s outbreak<\/a> in July 1914, then it\u2019s the leaders of Europe\u2019s Great Powers<\/a> rather than the Bosnian peasant Gavrilo Princip. Yet how much easier it is to assume a synonymous relation between the Archduke\u2019s murder and Armageddon.<\/p>\n This assumption is what makes studying the Sarajevo assassination so fascinating. How do we wrap our heads around the vast and discomfiting disproportionality between a single deadly act and an act of war that would leave millions dead?<\/p>\n Language like the \u201cfirst shots of the First World War\u201d and crude analogies between this amateurly organised political murder and modern-day mass terrorism represent two such means of grappling with the origins of what American diplomat-historian George Kennan famously called \u201cthe<\/em> great seminal catastrophe of the [20th] century.\u201d But there are myriad others. Most histories of the Sarajevo assassination, whether in scholarly books or news journalism, strive so hard to make the murder live up to its legacy that they often distort and decontextualise it beyond recognition. And that\u2019s a bigger problem than a clever metaphor \u2013 it\u2019s mythology.<\/p>\n From its \u201cviolent\u201d Balkan setting to the vastly bungled execution, Ferdinand\u2019s political murder has been manipulated and fabricated, embroidered and mythologised. Foremost, it had to happen in this \u201csavage patch\u201d of \u201ccivilised Europe,\u201d wrote a historian in the 1930s, following a long and ongoing tradition of stereotyping the Balkans as dangerous and unruly, primitive, and war prone.<\/p>\n Nearly 80 years later, another scholar depicted the murder as a \u201crandom event in an Austro-Hungarian backwater\u201d. To be sure, Sarajevo was not Vienna, though ever since assuming the administration of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1878, Austria-Hungary had poured enormous resources into the region\u2019s development. And after unilaterally annexing it in 1908, the Habsburg monarchy<\/a> itself came exceedingly close to provoking that other Balkan power, the Russian empire, into a European war.<\/p>\n When tensions calmed and the Habsburg kaiser defiantly visited his contested provinces in May 1910, an assassin stalked him in Sarajevo. Franz Ferdinand himself was cautioned against going to Bosnia for military inspections in 1914, in light of the numerous assassination attempts in the region. Even on the eve of his procession through Sarajevo, Franz Ferdinand was forcefully warned by Bosnian officials and men in his own entourage about the dangers of driving through the capital in an open air auto on a Serb national holiday. It was Vidovdan<\/em>, or St Vitus\u2019 Day.<\/p>\n Serb nationalism is the other set piece of supposed Balkan brutality. The kingdom of Serbia, though having one-tenth the size and population of the Habsburg empire, coveted its south Slavic provinces \u2013 Bosnia above all \u2013 as its rightful irredenta. Princip and his accomplices were mostly Bosnian Serbs \u2013 that is, Orthodox Bosnians, not Serbian citizens. Clearly, it was the height of insensitivity to organise the archduke\u2019s procession through Bosnia\u2019s capital on Vidovdan<\/em>, though there\u2019s no evidence that this timing was purposeful.<\/p>\n More importantly, it had little to do with the motivation for the assassination. As Habsburg subjects rather than \u2018Serbs\u2019 or, even, \u2018Serbian nationalists\u2019, as they are regularly and wrongly portrayed in critical literature and film, the Bosnian assassins had been planning the political murder well before they learned the exact date of the archduke\u2019s visit.<\/p>\n What mattered to the conspirators was their innate hatred for Habsburg rule rather than their intense love of Greater Serbia, let alone of socialism, anarchism, or any other of reigning ideologies in the late 19th century. The unification of all South Slavs (Yugoslavism) was certainly on their minds, as court records reveal, though they cared little about the actual political form as long as it delivered them from Habsburg control.<\/p>\n Many writers understand this, and thus nudge the Serbian influence and ideology into the background. For these \u2018conspiracy-from-below\u2019 theorists, however, it\u2019s typically not enough to paint the Bosnians simply as \u201cfreedom fighters\u201d \u2013 after all, they committed murder, and Franz Ferdinand himself was no tyrant. Rather, they must have been totally \u201cdesperate\u201d, and so racked with tuberculosis that they were ready to go to any length on behalf of their Bosnian people. The socio-economic situation of peasants in Bosnia like Princip was certainly dire, but there is no direct evidence that any of the Bosnian plotters were terminally ill. This is a myth, though a relatively empathetic and mild one.<\/p>\n Far more serious, and subversive, are allegations that insidious nationalist forces inside Serbia planned the assassination and recruited the young Bosnian \u201cpuppets\u201d to do their Greater Serb bidding. One \u201csecret\u201d, \u201cterrorist\u201d organisation in particular \u2013 Unification or Death (more menacingly known as the Black Hand) \u2013 was the purported \u201cmastermind\u201d behind the Sarajevo conspiracy. Yet again, the evidence is insufficient. The Black Hand was real, and a really menacing military faction for the Serbian government which, it insisted, was not moving fast enough on the Greater Serb project. But its leaders were not stupid, and they knew that an assassination of the Habsburg successor risked war for which Serbia was ill-prepared.<\/p>\n It may have been a Black Hand member who helped the assassins obtain their weapons and training in Belgrade, but there is no direct connection to Unification or Death itself, let alone to the Serbian government. Nor did Austria-Hungary contend one in its 23 July Ultimatum to Serbia, which does not specifically mention the Black Hand. Whatever historians may say about this \u201cterrorist network\u201d pulling the strings of the Sarajevo conspiracy, it was three young Bosnians living in Belgrade \u2013 two students and a typesetter \u2013 who decided on the political murder and executed it imperfectly.<\/p>\n How can we say this, given that archduke ended up dead? Contrary to popular depictions of hardened terrorist-assassins, these young Bosnians were total amateurs, who had recently learned to fire a gun or ignite a grenade. After the first assassin failed to act and Nedeljko \u010cabrinovi\u0107\u2019s bomb missed its mark, the remaining \u201csuicide bombers\u201d fled the scene. Princip was the sole exception, and he only \u201csucceeded\u201d thanks to a \u201cwrong turn\u201d taken after Habsburg authorities tweaked the procession route in light of the bomb attack. In other words, this \u201cwrong\u201d turn was the right turn (and a right turn) according to the original itinerary of the procession, and thus there the assassin was stalking.<\/p>\n Princip, in short, was not on that street corner by \u201cchance.\u201d Nor was he \u201cconsoling himself with a sandwich\u201d from Schiller\u2019s delicatessen when the archduke \u201chappened\u201d to drive up. Yet ever since the documentary Days That Shook the World<\/em> (2003) informed viewers that Princip had \u201cjust eaten a sandwich, and . . . completely by chance, fate has brought the assassin and his target within ten feet of each other\u201d, the legend of Princip\u2019s sandwich and utter happenstance has seeped into serious and popular literature alike. Today, students learn about it and academics assure us that Princip was \u201cloitering on the corner\u201d or \u201cstanding idly by\u201d or \u201cmilling about\u201d or snacking on a sandwich when \u201cdestiny\u201d struck and the \u201ccursed\u201d car \u201csuddenly\u201d halted before him.<\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Princip\u2019s sandwich and serendipity may just be another myth, but there\u2019s something more convincing about the notion that Princip\u2019s pistol shots \u201cshook the world\u201d. According to one historian, the political murder was a \u201cflashbulb event\u201d that imprinted itself on the minds and memories of all contemporaries, much like 9\/11<\/a> or President Kennedy\u2019s assassination<\/a>. On the contrary, countless first-hand accounts support the relative apathy and indifference that greeted the political murder. It was considered a tragedy, certainly, but not one which, as British permanent undersecretary of state at the Foreign Office, Sir Arthur Nicolson, wrote eerily to his ambassador in St Petersburg, would \u201clead to further complications\u201d.<\/p>\n What \u201cchanged everything\u201d was not a \u201cSerbian hero\u2019s\u201d poorly aimed bullets (the first of which killed the one person in the car\u2019s rear seat that Princip had wished to spare \u2013 the Archduke\u2019s wife, Sophie), but the world historical misfire by Europe\u2019s Great Powers, which first came to light with Austria-Hungary\u2019s ultimatum to Serbia on 23 July. By then, the Sarajevo assassination was slipping from memory \u2013 this was an age, after all, in which political murder was all too common; or, as one American newspaper casually put it, there were other Austrian heirs to replace the archduke.<\/p>\n All this is not to argue that the historical record is in dire need of a good corrective. My intent here is not to set down sound \u201ctruths\u201d about the \u201ccentury-changing\u201d Sarajevo assassination, but rather to illuminate some of this history\u2019s most popular hyperbole \u2013 like the \u201ctubercular\u201d assassins\u2019 \u201crandom\u201d and \u201cdesperate act\u201d; the \u201cSerb\u201d Princip\u2019s \u201cfortuitous\u201d placement on the \u201cfateful\u201d corner; and the insidious role of the Black Hand \u201cterrorists\u201d in organising the intrigue.<\/p>\n Nor do I wish to wage some determined campaign to eradicate the kind of compelling language that often draws people to history in the first place. Although Franz Ferdinand and his wife were certainly not the first victims of the First World War<\/a> in any literal sense, I hardly expect such rousing expressions to be erased from the literature (let alone from Austrian monuments). In other words, this analysis of how the Sarajevo murder is commonly portrayed is by no means meant as a high-minded lament on how we should approach the subject, nor on how history gets written generally.<\/p>\n That would have been trivial, and this article has broadly sought to bring attention to the various ways in which this history gets transmitted, such that it\u2019s time we spoke of a Sarajevo myth. Through a combination of metaphorical language (\u201cthe most significant moment in modern history\u201d), trite rhetoric (fate, chance), enticing inventions (Princip\u2019s sandwich, fatally ill Young Bosnians, and fanatic Serb \u201cterrorists), easy analogies (to just about every tragedy, including 9\/11), and, above all, overinterpretation of the Serb nationalist conspiracy and its \u201cflashbulb\u201d impact, the archduke\u2019s murder has come to embody the kind of blithe simplicity that characterises mythology. This is not an issue of good or bad history, but a means of expressing how we construe and cope with this highly ironic and hopelessly unsettling past.<\/p>\n Contrary to popular depictions of hardened \u2018terrorist-assassins\u2019, these young Bosnians were total amateurs, who had recently learned to fire a gun or ignite a grenade <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
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<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture><\/div> The Sarajevo assassination did not \u2018spark\u2019 the world war, but rather a diplomatic crisis that the leaders of \u2018civilized\u2019 Europe failed to resolve diplomatically <\/blockquote> <\/div> <\/div> <\/div>\n<\/div>
The big questions about WW1<\/h3>\n
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