delirium clemens

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The frail-looking student who on 28 June 1914 shot the Austrian crown prince Franz Ferdinand and his Czech wife Sophie does not rest in peace: Gavril Princip is one of the many ghosts that rumble in the cultural memory of Central Europe like a nocturnal flatulence.

In a way the young “Gavre” was one of ‘those radical intellectuals’ – a typical product of Habsburg colonialism (one of whose heads he would later cut off). Being one of nine children of a Bosnian Serb postman from Tuzla, it was the “civilizing mission” of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, which enabled the talented student to attend high school in Sarajevo where he joined the underground youth movement Mladna Bosna. In 1912 he went to Serbia where he got in touch with the terrorist group Crna Ruka (“Black Hand”) and other like-minded people; consequently he received some pistol training, weapons and orders. He and his accomplices returned illegally to Bosnia-Herzegovina in spring 1914 to carry out their attack on Archduke Franz Ferdinand during his visit to Sarajevo.

However, it was a coincidence that gave Gavrilo a quick chance to kill, to die early and to become immortal eventually. The crime scene was on the picturesque Miljacka quay where several administrative and religious buildings are lined up like meat on a skewer. When Franz Ferdinand’s motorcade flashed through here the first time, a bomb thrown by an accomplice missed the automobile of the prince and injured ‘only’ two accompanying officers. At the Town Hall the outraged Archduke complained briefly before embarking again: “Mr. Mayor, we have come to visit Sarajevo in order to make a visit and not to be bombed!”

On the way back, it was probably a communication error which caused Franz Ferdinand’s Moravian driver Leopold Lojka to make a right turn at Latin Bridge into Franz Josef Street. You can speak of a “Lojka effect” here, meaning that little extras can also affect the c(o)urse of history: in order to correct his little mistake, the good chauffeur stopped and turned the car – right in front of Gavril who pulled the trigger twice and killed the royal couple in spe. His Browning did not fail, but the cyanide capsule he had brought along for himself did. Franz Ferdinand’s last words allegedly were: “Sophie, please stay alive for our kids.” Then policemen overpowered the perpetrator and protected him from being lynched by an angry Muslim crowd which would vandalize quite a few Serbian shops in the city during the following days to express their solidarity with the ruling dynasty.

At his trial the newly crowned terrorist Princip hung out the Balkan gentleman and apologized for the murder of Sophie because she had been a woman and a fellow Slav; allegedly his first bullet had been meant not for her but for the provincial governor, General Potiorek. The true obstacle to criminal justice became apparent, however, with the fact that most perpetrators were underage in terms of the penal code. The court had to remain within the confines of civil society and could dish out only three death sentences.

This was the reason why one of Princip´s co-offenders, Vaso Čubrilović, was later able to become minister of forestry in Tito’s Yugoslavia. The token Muslim of the gang, Muhamed Mehmedbašić, the only one who managed to escape from Bosnia and a brief prison stay in Montenegro, finished his life as a carpenter and gardener in Sarajevo – killed by the Croatian Ustasha militia in 1943. In a way history came full circle here in the Balkans: from nationalist anti-imperial struggle to the age of Fascist genocide which was a result of nationalism as well.

On the other hand, Princip, Nedeljko Čabrinović (the bomb man) and Trifun Grabež did not get away either. Before they could have been pardoned by the new Czechoslovakian state in 1918, they all died from tuberculosis during the First World War due to the harsh prison conditions in the Bohemian fortress of Theresienstadt (Terezín) – which later was to serve as a concentration camp during World War Two. A couple of days before his final exit, Princip had engraved some words into the wall of his prison cell with a spoon: “Our ghosts will haunt Vienna / wander about the royal court and scare the so-called gentlemen.”

However, Princip was certainly not the one who killed the monarchy; it rather committed suicide with its subsequent “War on Terror” against Serbia, which resulted in the First World War. George W. Bush could have learned a lot here, and Princip in our day probably would have become a suicide bomber, maybe flying a plane on 9/11. But this story was by no means over with World War One; on the contrary, Princip has been haunting Central Europe ever since.

In 1918 the Kingdom of Yugoslavia removed Franz Ferdinand´s martyr monument near Latin Bridge, but left the marble chair in front, inviting passers-by to “rest and reflect”. Tito’s cult of dead partisans after 1945 stylized the tubercular terror pupil Princip as “the seed from which many heroes of our people have sprung” (a revolutionary formulation with which I could even successfully piss off my monarchist history teacher in Vienna around 1980). In addition, Hollywood-like footprints in the asphalt by the street corner marked the crime scene, or the position of the gunman, respectively – until they eventually vanished during Bosnian War in the early 90s.

Instead, the “Museum of Sarajevo 1878-1918” stands at the spot nowadays; according to its own mission statement, it “preserves those undear (sic!) memories of the event in 1914”. Since you can find Lojka’s car and Franz Ferdinand’s bloody uniform already at the Viennese Museum of Military History, the Sarajevo institution is only able to show unrelated props from the flea market of history – clothes, pictures, furniture: rather the new Bosnian Habsburg nostalgia than the historical circumstances of the assassination. In plain English, this also means that by displaying Princip’s police mug shots, the national hero is made a criminal again. Obviously the Bosnians don’t intend to annoy the Austrians any longer, who are the most important investor in their country in 2011. Only the Bosnian Serbs defiantly stick to “Gavre” as an idol.

In 2014, however, the assassin and his major target will meet each other in public again it seems. In a kind of all-inclusive solution to the quandary of cultural memory in the torn country of Bosnia-Herzegovina, both the statue of the victim and the footsteps of the offender will be put up again (and I am pleading to add the tire tracks of Lojka). Sarajevo will become European Cultural Capital in that year, if the financial crisis allows it and nobody pulls the trigger again.

(c) RUTHNER & Lidové noviny, 2011 
>> German text version

This entry was posted on 28 June 2011 at 18:24 and is filed under Uncategorized with tags Austria, bosnia-hercegovina, Gavril Princip, Sarajevo, World War One. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.