Authors: Tim Butcher
A key event took place in 1908, a year after Princip started school: a political and diplomatic crisis that was centred right there in Sarajevo, but soon spread far beyond Bosnia. It would change fundamentally the character of Bosnian youth politics, launching quiet students like Princip on a much more radical path. It would also give final proof that the country’s remote geographical location did not stop it from playing a role in high European diplomacy. The Bosnian dispute was so serious it almost led to a European war and can be regarded today as a dress rehearsal for 1914: it was the formal annexation of Bosnia by Austria–Hungary.
When Bosnia was occupied by the Habsburgs in 1878 through the settlement agreed at the Congress of Berlin, the diplomatic rubric insisted that the Ottoman rulers nevertheless retained nominal control or suzerainty over the land. While this did not limit in any meaningful way how Austria–Hungary set about administering and exploiting its new Bosnian dominion, the words retained a certain diplomatic potency, one that only became truly apparent once Vienna pushed through formal annexation in October 1908, claiming for itself full sovereign rights over Bosnia for the first time.
The move was a pre-emptive strike by the Austro-Hungarians to deal with murmurings of discontent within their already large population of south Slavs, made up of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes spread across the empire’s long-established territories in the North Balkans. The emergence during the nineteenth century of an independent nation of Serbia further south had given the south Slavs within the Habsburg Empire an example to aspire to. They had not known meaningful self-rule since the Middle Ages, yet they watched closely as fellow south Slavs in Serbia showed that in the modern age it was possible to rule themselves. In order to put Serbia back in its place, so the thinking went in Vienna, Bosnia would be formally annexed, thus shifting the centre of gravity for all south Slavs away from Serbia.
The upgrading of occupation to annexation in a small corner of the Balkans might today sound arcane, but it had dire implications in the context of early-twentieth-century diplomacy when the balance of power was as painstakingly and delicately constructed as a house of cards. For several months around the winter of 1908/9, Bosnia was the epicentre of a portentous international debate, as European statesmen struggled to deal with Vienna’s unilateral violation of the treaty agreed at Berlin. If the annexation represented a diplomatic gain for Vienna, which of the other Great Powers would stomach a loss? For many months the name of Bosnia, the layout of its borders and the details of its administration occupied the attention of the greatest diplomats from London to Rome, St Petersburg to Berlin, desperate both to save face and restore order. That these statesmen were successful in managing to avoid a European war has meant that the importance of the Bosnian annexation crisis is today rarely recognised. But what I found particularly striking in my research was that so many of the diplo-politico linkages that would lead the world to war in 1914 were in play during this earlier crisis: Serbian attempts to draw in Russian support; Germany’s willingness to back Austria–Hungary; Britain’s sweeper-role monitoring the impact on Europe’s balance of power; secret talks, ultimatums. In the end it was Russia’s reluctance to offer military support to Serbia that defused the situation, eventually leading to Serbia’s grudging acceptance of the annexation. By the spring of 1909 the Berlin treaty had been amended, the annexation was complete and the house of cards still stood.
Princip had only just started his second year of the Merchants’ School when the crisis began in 1908. But what he witnessed on the streets of the capital city was the impact of the annexation: deeper entrenchment of Austro-Hungarian colonial rule, emergency powers granted to imperial governors, new waves of non-Slav immigration from elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire, growing resentment among fellow Slavs who grumbled that advancement was being monopolised by foreigners. The 1910 census illustrated the population shift clearly, recording a city population of 52,000, with the Muslim and Orthodox communities relatively static. In contrast, the Catholics, consisting mostly of arrivals from elsewhere in the Habsburg Empire, had ballooned in just three decades from 700, when Bosnia had first been occupied by Austria–Hungary, to 17,000.
This was when Princip’s simmering anger towards the foreigner began to strengthen into rage. During these early years in Sarajevo he endured a meagre existence, spending what little money he had on books. Friends said he would rather go hungry than sell from his beloved library, surviving mostly on loans advanced against the promise that his older brother would pay off the debt. While Jovo did everything he could to support Gavrilo, there were occasions when he was not good for the money, forcing his younger sibling to change digs – hence the many addresses I found on Princip’s school records. ‘I did not have the means to maintain myself here,’ he said at his trial. ‘I always lived on credit.’ He found himself exactly where his serf forebears had been, anchored to the bottom of a social order imposed by a foreign power. The anger only got worse when he went home on school holidays. Land reform had been one of the promises made by the Habsburgs, and yet whenever he travelled to Obljaj – such as in 1909, when he scratched his initials on the wall in the garden of the family homestead – he saw that Bosnian peasants like his own family were no better off under the Austro-Hungarians than they had been under the Ottomans.
This mounting fury towards Vienna seeps through Princip’s testimony at his trial. He accused Austria of ‘doing evil to the south-Slav people’, ‘imposing torments upon the people’ and ‘behaving badly to our people’. There are several references to his ‘hatred’ of the occupier and to his desire for ‘revenge’ against injustices forced on the south-Slav citizens of Bosnia. ‘If I could, I would destroy Austria completely,’ he declared towards the close of proceedings.
But there was also a sense in which his anger metastasised. It was not just the foreign occupier that he hated. He also came to distrust those leaders of his own south-Slav community who accommodated the Austro-Hungarians. These were local councillors, businessmen and politicians who took the view that working for change from within the occupation was wiser than fighting against it. They were derided as Mamelukes, an Ottoman euphemism for slaves, by young Bosnian zealots then poring over their revolutionary texts. The Serbian government’s decision, albeit under intense diplomatic pressure, to accept the annexation of Bosnia by Austria–Hungary was the clearest proof that the older generation of south Slavs could not be relied upon to bring about change. Their gradualism would never deliver true freedom, so something more radical was needed. Dr Pappenheim’s notes capture Princip’s attitude:
Our old generation was mostly conservative, but in the people as a whole existed the wish for national liberation. The older generation was of a different opinion from the younger as to how to bring it about. In the year 1878 many Serb leaders and generals prayed for liberation from the Turks. The older generation wanted to secure liberty from Austria in a legal way; we do not believe in such a liberty.
As an underground movement Mlada Bosna did not have any formal membership process, so there is no paper trail tracking Princip’s links with the group. But it was in the aftermath of the annexation that, still only fifteen years of age, he began to associate with its members in Sarajevo and to embrace its ideals of taking on the imperial occupier. Again his evolution was far from headstrong. Princip did not rush into radicalism, exploring instead a wide range of options, from the peaceful utopianism of William Morris – after his death a copy of Morris’s News from Nowhere was found with Princip’s signature inside – to the more turbulent radicalism of the Russian revolutionaries. ‘I read Krapotkin and the Russian socialist literature,’ he said during his trial.
Princip remained a very private individual, an introvert, at his happiest keeping himself to himself. As he dabbled with politics in an environment rife with Austro-Hungarian spies, he learned the true value of discretion. One of the books in his growing library was an obscure series of short stories written in German – Wenn Landsleute sich begegnen, by Jassy Torrund. As well as having his signature within the covers, it was found that he had picked out and transcribed a few portentous lines from the text:
What your enemy should not know,
You shouldn’t tell your friend.
If I don’t tell the secret, then it is my slave,
If I do, then I am its slave.
Up until the annexation in 1908, the dominant voices within Mlada Bosna were moderate, but after the crisis such restraint was thrown off. Sarajevo – like so many other cities, not just in the Austro-Hungarian Empire but across all of Europe – simmered with the injustice felt by the masses. It led to pressure for direct action, a force that built and built. With only sham democracy in place, one that allowed for a local parliament to be elected, but without the power to challenge the colonial occupier, there was no safety valve to release this pressure. Eventually revolutionary thoughts in Sarajevo turned to calls for political assassination.
An account of life in Sarajevo at the time from a young boy who would go on to become one of Austria’s most renowned artists gives a wonderful counterpoint perspective on this febrile atmosphere. Hans Fronius was a perfect example of the Austro-Hungarian colonial immigrant class that had flooded into Bosnia. His father was a doctor who served as a state physician based in Sarajevo, and his grandfather had been one of the early train engineers who built Bosnia’s narrow-gauge railway network for the Habsburgs. Describing the childhood he enjoyed in Sarajevo around the time of the annexation crisis, Hans Fronius wrote:
We Schwabians, the incoming Austrians, lived in the Balkans like colonialists and enjoyed a high standard of living. I was a quiet child and drew a lot. But despite all I did to cut myself off, I nevertheless could feel that not everything was in order in this peaceful world. There were workers’ strikes, as well as parades against the threat of war and attempted assassinations on the governor. Unforgettable was the following mental image: my father still agitated as he talked about an attempted assassination, removing his bloody shirt cuffs while washing his hands.
Amid all the growing political tension that was born of the annexation one episode stands out. In June 1910 a young man called Bogdan Žerajić – a Bosnian Serb from Herzegovina, just like Princip, and also a supporter of Mlada Bosna – took a pistol and fired five times at the Austro-Hungarian governor of Bosnia, General Marijan Varešanin, as he was being driven by coach over one of the old Ottoman bridges across the Miljacka in Sarajevo. The General had just taken part in a high-profile event, the state opening of Bosnia’s quisling parliament – one that was brought into existence as a result of the annexation eighteen months earlier. In Žerajić’s eyes, the parliament was nothing but a council of Mameluke lackeys, south-Slav elders complicit in the oppression of Bosnia’s population by the Habsburg outsider. The time had come for action.
Žerajić was standing about halfway across the Emperor’s Bridge when his target drove past. It was a narrow bridge, so the General would have been only a few feet away from him when Žerajić pulled out the gun and fired. He missed his target with all five bullets. But the gunman then did something that marked out his assassination bid as different from others. With his sixth bullet he shot himself dead – a martyr in the eyes of Mlada Bosna supporters; a cowardly suicide terrorist in the view of Austria–Hungary. The way his body was then treated added to his legend. Some sources said that General Varešanin got out of his coach, walked over to the body and kicked it. Others said he spat on the body. What is not disputed is that the gunman’s head was cut off and his skull ostentatiously used as an inkpot, pour encourager les autres, by one of Sarajevo’s more brutal colonial police investigators.
The legend of Žerajić grew in tribute poems and essays written by fellow Mlada Bosna members and the whole incident had a great impact on Princip. For young political activists like him, this was not the highbrow theorising of philosophical debate or the strategic-level calculus of international diplomacy. This was politics at its most real: direct action by a student only a few years older than himself – Žerajić was in his mid-twenties when he died – from exactly the same background, for a political cause that he shared, and right there, in his own neighbourhood. The bridge where it happened lies a few minutes’ walk from where Princip attended school and he must have passed the spot often, each time being reminded that the fight against the foreign occupier could demand the ultimate sacrifice.
At Princip’s trial in 1914 the ghost of Bogdan Žerajić was ever-present. When mention was made of a poem, ‘Death of a Hero’, that praised the failed assassin, Princip shouted out, ‘May Žerajić rest in peace!’ It was an outburst that incensed the Austro-Hungarian judge and led to proceedings being suspended. Earlier, when the name of Žerajić came up, Princip was candid in his explanation of how highly he regarded him: ‘He was my role model. At night I used to go to his grave and vow that I would do the same as he … The grave was neglected and we put it in order.’
Princip was only fifteen when Žerajić died in 1910. It would take time for the slow-burn revolutionary to complete his own journey from schoolboy dreamer to assassin. Dr Pappenheim’s clinical notes recorded how that journey started shortly after the failed assassination attempt by Žerajić, when Princip began an episode of sleepwalking. His schoolwork, as indicated by the worsening grades of his school reports, no longer mattered as much as politics. He found himself increasingly caught up in student demonstrations and agitation against Austro-Hungarian rule. The young man told his psychiatrist that the year following the Žerajić shooting was ‘critical’:
Left the school in Sarajevo in 1911. At that time nationalistic demonstrations were taking place … Was in the first lines of students. Was badly treated by the professors. Read many anarchistic, socialistic, nationalistic pamphlets, belles lettres and everything. Bought books himself; did not speak about these things.