First world war: was Gavrilo Princip a terrorist or a freedom fighter?

It was not the 'shot heard around the world' that caused the 1914-18 war but imperialism – anything else is revisionism

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/apr/15/first-world-war-gavrilo-princip-terrorist-freedom-fighter-revisionism

Srećko Horvat

Tuesday 15 April 2014

As the date approaches when all countries will mark 100 years since the "shot heard around the world", it gives rise to more discussions about the meaning of the first world war. If there is one single historical figure who still provokes controversy, it is without doubt the Bosnian Serb who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. His shot led directly to the first world war when the Austro-Hungarian empire issued an ultimatum against Serbia and then declared war. Russia and France mobilised their armies, followed by Germany, and soon all the great powers had gone to battle.

Never before had a 19-year-old man provoked so much trouble: at the end of the four years of war, four powerful empires – the Austro-Hungarian, German, Turkish and Russian – disappeared from the world map, 16 million people were dead and 20 million wounded, and in 1917 the Bolsheviks came to power. These things may have happened at some point anyway, but it was Gavrilo Princip who sparked it all off.

The Wall Street Journal recently compared him to Osama Bin Laden, and reviewing Christopher Clark's bestseller The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914, one author goes so far as to state that Princip "did a great deal to make the Holocaust possible". Not only was the second world war a consequence of the first world war, but in an irony only history can invent, the young terrorist died miserably in April 1918 in the same prison that later became the concentration camp of Theresienstadt.

Although blaming a single person for the Holocaust is similar to the controversial theory in The Jew of Linz – which claims that the incident responsible for Adolf Hitler becoming antisemitic was a schoolboy interaction in Linz in 1904 with the Jewish philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein – for the first time a Serbian weekly recently published a picture that proves how important Princip was to Hitler. It shows Hitler being given a memorial stone that commemorated Princip, taken by the Nazis from the Sarajevo street where Princip opened fire on Ferdinand. The weekly paper Vreme says the memorial was presented as a gift to Hitler by German officers during the second world war as he celebrated his 52nd birthday on 20 April 1941. Three days earlier Yugoslavia had capitulated after being invaded by Nazi Germany and its allies.

About the same time as this picture was published in Serbia, neighbouring Bosnia – where the "Sarajevo, the heart of Europe" celebration will take place on 28 June – announced a new monument to Ferdinand. A few months later the Serbian government announced that it will build a big monument to Princip.

So who was the hero and who was the victim? It seems the old formula could be applied once again: "One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." In the case of Princip, which side should we choose? The answer is clear: both are wrong.

What is missing here is the third option. None of the above monuments gets the picture right; both represent historical revisionism at its worst. According to the historical archives, during the hearing of Princip on 12 October 1914, when asked by the judge what kind of idea stood behind the assassination, the young terrorist answered plainly: "I believe in the unification of all south Slavs." Although he was surely used by the Serbian ultra-nationalist organisation Black Hand, Gavrilo and his comrades were not nationalists. This can also be proved by the books they had read: the evening before the assassination, Gavrilo was reading Peter Kropotkin's "Memoirs of a Revolutionist", while on the same evening another member of their revolutionary organisation Young Bosnia (Mlada Bosna), Danilo Ilić – only three years older than Princip and already a translator of Kierkegaard, Ibsen and Edgar Allan Poe – was translating Oscar Wilde. Another member of Young Bosnia and its main ideologist, Vladimir Gaćinović, was a friend of Victor Serge, Julius Martov and Leon Trotsky.

If we want to explain the shot that was heard around the world, we should first explain its historical context. It was not Princip but imperialism that drove us to the first world war. And contrary to the current trend for historical revisionism – be it the Serbian version of Princip as a "nationalist hero" or the Bosnian obsequiousness to Ferdinand – those young people were primarily political romantics and anti-imperialists.

So why does Princip still matter? Usually we think 100 years is a long period, sufficient to learn some lessons from history, but if anything, it is exactly the first world war centenary that proves again that maybe the only thing we learn from history is that we do not learn from it at all. As long as the worldwide competition for the best commemoration of 28th June remains a self-congratulatory spectacle, European nations might be sleepwalking into war again.