At the trial following the assassination Princip claimed, under cross-examination, that he left school in Sarajevo after falling ill and resolving to continue his studies in Belgrade – the capital of what was then the small but growing nation of Serbia, Bosnia’s independent neighbour to the east. When asked why he wanted to do this, he answered obliquely, saying, ‘That is my private affair.’
The best clue explaining how this clearly capable student with academic ambitions came to abandon schooling in his homeland comes not from the personal report for his final year, but instead from the High Gymnasium’s yearbook for 1911–12. Under the list of Fifth Grade students who dropped out that year there are thirteen names. Princip is one of them, but among the others are Trifko Grabež and Lazar Djukić. All three would be dead within a few years, sacrificing their lives to the cause of fighting Austro-Hungarian rule in Bosnia. This was just one grade at one Bosnian school, and yet three of that year’s dropouts would become revolutionaries of the most militant stamp. It was a pattern repeated across the country in the early twentieth century as the education system became Bosnia’s primary breeding ground for radicalism, a Petri dish in which political plots could morph like multiplying bacteria into thoughts of change, direct action, even assassination.
CHAPTER 8
Fin-de-siècle Chat Rooms
Princip posing with older brother, Jovo, left, and younger brother, Nikola, right, circa 1910
Postcard written by Princip to a female relative, Persa, back in Obljaj, circa 1913
The school reports I had found gave new life to my mental picture of the adolescent Gavrilo Princip. He would still be in his teens when he assassinated the Archduke, so these formative years of education were of real significance. Here was evidence of an outlier student who began by defying a provincial childhood of extreme poverty to outperform fellow students from much richer, more sophisticated families in the capital city. At first he could not stop himself from doing the conventional thing by studying hard and obeying the teachers – no more so than could those members of the Princip family back in Obljaj who over the generations had worked as border guards and policemen for the colonial authorities, first Ottoman, more recently Austro-Hungarian.
The earliest photograph of Princip, one I retrieved from an archive in Belgrade, dates from this early period of his schooling, a souvenir family portrait taken in a professional studio with all three Princip brothers as its centrepiece. They appear rather self-conscious, stiff even, determined both to look away from the camera and to show publicly that they had broken with their peasant serf roots. The oldest brother, Jovo, sits to one side, fashionable flat cap on his head, cigarette in his left hand. Over on the other side Nikola, the youngest, maybe not yet in his teens, rests on a fake balustrade, with his arms tightly crossed in front of a painted backdrop showing a very un-Bosnian scene, an ornate, landscaped garden. Gavrilo has been given the most prominent position, right in the middle.
The photograph is not dated, but it would appear to have been taken in Sarajevo around the time of the 1910 census. The official form I found for the population count showed that Gavrilo, aged fifteen, was not the only Princip boy then lodging at Jezero Street with the Bozić family. Nikola, aged twelve, was recorded as living at the same address, having also come to the ‘big city’ to receive an education. All other pictures of Princip, which date from around the time of the assassination in 1914, show him with a rather hunted, even haunted appearance: face drawn, eyes sunken. But in this early photograph alongside his brothers we see a very different boy. His face is full and healthy, the shaped chin that is so characteristic of the Princip family is clearly visible and his hair is neatly parted. He wears a smart three-piece suit over a collared shirt and tie, while for footwear peasant clogs have been replaced by lace-up leather shoes. In his hands he holds a book: the very image of the dutiful, hard-working, successful scholar.
And yet this A-grade student turned. To understand why, I would have to search out other sources. He had kept no diary, and only a few scraps of his own writing survive along with a handful of photographs, so I was drawn instead to the extensive legal and medical records from the Austro-Hungarian authorities that arose following the assassination. Under cross-examination during the trial that followed the shooting and as part of the police investigation, he answered numerous questions about his background and schooling. Other clues come from the records of an Austrian psychiatrist, Dr Martin Pappenheim, who was allowed to visit him four times during his imprisonment. Dr Pappenheim, a professor from the University of Vienna, asked a wide range of questions, probing not just the 1914 assassination, but also the life experiences and intellectual development that led up to the event. These clinical notes were published verbatim in 1926 by an Austrian publisher in German, and in English by an American magazine the following year.
The dominant theme that emerges from these sources is a growing anger, one that drove a young man to kick back against a way of life imposed from above. The rage was directed against the Austro-Hungarian colonial occupier of Bosnia, but in essence it was no different from that felt in the same period by the Russian serf struggling against tsarist exploitation, or the British worker still without a representative political party in Parliament, or the peasantry calling for home rule in other parts of the Balkans such as modern-day Macedonia or Slovenia or Croatia. The history of these many struggles is rich and involved, but in essence it has one common feature: the rage of the oppressed.
What marks out Princip’s anger is that it grew to consume him, knocking off-course the dutiful student and ultimately leading to direct action. This was a young man who, as his family told me so proudly, could not help himself doing whatever was necessary to protect victims of bullying, whether it was hitting a primary-school teacher with a pencil case or getting into a fight with an abusive imperial gendarme. And what I found intriguing was how it all began with his first journey to Sarajevo – an experience which showed him that the poverty he experienced growing up was the same across the country, through all of Bosnia’s south-Slav communities. The dire conditions that killed six of his siblings in infancy applied all over a territory where an impoverished peasantry was still by far the largest single social cohort. And as he spent more time in the capital city, events took place that spread his anger to the older generation of his own people, local leaders from the south-Slav communities grown docile under the rule of Austria–Hungary. To bring about meaningful change, the older generations could not be relied upon.
The politics of change had been mobilising the young across Europe from far back in the nineteenth century. From 1848, the year when so much of Europe flirted with revolution, to the Paris Commune in 1870s France, the 1881 assassination of the Russian Tsar, Alexander II, and the Young Turk rebellion of 1908 that hastened the end of the Ottoman Empire, a central role was played by younger generations. As the twentieth century began, the forces of reaction were holding on, but calls for change were growing all over Europe, especially among the young. When these went unheeded, support grew for more radical change. Britain today might enjoy a reputation for stability, but it was not immune. Emily Davison, a campaigner who called for nothing more radical than the right for women to vote, was in her thirties when she left the following rallying cry on the wall of a prison cell in 1909: ‘Rebellion against tyrants is obedience to God.’ Four years later she would die after throwing herself in front of the King’s horse at the Derby.
The exact same forces found purchase among the younger generations in Bosnia, so much so that a movement grew up that they would later call Mlada Bosna or Young Bosnia. That is not to say it was a single, disciplined party with a coherent structure, leadership or set of internal rules. It would be more accurate to describe it as an amorphous grouping of diverse young people from across Bosnia’s ethnic and social spectrum, coalescing around one shared aim: the removal of Habsburg colonial rule. Ideas about how this would be achieved and what type of regime would come in its place
did not enjoy the same unanimity. These questions remained unsettled, subject to fierce debate and bitter disagreement. But what stands out to me – as someone who saw Bosnia pull itself to pieces in the 1990s over ethnicity – is that the group was not called Young Serbs or Young Croats or Young Muslims. By using the name Young Bosnia, there was a deliberate attempt to achieve inclusivity, a common purpose between all those living in Bosnia that was not limited by ethnicity and religion.
In the eyes of many observers, Bosnia’s geographical position on the south-east Balkan periphery of Europe served to distance it fundamentally from the rest of the continent. When the 1990s war was raging, Western politicians sought to decouple their world from Bosnia. John Major, then the British Prime Minister, implied that it was a place unlinked to the West when he spoke of conflict driven by ‘ancient hatreds’. It was perhaps John Gunther, the American author, who best captured this sharp and rather resentful presumption of disconnect between the Balkans and the rest of the world. He wrote in Inside Europe:
It is an intolerable affront to human and political nature that these wretched and unhappy little countries in the Balkan peninsula can, and do, have quarrels that cause world war. Some hundred and fifty thousand young Americans died because of an event in 1914 in a mud-caked primitive village, Sarajevo.
Yet the more I read about the country at the time when Princip was losing his way at school, the more I saw it as fully joined up with European political thinking at the time. The Mlada Bosna movement reflected perfectly the spectrum of political debate occupying minds throughout Edwardian Europe: the gradualism of social democracy, the theoretical promise of revolutionary socialism, the turmoil of anarchism, and all points between. The same political tracts that stirred so much revolutionary thinking elsewhere in Europe were steadily becoming available, smuggled into Bosnia under the noses of the Austro-Hungarian censors – every publication that made it through being a gesture of defiance against the foreign occupier.
The works of Bakunin, Kropotkin, Marx, Gorky, Dostoyevsky and others were handed around like forbidden scripture to be parsed, analysed, discussed, memorised, copied and distributed. As they did for the downtrodden all over Europe, these thinkers raised in the minds of radical young Bosnians the possibility of changing a stratified, feudal social order that had altered little in hundreds of years. The young might not have had the Internet chat rooms of the twenty-first century, but they did have school libraries, youth clubs and coffee houses, and it was here that the merits of socialism, anarchism and nationalism were all boisterously debated. Secret societies emerged, sometimes modelled along the strict need-to-know basis of Russian revolutionary cells, protected by oaths and passwords and under constant attack by spies in the pay of the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Some of the student activities in Sarajevo were so low-level as to be almost harmless: a campaign to deface signs printed in German, the language of the occupier; another to pull down flags showing emblems associated with the Austro-Hungarian authorities. Graffiti would appear denouncing the foreign rulers or Schwaben, as they were pejoratively referred to by young Bosnians. But with assassination an already established reality of early-twentieth-century politics, one that had claimed the lives of prime ministers, plenipotentiaries and presidents from France, to Russia, the United States and beyond, the potential impact of secret student groups could not be ignored.
The Austro-Hungarian occupiers were fully aware that young Bosnians were experimenting with political ideas that clashed with the fundamentals of traditional imperial rule, and made great efforts to suppress them. Student societies were outlawed and anyone caught violating this rule faced expulsion. The high school in Mostar was a particular hot zone for Mlada Bosna, so much so that in 1913 the whole school was shut by the colonial authorities. In the same year 141 secondary-school students were arrested across Bosnia and tried for membership of groups hostile to the state.
But try as they might to close off this seam of angry young people, the Austro-Hungarians failed – in many ways victims of their own success at empire-building. Bosnia was, after all, a component part of the Habsburg Empire at the start of the twentieth century. Its population, including any student sufficiently rich and qualified to seek out further education, could travel easily to Vienna and other nexuses of political thought across Europe. As citizens of the empire, Bosnians needed no passport to travel across its vast territory and their only obligation was to register at the police station of any town or city they reached. At his trial Princip recounted how, as he became older, he had travelled extensively through the empire, visiting Zagreb, capital of today’s independent country of Croatia, and other cities outside Bosnia on the Adriatic coastline.
Leon Trotsky, then based alongside so many other would-be revolutionaries in the political hothouse that was early-twentieth-century Vienna, would take a close interest in Mlada Bosna. On a number of occasions he met several of its senior figures, influencing some of its internal ideological discussions, not least on the old trope of whether socialist revolution was possible in a rural, peasant society such as Bosnia, which had no significant industrial proletariat. Other young Bosnian schemers made pilgrimages to Zurich to meet leading Russian revolutionaries within the circle of Lenin, himself a longtime exile in Switzerland. Links would reach right across Europe, with Edith Sitwell, the avant-garde English poet, later falling under the influence of the mystic and poet Dimitrije Mitrinović, who was born in Herzegovina and was one of the earliest Mlada Bosna pioneers. He had been among the first wave of student troublemakers at Mostar high school, where he had set up a secret library to exchange revolutionary texts. Bosnia was fully linked up with contemporary political debate and, although it might be geographically on the edge of Europe, in many ways this made it all the more important. History teaches us that it is on the margins that the greatest change often happens.
From the moment in 1907 when Princip was lodged in Sarajevo at the house of the widow Ilić, there was no chance he could avoid exposure to Bosnian youth politics. The person he shared a room with at Oprkanj Street was already a keen admirer of all that Mlada Bosna stood for. Danilo Ilić, the landlady’s son, was four years older than the thirteen-year-old boy from the provinces given the spare bed in his room. An unsettled young man, Danilo had a life that was typical of those young Bosnians experimenting with politics at the time. After qualifying as a teacher, he failed to settle down to a career in education, wandering instead between jobs as a bank clerk, proofreader and journalist writing columns critical of the Austro-Hungarians, but unsure how best to serve the goal of taking on the occupiers of his homeland.
Princip soon became friends with the older boy, who showed him how to find his way in Sarajevo, starting with the teeming bazaar so close to the front door. But their relationship would soon reach beyond ways to survive in the big city. Ilić was already caught up in underground youth politics, so much so that he would later travel to Switzerland and beyond, meeting revolutionaries and carrying back to Sarajevo their latest publications. His journeying would become so extensive that, according to Dedijer, Danilo Ilić became known by other young Bosnians in Sarajevo as Hadji – as if he were a pilgrim bringing back life’s inner secrets from Mecca.
Princip turned out to be a slow-burn revolutionary, only gradually embracing the radical politics that drew in his room-mate so fully. When he arrived in Sarajevo he was already a keen reader and for these early years in the city, when his school performance was still so good, he was remembered by schoolmates as a solitary, private individual who preferred to surround himself with books. In these early days he read nothing more inflammatory than the work of Alexandre Dumas, Oscar Wilde and Walter Scott, while joining the many Sarajevans who eagerly devoured the Sherlock Holmes whodunits serialised in popular local news-sheets. Dr Pappenheim’s clinical notes were consistent with the school reports I found:
No diseases in the family . . . Always has been healthy . . . Always an ‘excellent student’ up to the fifth grade .
. . Was not much with other schoolboys, always alone. Was always quiet, sentimental child. Always earnest with books, pictures, &c. Even as a child was not particularly religious.
As he matured, Princip sought to express himself through poetry, scribbling away for hours and sharing the results with friends. They were not impressed. At one point he tried to summon the courage to submit one of his compositions to Ivo Andrić, only a few years his senior, but already a young man with a reputation as one of Sarajevo’s finest literary talents. Princip could not overcome his nerves and chickened out in the end. His failure calls to mind another would-be artist struggling to survive at exactly the same time in another Austro-Hungarian city. In around 1910 Adolf Hitler was trying to make it as a painter in Vienna. He too failed and was forced to direct his energies elsewhere.
Numerous friends reported that the young Princip did not drink and he did not chase members of the opposite sex. There was one girl he did have a special bond with, according to the psychiatrist, Dr Pappenheim, although it was a chaste, unconsummated relationship that he did not want to discuss. ‘Relates he knew her in the fourth class,’ the doctor’s notes stated. ‘Ideal love; never kissed; in this connection will reveal no more of himself.’