The Trigger (23 page)

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.’

Dedijer named the girl as Vukosava, the younger sister of one of Princip’s associates in Sarajevo, although the passion got little further than him giving her a copy of his favourite Oscar Wilde stories. There is a legend that Princip wrote Vukosava many letters and poems, opening his heart and expressing to her his innermost feelings and thoughts. But as with the original co1urt transcript and much else connected with Princip, these letters – if they ever existed – went missing. The story went that Vukosava buried them in a village out in the Bosnian countryside during the First World War, but somehow in all the turmoil they were never retrieved. This did not stop acquaintances of the young couple recomposing some of the text of these love-letters and publishing them in the years after the First World War. By then the interest in Princip was of such intensity that many friends, contemporaries and acquaintances wrote books and memoirs about their time with the young assassin. I rather fear the desire to be published overcame adherence to the truth.

Princip’s retiring, solitary nature did not necessarily win him friends, with some of his contemporaries regarding this behaviour as superior and boastful. Dobroslav Jevdjević gave a rather damning character reference for him in a sworn statement that was read out at the trial following the assassination: ‘Gavro Princip stood out … He pretended that no one was better than he, especially in his knowledge of literature and he used to say that he was the best among us.’ Dedijer described the two as ‘intimate friends’, something I found strange. The whole tone of Jevdjević’s testimony was very negative regarding Princip, and when the statement had been read out the defendant objected fiercely that many of Jevdjević’s assertions were wrong. ‘It is true that I had a conflict with him,’ Princip announced to the court.