Each year, 28 June is always a day of meditation for me, because it was on that day, 110 years ago, in a town in Bosnia-Herzegovina of the Habsburg Empire, that a magnicide brought about the end of a world. It was a world that Stefan Zweig would later evoke in the title of his book, Die Welt von Gestern: Erinnerungen eines Europäers (The World of Yesterday: Memoirs of a European). From the chaos that followed, another world was born—the world in which we still live.
A pair of shots—those with which the young Gavrilo Princip killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg—were the end of the world of yesterday in which Zweig and the archdukes lived, coexisted, and dominated. The world of the imperial and national European constitutional monarchies of the 19th century, and of the triumphant bourgeoisies of the Industrial Revolution was ended by the Great War.
In his memoir, Stefan Zweig recounted this ‘world,’ this age. Vienna at the beginning of the 20th century was a golden place for someone of his class—”the good old Jewish bourgeoisie.” Zweig’s father was a successful textile industrialist, and his mother came from a family of bankers in Ancona, Italy. The young Zweig knew the world of yesterday well; he travelled through the Paris of the Belle Époque, through Edwardian London, and saw much of the world. Then came the summer of 1914, a summer that he—and many like him throughout Europe—had no reason to think would change the world forever.
Visit on a Summer Morning
Sarajevo was a Balkan city founded in 1461 by Isa Bey Ishaković, an Ottoman governor of Bosnia. The city had its days of glory and misfortune; it had been an important urban centre in a region where empires were fighting. Prince Eugene of Savoy had conquered it and burned it to the ground in 1697, leaving little standing. But in the 19th century it was rebuilt again, and the Habsburg armies took the city from the Bosnians and the Ottomans in 1878. Afterwards, the Congress of Berlin determined an ambiguous regime for the region, a region in which members of three faiths—Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodoxy—and various empires, nations, and tribes were fighting each other.
The Habsburgs triumphed in the war, but the occupation was not easy, and local resistance continued for decades. On 28 June 1914, the Habsburg couple arrived by train from Ilidze, in Bosnia. The conspirators were seven in number, belonging to a secret association, the Black Hand, headed by a shadowy Serbian colonel with a large build and the nickname ‘Apis.’ The visit of Franz Ferdinand, Emperor Franz Joseph’s nephew and the heir to the throne, was a provocation for them. The conspirators decided to assassinate him. Moreover, in the Julian Calendar, 28 June was St. Vitus’ Day, the day of the battle in 1389 when Prince Lazar’s Christian Serbian army was defeated by the Turks on the Blackbird Field.
There are photographs of that 28 June, which were taken by the official photographer of the Vienna Court, with the visiting couple disembarking from the station and moving towards the Gräf und Stift coupé that was waiting for them. Then there is a tragic-grotesque sequence: the seven freshmen terrorists were armed with bombs and pistols, arranged along the route of the motorcade. As the Archduke and his wife left the railway station, one of the seven, Nedjelko Cabrinovic, an anarchist member of the Black Hand, threw a bomb, which missed the Archduke’s car and exploded under the next car, injuring the passengers. The terrorist tried to kill himself with cyanide, but he was grabbed by the police and attacked by the crowd—he survived.
Amid this turmoil, and after a pathetic welcome session at the Town Hall where the mayor ignored the attack, Franz Ferdinand decided to visit those injured in the bomb attack. A.J.P. Taylor relates, with his masterly blend of historical accuracy and English humour, what happened—the mistake made by the Archduke’s chauffeur; Gavrilo and one of his companions, frustrated by the earlier failure, were standing on the pavement. When they saw the car carrying the hated Habsburg couple, Princip approached and, with two shots, killed the Duchess and the Archduke.
The Sleepwalkers in the World of Yesterday
What happened in the weeks following the Sarajevo assassination was a game of alliances and snarling declarations, a story told in convergence or polemic by authors such as David Fromkin (Europe’s Last Summer) and David Stevenson (Cataclysm: The First World War as Political Tragedy) or in The First World War series produced by Hew Strachan, a military historian and Oxford professor. The best portrait of the plot that led to war is in the narrative by Australian Christopher Clark, The Sleepwalkers (2012).
Perhaps Europeans were tired of the long peace since Waterloo, but the truth is that the road to war and the disasters of war were born in July 1914. Vienna wanted to punish the Serbs, even though the Serbs had warned of the dangers of the attack beforehand and had humiliated themselves almost to the limit. The Kaiser, besides loving uniforms, had a commitment with the Habsburgs in the Triple Alliance; the Russians couldn’t abandon the Serbs, their South Slav brothers; the French wanted to wash away the defeat of 1870-1871; the British looked at all these misfortunes on the Continent with some distance, but they had an Entente with their former French enemy and feared the new industrial power of the Continent—Bismarck’s unified Germany.
And so, it came to war. In addition to the millions of war dead and the transformation of the people into masses in the great battles of fire and steel, the war gave birth to the Bolshevik revolution and the first modern totalitarianism. From the response and fear of the revolution came authoritarian Italian fascism, albeit moderated by Latinity. But then came Hitler, in whom the Germans humiliated by Versailles saw only a Messiah who could restore pride and lost borders. Humiliation, rancour, conspiracism, and fanaticism led to the Apocalypse.
Stephan Zweig saw it all. He realised the danger for his kind in the Greater Germany of the Linz Caporal. He wrote his memoir about that “world of yesterday” while in exile in Europe and in North America. He sent the original to the publisher on the eve of his suicide, with his wife in Petrópolis, Brazil, far from Europe, and even farther from the world he eulogized. For yesterday’s world wasn’t just that of the douceur de vivre and of the aristocracies and bourgeoisies of Vienna and Paris. It was the Eurocentric world of imperialisms that were beginning to be benevolent and where, despite everything, alternatives and counter-powers were being accepted—a world where the new middle classes were being born out of progressive liberalisation and democratisation.
But all that came to an end on a morning of Sarajevo, with Gavrilo Princip, the volunteer for death who ended up, still within the rules of yesterday’s world, being tried and condemned. Princip hated the world that he believed marginalised and despised him. But the emperors, kings, presidents, ministers, and diplomats who set Europe on fire were from that world. That is why, like sleepwalkers, they were able to walk into an end to it. Let the lesson be learnt by the masters of this world—a world of sleepwalkers and worse—110 years after that fateful morning in Sarajevo.
