‘The First Shots of the First World War’: The Sarajevo Assassination in History and Memory

Abstract

We all know the image. Many of us first saw it in our school texts or local newspaper whenever the First World War was on the lesson plan or another anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination rolled around. It has adorned book covers and album covers, appeared in serious works of scholarship, university-level textbooks, museums, children’s books, and comic strips. And today it is all over the Internet. It is, one could say, iconic. Taken just minutes after the murder, the photograph forces our eye to the far right, where a dapperly dressed man is being brutally propelled towards an open doorway by an Austrian gendarme and plain-clothes policeman. Although the man’s face slants downward with the rest of his resisting body, its grimace is palpable, and pained. The jostling crowd behind, meanwhile, bolsters the scene’s forward momentum, while in the centre of the image a second, sabre-wielding gendarme is pushing aside a man in a fez. As everyone knows and even Wikipedia confirms, it is the arrest of Gavrilo Princip.1 Or is it? On the tenth anniversary of the Sarajevo assassination, one Ferdo Ber (Ferdinand Behr) allegedly saw the photo in the Vienna paper Das Interessante Blatt and recognized himself.2 It is unclear why Ber would wait until 1930 to publish an article in the Sarajevo journal Pregled describing his surprise at first spotting the picture. Perhaps it was beginning to become ubiquitous, though the photo had appeared on the cover of Wiener Bilder as early as July 5, 1914, with the caption: ‘The arrest of the murderer Princip’.3 Then, too, Ber used the occasion to describe how he had grabbed the arm of a gendarme who was beating Princip and, ‘with colorful language’, bellowed in German