Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I by Paul Miller-Melamed (review)

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• Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I by Paul Miller-Melamed
• Eric Grube

Paul Miller-Melamed, Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I. New York: Oxford UP, 2022. 280 pp.

Paul Miller-Melamed’s Misfire: The Sarajevo Assassination and the Winding Road to World War I is an attempt at yet another monograph concerning the origins of the First World War. For his main thesis, Miller-Melamed asserts that the assassination in and of itself was not the “cause” of the later conflict, which he argues arose strictly due to the brinkmanship, bravado, miscalculations, and miscommunications of the statesmen of Austria-Hungary, and to a lesser extent Serbia, Russia, and Germany. To be sure, there’s hardly anything novel there, especially for historians familiar with the topic, which he himself states outright. Indeed, with the outbreak of World War I, there was plenty of blame to go around, and one can find it where-and whenever one decides to focus. Thus, the strength of this book lies not with this well-established thesis. Instead, this work shines because of the author’s more nuanced sub-claims, which stem from his coverage of the complex Balkan affairs in the decades before the war.

More specifically, throughout the book Miller-Melamed adroitly dismisses a litany of popular myths that have arisen around the murders, ranging from the seemingly trivial to the deeply analytical. The most [End Page 111] intriguing claim here is when he dismantles presumptions of official Serbian condonation, complicity, and premeditated policy to help the Black Hand carry out this infamous deed. Indeed, he presents the Black Hand as not just a reductive, if fittingly ominous, misnomer but also as a red herring. He urges us to consider and recognize not some abstract, grandiose conspiracy but instead, the agency of each Bosnian individual who clumsily planned and carried out the assassination. As such, we get a deep, almost dossier-style profile of the young, militant activists, none of whom (he asserts) has any teleological connection to the terrorism that has haunted the twenty-first century. Thus does he shift the narrative to emphasize the motivations, lifestyles, and actions of this loosely fraternal Bosnian group rather than the nefarious Black Hand. But in so doing, he does not lose sight of nuance, being sure to address the ties of each Bosnian youth to certain agents in Serbia, many of whom had more prosaic, domestic political reasons for pushing for trouble abroad.

To prove this point about the agency of these young Bosnian men, Miller-Melamed could stand to be more explicit in his use of sources. He pulls heavily from the trial proceedings of these Bosnian agents, but these defenses present problematic evidence. The assassins were to commit suicide to avoid interrogation that might link them to broader circles. But they failed to do so. Their ensuing testimonies, which he claims prove their own agency independent of Serbian influences, may have been rehearsed, scripted, or even parroted to avoid linking them to broader transborder circles. Their answers assuredly reflected a shrewd strategy, given that they were made under an explicit power dynamic: as captives to captor, with the verdict all but foreordained. My point here perhaps stems from the sort of paranoid, conspiratorial thinking Miller-Melamed warns against, but these sources warrant an extended methodological discussion of how to read such transcripts and corroborate them with other sources.

Regarding structure, Miller-Melamed mostly organizes the book around a dual biography of assassin and victims. This method works in revealing the human story he is after: the personal contingencies at play, the multitudes of happenstances, and the overall tragedy of errors that put Ferdinand and Princip face to face on 28 June 1914. And he does a tremendous job of presenting those mistakes as very human errors to showcase just how perfectly explainable each “accident” really was. But this twin biography method starts to falter when suturing the individual life stories to the larger fin-de-siècle geopolitical contexts he covers. The resulting narrative is rather disjointed, [End Page 112] with frequent jumps, stops, pauses, and leaps to other...