The Trigger (22 page)

Along with religious instruction in the faith of the Habsburg Empire – Catholicism – students also received instruction in Orthodox Christianity, Islam and Judaism. Clearly the view was that to do business in Bosnia, trainee merchants must have knowledge of the country’s different ethnic groups, and to do that you needed to know something about their religion. History was not one of the subjects on offer to the class in this first year, although language was taken very seriously. As well as the language of the occupier – German – the pupils had lessons in their native language. I was intrigued to see that the same sensitivities that I came across in the twenty-first century had applied a hundred years earlier. In the language box on the form the printed term ‘Bosnian’ had been scrawled through by someone with red ink and replaced with the handwritten term ‘Serbo-Croatian’. Use of the term ‘Bosnian’ implied the existence of a Bosnian national identity, an issue clearly of some sensitivity even at the start of the twentieth century.

Inside the folder, Princip’s name was recorded in a flourish of copperplate manuscript, his first name abbreviated to Gavro, just as his descendants had referred to him affectionately when I had listened to the family history back at the start of the journey in Obljaj. The section for recording any bursary or scholarship showed that he received nothing, and his address in Sarajevo was given as 4 Oprkanj Street.

His date of birth was correctly recorded except for the month, which was entered as June, not July as official records have it back in Obljaj – a divergence that came close to costing him his life following the assassination of the Archduke. Under the Austro-Hungarian criminal code, a prisoner guilty of a capital crime could only be executed if aged twenty or older on the day of the offence. Had he been born on 13 June 1894 he would have hanged, as that would have made him twenty when the Archduke was shot on 28 June 1914. After a long investigation – not helped when his own mother, Marija, got into a muddle over exactly when her son had been born – the best legal minds available in Austria–Hungary settled on 13 July 1894 as his actual date of birth, saving him from the death sentence by a matter of days.

The report then graded his performance through the academic year, which was divided into two long terms, each several months in duration. Although he had arrived in the city with nothing more than a rural primary-school education behind him, Princip really shone. The normal starting age for secondary education was eleven, making the thirteen-year-old new boy a little old for his first year, although the class records indicated a wide spread of ages among classmates and he was not necessarily the oldest. Such an age range was to be expected in a country with a poorly developed education system. Under Ottoman rule, schooling had been almost non-existent, something that was changing only slowly under the Austro-Hungarians. Interestingly, all the Bosnian schools Princip studied at were open to students from any of the country’s ethnic groups and there was no dogma that insisted on the reports being kept in the Western, Latin script used by the Habsburgs. Some of the reports were written in Latin script, but several others were in Cyrillic. The register for his class recorded names of Bosnian Serbs like himself alongside Jewish students, Bosnian Croats and Bosnian Muslims. The boy who ran away in fright when he saw a Sarajevan innkeeper from the Bosnian Muslim community was now living and learning alongside young people from across the ethnic spectrum.

Princip’s descendants in Obljaj had told me that he had done well at school, but the marks I found in his early school reports were extraordinary. He scored highly across all subjects and improved as the year progressed, ending with the highest possible overall grade. Maths was his best academic subject, German his worst, although here he still scored far above the average in the class. In terms of behaviour, he scored almost perfect marks for conduct and did not miss a single lesson. Princip was clearly yet to develop his troublemaking streak.

His report for the following academic year, from autumn 1908 to summer 1909, showed that he followed the standard trajectory by going up a year to Class IIb, the Second Grade. His scholarship remained nil and his address was unchanged at 4 Oprkanj, along with the same incorrectly recorded month of birth. But now his scores began to dip, his rating for behaviour being much worse, his grade for maths slipping and twenty lessons being missed across the year. The school then changed its name to the Professional Merchants’ School, and when Princip went back in autumn 1909 the Third Grade that he joined was named Class I Professional. The school report showed that this year he was the recipient of a scholarship worth 150 crowns from Prosvjeta, a Serbian cultural group, and suggested that he had moved from Oprkanj Street, recording two addresses in the city for that year: one on Franz Joseph Street, the other on Upper Bjelava Street. Another unpublished document that I came across at the Sarajevo Historical Archives, the official records of an Austro-Hungarian census carried out across their Bosnian colony on 18 April 1910, had Princip lodging at a further address, this time on Jezero Street with old family friends originally from the Obljaj area, Ačim Bozić and his wife, Staka.

His academic marks were now in free fall, with absenteeism rocketing to sixty-eight lessons missed in the first term alone of the 1909–10 year. Princip’s commitment to the Professional Merchants’ School had clearly gone, and he did not make it through to the end of the academic year. Notes in red ink recorded that on 11 May 1910 he left the Merchants’ School ‘with the permission of his parents’, although he was not giving up on school, transferring instead from the commercial school to the grammar system.

Princip’s family members in Obljaj had said that from an early age he was so bookish that he sometimes overlooked his shepherding duties, and here was proof that this bookishness had led to more academic ambitions. After an early taste of secondary education in Sarajevo through the trade school, he wanted to complete all eight grades and perhaps even go on to university – a rarity for Bosnian students at the time, when official figures for 1902 stated that only thirty locals had a university education. Princip’s aim of completing all eight grades would be impossible to fulfil if he stayed where he was at the Professional Merchants’ School, an institution designed to produce shopkeepers and traders and which did not go all the way up to the eighth grade. To be able to complete the full secondary-education cycle he would have to enter the grammar-school system.

Dedijer suggested there was another reason for Princip’s 1910 switch, claiming that the fifteen-year-old’s awareness of politics meant he now viewed the mercantile interests of the Merchants’ School as too bourgeois. Although Dedijer gives no evidence, this account chimed with the reports I had found. Whatever the motive for the switch, Princip was clearly determined to make it happen, even though it meant leaving Sarajevo temporarily and first moving to a grammar school in Tuzla, a provincial city in the north of Bosnia, for the start of the 1910–11 school year. Again, I was able to find the school report from Tuzla, although it recorded simply that Princip studied there for only the first month of the year, attending as a boarder and without any of the scholarship he had enjoyed the year before. The report recorded that no sooner had term begun than Princip left Tuzla on 7 October 1910, transferring back to Sarajevo, where a place had become available at the most prestigious school in the land, the High Gymnasium.

The founding of this showpiece institution was one of the first acts by the Austro-Hungarians when they occupied Sarajevo. After so many centuries of Ottoman rule in Bosnia, routinely described by Westerners as unenlightened, the establishment of a modern education system was another statement of political intent by the new colonists. The school network they set up was piecemeal, thinly covering the whole country, but it benefited many young Bosnians who would otherwise have had no meaningful education. Among them were Princip and many other activists who would work to bring down the same empire that had made possible their education.

By the time Princip came to study at the High Gymnasium in the late autumn of 1910 it was housed in a prominent, purpose-built colonial building set just back from the Appel Quay boulevard, which was created through the straightening of the Miljacka. The school is of such historical importance that its image has appeared on Bosnian postcards and postage stamps, and lists have been published of its star alumni, including luminaries such as Ivo Andrić. Princip’s name does not make it onto those lists.

The 1910–11 school year would be the last Princip would complete in Bosnia. His report notes that he arrived at the start of the year from Tuzla, records that he had no scholarship and gives him yet another city address, this time on Mjedenica Street. After such a stellar performance in his first year at the Merchants’ School, the end-of-year grades for pupil number 21 of the High Gymnasium’s Class IVb, the Fourth Grade, make dismal reading. His highest score was a B in gymnastics and most of his other grades were D. The report says his Latin exam was retaken in the summer holiday, on 18 August 1911, some weeks after he had trekked up Mount Igman and written his doom-laden description of the forest by night. The report shows he scraped a D in the resit, still enough to allow him to go up to the next grade: Class Vb, the Fifth Grade. He would attend only the first few months of the new academic year and his Fifth Grade school report, which places him at a new address (this time on Hadji Suleyman Street), contains no performance grades. He did not attend enough classes to earn a rank as his Bosnian school career petered out, the end being marked by a teacher’s note that said simply: ‘failed to attend exam, Sarajevo, 28 Feb 1912’. Dedijer wrote that Princip was expelled for taking part in demonstrations against the Austro-Hungarian authorities, but the school records make no mention of this.

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.

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.