The Trigger
By Tim Butcher,
Chatto & Windus, 326 pages, £18.99
The 20th century began in earnest in Sarajevo and ended there too: bookends of history stained in blood. A first-time visitor to the city may well wonder why this gentle and quietly elegant place set in a valley surrounded by imposing verdant hills was selected to play this tragic role on the European stage. In his latest book, Tim Butcher sets out to provide some answers. Butcher is best known for his remarkable political travelogue “Blood River”, about the Congo, and “The Trigger” is similarly ambitious.
By going in search of an individual legacy, he aims to cast light on those two bloody bookends. The man in question is Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian student, who stepped into history on June 28, 1914 when he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the act that triggered the First World War. Princip came from a part of Herzegovina that Butcher describes as vukojebina — a place as desolate and as windswept an environment as one might care to imagine.
In a colourful scene, Butcher spots the twinkling blue eyes of a wolf in a forest after he heads southeast along the same route that Princip took from his home village to Sarajevo. Butcher starts his journey in that village, Obljaj, by meeting some surviving members of the Princip clan. The Princips display a mixture of hospitality and parochialism which is a common feature of many rural areas in the Balkans. Their ancestor had been born into a Bosnia-Herzegovina that was under Austro-Hungarian occupation.
Vienna had seized the opportunity to take the territory after the Congress of Berlin in 1878. But it was the Habsburgs’ decision to annex the area in 1908 that ratcheted up tension between them and the government in neighbouring Serbia. Russia, too, was displeased by the Austro-Hungarian move and for this reason Bosnia became a potential primer for a much larger explosion. (The idea that the Balkans was the powder keg of Europe is unfair: it was merely the detonator. The real powder keg was the rivalry between the continent’s great powers.)
Princip’s primary motivation for wanting to rid his land of the Habsburgs was the fearful poverty which he saw among all three major communities in Bosnia: the Catholics, Orthodox and Muslims as they are often referred to in the former Yugoslavia. It is ironic, then, that Butcher finds Princip’s descendants almost as poor today as the assassin was 100 years ago.
On his impressive hike to Sarajevo through a land riven with minefields, Butcher reminisces about his time as a correspondent during the war in Bosnia. This is illuminating stuff, if not path-breaking, but as always with Butcher extremely well written, taut and evocative. But what really elevates this book beyond another journalist’s memoir is the tenacity with which he goes about investigating Princip’s history.
His discovery of Princip’s early school reports after trawling through several archives is a moment of genuine excitement and surprise. They mark an important addition to the historical record: I cannot recall any reference to these in the major sources on Princip’s life. They suggest that his politicisation and his disillusion with the Habsburg administration started earlier than was previously thought. Furthermore, as Butcher finds more traces of his quarry in Belgrade and other parts of Serbia and Bosnia, he paints an ever clearer picture of how Princip’s politics developed and, indeed, how attitudes towards him changed before, during and after the collapse of Yugoslavia in the early Nineties.
Princip is often characterised as a Serbian nationalist, part of the underground organisation founded in Belgrade called the Black Hand. It is certainly true that Princip received weapons, including the pistol with which he killed Franz Ferdinand, from representatives of the Black Hand. But although his own organisation, Young Bosnia, was made up predominantly of Serbs, it also included Croats and Bosniaks in its ranks. It was proto-Yugoslav and wanted the liberation of all South Serbs from Habsburg domination — and not only the Serbs.
Butcher does not pretend that Princip was much more than a troubled student, poor and unhappy. He would lock himself away in books rather than indulge in more usual teenage pursuits. But he is right to highlight his sincerity and how he reflected the growing disgust with the old regimes of Europe, whether Austrian, Russian or Ottoman.
Despite its complex subject, Butcher makes this an easy and engaging read with his breezy style and fascinating encounters, none more so than when he sees the rock group Franz Ferdinand play in the predominantly Serb city of Banja Luka. He hangs out with lead vocalist Alex Kapranos, and mulls over the origins of the band’s name. During the concert, Franz Ferdinand project a giant image of Princip behind the stage. Butcher observes that most of the young Serbian crowd seem to have no idea who this gaunt figure is.
Until now, Princip’s history has been largely obscure to an English-speaking audience as well. Thanks to Butcher’s timely book, this should now change.
–The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2014
Misha Glenny is the author of “The Balkans: 1804-2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers” (Granta) and, most recently, “Dark Market” (Vintage).
