On a wall of Princip's cell, the following lines were found, written in penciclass="underline"
Our ghosts will walk through Vienna And roam through the Palace Frightening the Lords.
Afterword to the Da Capo edition
WHEN I FINISHED THESE PAGES IN 1989, THE BALKAN MAP REVEALED only half of the devastating truth in Max Weber's observation: "History is a web of unintended circumstances." In response to the assassination of archduke Franz Ferdinand by the Serb Gavrilo Princip in 1914, Austria intended to uphold the honor and integrity of its realm by declaring war on Serbia. Consequence: By 1918, the Hapsburg empire lay shattered into jagged pieces.
Princip's intention, on the other hand, seemed to have prospered. The bullet he put through the archduke's neck did more than punish an Austrian oppressor; it kindled the global conflagration whose aftermath saw the South Slavs unite into one country. Yugoslavia, Princip's dream, emerged from the slaughter as a breathing reality. During World War II the Nazis abrogated it briefly. In 1946 it revived, continued on under communism, and persisted after Tito's death into the late 1980s.
But soon after 1989-the year of this book's publication-history dropped the other shoe. With cannon and sniper it began to disembowel Princip's utopia.
Today, in 2001, Yugoslavia is a minefield rather than a country. It consists of Serbia in turmoil clutching a simmering Montenegro. Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia have fought themselves apart into separate states. The province of Kosovo is an explosive U.N. protectorate. Two adversarial entities-one Muslim, one Serb-form Bosnia, each with its own parlia ment, police, and army. Croat troops ruined much of the Gravoho valley where Princip first brooded over his Pan-Slav ideals.
In the course of the last century, a pageant of the futilities Max Weber had in mind has moved past the corner of Appel Quai and Rudolf Street in Sarajevo. Here on a bright June morning in 1914 the two most fateful pistol shots of all time rang out. After the deed, Austria erected here a column in honor of the slain archduke. This yielded to a memorial to the slayer, put up by postwar Yugoslavia: The spot where Princip had pointed his weapon was marked, Hollywood-fashion, by footprints sunk in concrete. They celebrated Gavrilo Princip as megastar of Serb valor. Then, in 1997, the Muslim-dominated municipality of Sarajevo, hostile to all Serb insignia, used a jackhammer to pulverize Princip's sidewalk immortality.
One irony succeeds another. For what authority will prevent Serbs from avenging this insult to Princip's remembrance? It is the office of the High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina, instituted by the international community of fifty-five nations signing the Dayton Peace Accord in 1995. And who enforces the directives of the High Representative to keep the peace among ethnic strains and to establish democracy in Bosnia? A contingent of 25,000 NATO-led troops. Its headquarters are located in Ilidze, near Sarajevo, bristling with barbed wire and sandbag revetments. In 1914 this very building, then known as the Hotel Bosna, was the final lodging of the archduke and his wife before their murder the next morning. The landscape teems with paradoxes.
Not least among them is the background of Wolfgang Petritsch, the High Representative himself, appointed on the eighty-sixth anniversary of Franz Ferdinand's assassination. He has the power to dismiss Bosnian officials high or low and to dissolve parliament. His job before his present position was as Vienna's ambassador to Belgrade. He is, of all things, one of Austria's most brilliant diplomats. Letters threatening his life are often addressed to "His Honor Franz Ferdinand Petritsch."
And so Vienna 1914 ghosts through Sarajevo 2001. The future keeps mocking the past. The past, in eerie resilience, keeps shadowing the present.
— F. M.
WRITING THIS BOOK HAS MEANT INCURRING DEBTS OF GRATITUDE ON TWO continents.
In the United States, my thanks go for vital assistance extended to me to Dr. Wolfgang Petritsch, head of the Austrian Information Service for North America, and his deputy, Dr. Irene Freudenschuss; to Dr. Wolfgang Waldner, Director of the Austrian Institute in New York, and to Friederike Zeitlhofer, the ever-patient, ever-forthcoming librarian of the Institute; to Dr. Walter Klement of the Austrian National Tourist Bureau in New York whose office has been generous with maps and geographical advice. I have also benefited from the tremendous resources of the New York Public Library. Pucek Kleinberger proved a source of comfort. Jonathan Kranz of the Graduate Center of the City University of New York aided this project with significant research. Martin Tanz and Dale Cou- dert were also helpful, as was David Kahn with his expertise on the history of military intelligence. I am also grateful to Minister Philip Hoyos of the Austrian Embassy in Washington, D.C.; to Roberta Corcoran; Sylvia Gardner-Wittgenstein; Dr. and Mrs. Erwin Chargaff; and my excellent copy editor, Gypsy da Silva.
In Britain, Dr. Edward Timms of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, has generously shared his erudition with me.
In Austria, the staff and stacks of the Osterreichische Nationalbibliothek have been indispensable to my labors and so has Dr. Brigitta Zessner-Spitzenberg of the Bildarchiv. I am much obliged to the Literarische Verwertungsgesellschaft- and to its President, the novelist Milo Dor-for grants awarded me. I owe Prince Karl von Schwarzenberg many thanks for fine-tuned information on diplomatic and aristocratic aspects of the period covered in this book. Hetti von Bohlen and Halbach provided valuable access to the unpublished memoirs of her father, Prince Alois von Auersperg. I have been the beneficiary of Count Michael von Wolkenstein's advice and of his liberality with Mohnstriezel. The editors of the Socialist Arbeiter Zeitung furnished photocopied back volumes of their newspaper and thereby gave me the sort of education without which this book could not have been written. Inge Santner- Cyrus and Adolf Holl have been wonderful cultural hosts by the Danube. Further support and ideas have come from Hilde Spiel, Ernst Trost, Peter Marboe, Ernst Wolf Marboe, Alfred Payrleitner, Dr. Kurt Scholz of the office of Mayor Zilk of Vienna, and, at a rough estimate, at least five other people I have left out because of lamentable holes in my memory. Last, and far from least, I want to mention Wolfgang Kraus among my Viennese helpmeets. As President of the Osterreichische Gesellschaft fur Literatur and as a personal friend, he has been a treasure.
Now I come to a special category of thanks owed. There is my brother, Henry, Professor of Political Science at Queens College, CUNY. I have learned from his acumen and I have profited from the scholarship of his colleague, Professor Keith Eubank (History Dept., Queens College), who has given me crucial advice on researching facets of the genesis of the Great War. Robert Stewart, my editor at Scribners, has been the guardian angel of this book every step of the way. My wife, Marcia, was-as always-of incalculable help in shaping the manuscript.
— F.M.
Source references
Periodicals are referred to by the following abbreviations:
| AZ | Arbeiter Zeitung |
| Fackel | die Fackel |
| Fremd. | Fremdenblatt |
| IWE | Illustrirtes Wiener Extrablatt |
| INSJ | Intelligence and National Security Journal |
| NFP | Neue Freie Presse |
| NWT | Neues Wiener Tagblatt |
| WMW | Wiener Medizinische Wochenschrift |
| WZ | Wiener Zeitung |