Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions

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‘Union or Death!’: Gavrilo Princip, Young Bosnia

and the Role of ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of
Nationalist Terrorism

Paul Jackson

To cite this article: Paul Jackson (2006) ‘Union or Death!’: Gavrilo Princip, Young Bosnia and
the Role of ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism, Totalitarian Movements and
Political Religions, 7:1, 45-65, DOI: 10.1080/14690760500477935

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Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions,
Vol. 7, No. 1, 45–65, March 2006

‘Union or Death!’: Gavrilo Princip, Young Bosnia and

the Role of ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist
Terrorism

PAUL JACKSON
Oxford Brookes University
pnjackson@brookes.ac.uk
Totalitarian
10.1080/14690760500477935
1469-0764
Original
Taylor
7102006
Oxford
PaulJackson
00000Summer
&Brookes
Article
FTMP_A_147776.sgm
andFrancis
(print)/1743-9647
Movements
2006
UniversityOxfordEngland
FrancisGroup
Ltd and
Ltd Political
(online)Religions

ABSTRACT This article seeks to investigate the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdi-
nand from the ideological perspective of his assassins: the Young Bosnia movement. More
specifically, it views Young Bosnia’s ideology as a form of political religion. It begins by
constructing an ideal-typically defined syndrome of how radicalised, counter-hegemonic
ideologies draw on senses of the numinous as part of their praxis. The article argues that
through this lens we can enrich our understanding of the movement’s ideological
dynamic. By taking as a point of departure the Young Bosnia’s conception of cultural
time, which they believed to be unstable, the article argues that the movement promoted a
mental state that demanded the need to act out what were perceived as personally heroic
and socially redemptive fantasies. To the members of Young Bosnia, these fantasies,
dramatising individual and societal redemption, were understood as narratives of
renewal, or ‘palingenesis’. Following a theoretical discussion exploring this syndrome
ideal-typically, the model is then used to generate a reading of the ideology that
underpinned the Young Bosnia movement. After this, the article turns its attention to
Ferdinand’s killer, Gavrilo Princip, and the cohort helping to carry out the assassination.
This grouping’s willingness to commit suicide after completing their ‘mission’ was, the
article argues, the product of a host of mythopoeic resources drawn upon by the Young
Bosnia movement in order to elaborate a palingenetic ideology. Further, it claims that
their actions provide an excellent case study in which one can see how a broad synthesis of
socialist, Marxist and nationalist ideologies, alongside poetic resources, each induced the
palingenetic condition in the assassins. Finally, it provides an explanatory framework that
allows us to interpret how this ideology could justify political violence both against others
and against their own persons.

Introduction
Although the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand has been the object of
much historiographical attention, little theoretical interest has been given to the
importance of the cult of self-sacrifice and martyrdom conditioning his killers,
therefore precipitating the momentous events that followed. In fact, the willing-
ness of the assassins to sacrifice their own lives for the higher cause of the nation

Correspondence Address: Oxford Brookes University, Oxford OX3 0BP. Email: pnjackson@brookes.ac.uk

ISSN 1469-0764 Print/ISSN 1743-9647 Online/06/010045-21 © 2006 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/14690760500477935
46 P. Jackson

was an integral aspect of their ideologically motivated violence. This article seeks
to redress this neglect by moving beyond commonplace views of the actions of
Gavrilo Princip and his accomplices as secular nationalist terrorists, and instead
explores the role that sacralised elements played in the nationalist ideology of
Princip and his cohort. It argues that they can be viewed as manifesting elements
of the modern ‘palingenetic condition’ – a cultural climate that fosters projects for
imagined futures that are designed to bring about fundamental political and
cultural rebirth to resolve a sense of degeneration perceived to characterise in the
present. Further, the extreme nationalism of Princip constituted a form of ‘politi-
cal religion’ because it was a fusion of politics with a type of faith associated with
metaphysical religion that generated an ideological dynamic in which the self
could be ‘transcended’ and sacrificed in order to serve the perceived needs of the
community.1 The following also draws on a theory of the way the sense of a
supra-personal mission radically alters an individual’s perception of personal
time and mortality, which has led to the postulation of the need for a new sub-
discipline, ‘chrono-ethology’, that studies human behaviour through the
perspective of time.2 In this article, I shall briefly outline the categories of this
ideal-typically constructed heuristic tool before using it to generate a ‘chrono-
ethological’ reading of the motives behind Franz Ferdinand’s assassination.

Sacrificial Violence in Relation to ‘Chrono-Ethology’: A Summary

The desire that someone should pay the debt of sacrificial death and
redeem the world to new innocence: this eternal dream of mankind may
rise to murder, this eternal dream may rise to clairvoyance. All knowl-
edge waivers between the dreamt wish and the foreshadowing dream, all
knowledge of the redeeming sacrifice and the kingdom of salvation.3

Hermann Broch, The Sleepwalkers

There does not exist within academia a single conceptual paradigm to understand
terrorist and fanatical behaviour, merely a range of more or less heuristically useful
ones. The anthropological thrust of a ‘chrono-ethological’ perspective argues that
religious and ideological fanaticisms are linked to the subjective understanding of
an individual’s relationship with (a) phenomenological, ‘personal’ time, which
begins at birth and ends at death, and (b) a shared sense of cultural, ‘communal’
time, which begins with the creation of a society and ends with its demise. Both of
these can be infused with meaning not only through ‘rational’ thought, but also
through what are, essentially, mythopoeic thought patterns. The model’s underly-
ing thesis argues that we can present a simplified representation of human
consciousness as a system that has the inbuilt ability to experience ‘personal’ and
‘communal’ conceptions of time in two qualitatively different ways. First, they can
be viewed in a state of rectilinear chronos – the sense of a stable flow from past to
future, present in periods of political stability – and secondly in terms of a period
of kairos, which people can become sensitive to during periods of perceived or
actual political crisis, and during which the ‘normal’ sense of continuity between
the past and future needed to generate a sense of political and social stability
appear temporarily suspended. In this second temporal state, scenarios emphasis-
ing contingency and crisis are bought to the fore in debates; the sense of living
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 47

during a moment of historical opportunity is given privileged status over accept-

ing the status quo when formulating ideological praxis; action is motivated by a
guiding ideology that draws on inspiring events from the past to reconceptualise
the future; and through what is perceived to be altruistic behaviour, the individual
can feel renewed connections to senses of the sacred.
This bifurcation is admittedly a gross simplification, yet it is within an exponen-
tial psychological elaboration of connections to the notion of a moment of oppor-
tunity, or kairos, in the individual and communal awareness of time that we can
locate the rationale of the self-immolating fanatic. Within academia, theorists have
repeatedly constructed models that acknowledge this phenomenological distinc-
tion between a profane time and a ‘higher’ sacred time, even though empirical
evidence for this assertion may be elusive. These have included Walter Benjamin’s
notion of reconnecting with myths of past revolutions in order to motivate the
dynamics of Marxist revolutionary thought. As outlined in his Thesis on the Philos-
ophy of History, Benjamin’s idea was that revolutionaries would become sensitive
to ‘chips of Messianic time’ that would give access to a sense of historical mission
and secularised sense of sacred action. This sensitivity would enable one to gener-
ate a profound and selective reading of the past that would highlight myriad
historic events that each dramatise fundamental changes, and in combination
these would form a constellation of messages that would inspire revolutionary
action in the present. He contrasted this sense of living at a moment infused with
revolutionary possibility with ‘homogenous, empty time’ of everyday life. The
latter was to be eschewed by the good Marxist, who should formulate a praxis that
tapped into these chips of ‘Messianic time’, and their associated ‘higher’ calling.4
In a less polemical exploration of this archetype, Frank Kermode’s lecture
series, The Sense of an Ending, again draws out this distinction between rectilinear
chronos and a time of opportunity, or kairos. His thesis sketches out a temporal
model in which the second category has great heuristic value in interpreting the
repeated occurrences of senses of the apocalyptic found in the literature, cultural
milieus and political ideologies of societies marked by modernity. Those person-
ally experiencing a moment of kairos perceive a selected view of the past as a sort
of guiding light shining into the future, one that projects into the future a coun-
terfactual scenario that, at bottom, is utopian insofar as it offers a profound image
of hope emerging from a state of despair. In such times, the present is viewed as,
somehow, ‘out of joint’,5 a liminal time in between historical epochs. In contrast
to senses of personal and communal time characterised by an impression of chro-
nos – which places the founding myths of society safely in the past, and the apoc-
alyptic narratives of its demise in the distant future, thereby placing the
community ‘within’ a discrete historical epoch – kairos suggests the imminent, or
even immanent, ‘sense of an ending’ of an old order that engenders the opportu-
nity for a fundamental paradigm shift in the political and cultural hegemony, and
a termination of the status quo.6 It is therefore an unstable period that offers the
potential for new founding myths for a society to develop and old ones to be
destroyed. Other theorists and philosophers who have identified similar senses
of the sacred and profane in temporal experiences, and who have seen these as
manifestations of hope-filled myths projecting forms of utopianism into the
future and that emerge from despair, include Ernst Cassirer,7 Mercia Eliade,8
Joseph Campbell,9 Ernst Bloch10 and Jacques Derrida,11 each in possession of his
own particular philosophical point of departure, terminological details and
analytical peculiarities.
48 P. Jackson

To this distinction between chronos and kairos in ‘personal’ and ‘cultural’

constructions of time, we can add to our model the notion of ‘projective
narratives’, that is, the means of rationalising ‘personal time’. In short, these are
the existential narratives (the stories individuals tell about their lives in order to
narrate meaningful links between their past experiences and their future aspira-
tions) that form the psychological connections of identity between the self and
communities. As with crises in ‘communal time’, crises in ‘personal time’ lead to
the cultivation of ideas that draw out a sense of kairos rather than chronos. In order
for the types of ideologies that emerge during a period of perceived kairos and
present hope for their followers to function, their thinking must be directed
towards fundamental change in the near future, and specifically they must create
utopian counterfactual scenarios for their adherents’ future selves, alongside
society to which they identify, potentially to inhabit. At bottom, the self and
communal narratives are inherently intertwined, and they allow the fanatic to
narrate their future conduct in a matrix that will have agency over the political
future of the society to which they identify. In many ways, this is common feature
of human psychology, and as true of the political fanatic as any other politically
conscious actor. Consequently, from this perspective Griffin argues against the
view that fanatics are committing pathological acts:

most acts of political fanaticism, far from being pathological (‘awry’) in

themselves, are extreme examples of quintessential human capacity to
structure ‘real’ life on the basis of narrative fictions. Indeed human life
may well be literally unliveable without a shifting kaleidoscope of plans
goals, ideals, myths, fantasies, obsessions and utopias that together
constitute maps of reality that have more in common with the phantas-
magorical elucubrations of medieval cartographers than satellite-based
topographies available to modern geographers. In this context the
‘fanatic’ is only an extreme example of perfectly normal human beings.12

The distinction between the ‘normal’ psychology and that of the fanatic can be
found in the fact that the existential narratives that are generated by the fanatic
are highly influenced by mythopoeic tropes that shape their perception of the
world in particular stark fashions. These tropes create in the fanatic the sense of
one’s life being locked into a predetermined narrative structure, thereby inculcat-
ing a sense of mission and destiny in the individual’s motivation for action, and
portraying the fanatic as an active agent who takes a personal and communal
‘story’ to its logical conclusion. One can argue that, in order to deduce the motives
of the political fanatic, we must attempt to extract from extant data what their
perceptions of these ‘stories’ were. ‘Chrono-ethology’ argues that the three
mythopoeic tropes of greatest significance to the narration of fanatical political
activity are (a) the self as an archetypal hero, (b) the sacrifice of something of
profound value, including the fanatic’s own life, and (c) the myth of societal
rebirth. To summarise briefly the dynamics of these recurring mythic structures
in relation to an attempt to suspend a sense of personal and cultural chronos, and
activate sensitivity to kairos, at least for an esoteric vanguard, let us start with the
myth of the hero.
The important element of the hero myth in relation to ‘chrono-ethology’ lies in
its extraordinary mythopoeic resonance in linking the self to a wider sense of
regeneration. Their employment in the stories narrating the creation of new
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 49

worlds (cosmogonic myths) is a reoccurring theme among the creation myths of

many belief structures. For example, Prometheus’s theft of fire from the Gods, or
Moses’ leadership of the Israelites from Egypt and subsequent reception of the
Ten Commandments, can both be seen as figures possessing this quality. Other
prophetic figures can be seen similarly, at least for those ‘outside’ these mytholog-
ical and theological paradigms, as reoccurrences of the same underlying arche-
type: the offering of spiritual regeneration to a cultural milieu through
inspirational and heroic activity of a ‘chosen’ individual. In his exhaustive study
of this archetype, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell proposes a
‘monomyth’ as shorthand for this recurring pattern:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a religion of
supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered and a deci-
sive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure
with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.13

In the process of purifying and sacralising their political and cultural milieus – not
to mention their desire to destroy the hegemonic political authorities – political
fanatics may be seen to narrate their own activity as endless permutations of this
sacralising ‘monomyth’, or archetype. Through this process, fanatics can perceive
themselves as key players in the metamorphosis, or rather palingenesis, of the
community to which they identify. Their ‘boon’ to their fellow man is to change
their society from one governed by an alienating hegemony, whose effects are
perceived as degenerative and contaminating for the community, to one perceived
as regenerated. Further, the various events perpetrated by an individual or
esoteric group of fanatics may also hold the potential to key into the more general
desires of their community, though this is contingent on a wider willingness to
empathise with the fanatic’s ideology. Therefore, the use of familiar points of
cultural reference is also key to creating a politics with a sense of common identity
that, by drawing from a sense of a communal past, guides action in the present in
order to reshape fundamentally the community’s future.
This hero myth can also merge with the notion of ritualised self-sacrifice as an
integral part of ascetic, selfless behaviour underpinning the hero’s quest: to
become truly fearless, one must go beyond death by accepting oneself as already
dead. This selflessness therefore creates the ‘hero’ prepared to sacrifice his or her
own life for a perceived ‘higher’ cause. This elision is a reoccurring phenomenon
of fanatical violence, and can be seen in manifold permutations of the spiritual
and the violent throughout history. Examples of this include the Japanese Samu-
rai and the Native American Brave; warriors who find the idea of self-sacrifice in
‘holy war’ traditions found in the crusades or in jihad; and the nationalised
permutations of sacred heroic action, such as the deeds of the Japanese Kamikaze
pilots during the Second World War, or the Romanian Iron Guard ‘nests’.
Although the metaphysical nuances of each group are highly diverse, the
common factor lies in their members’ perception of themselves as a part of a
‘heroic’ elite within their society. As a part of this elite, they are prepared to die in
battle as a vanguard fighting for a cause that extends beyond the material realm,
in its full magnitude, and offers the ability for a special type of immortality for
those whose lives are sacrificed to their ‘higher’ cause. This sense of living out the
role of a communal hero is appealing to the fanatic as it offers the ability to
perceive of their praxis as manifesting all the key qualities of a legendary ‘hero’
50 P. Jackson

who is operating in the present – rather than merely fantasising about such activi-
ties – and will offer them a powerful sense of giving birth to a new age. It thereby
combines a highly selfish drive for personal immortality through the cultural
memory of legends and so forth, and also, potentially, an eternal metaphysical
‘home’ of some description, alongside a deeply altruistic aspect redeeming not
merely the self but an entire society, and for the fanatic bringing a sense of chronos
back to society. This sense of dying to oneself to be reborn as a sacred cultural
‘hero’ within a particular society, therefore, forms one permutation of the myth of
creation and rebirth. This provides the vital link between self-sacrifice and the
wider societal purpose of the fanatic’s mythopoeic calculus.
Further, what is created by this profound rationale for self-destruction is a
belief in a powerful new dialectic between present and future. Such a dialectic
simplistically views the present as decadent and degenerate, and contrasts this
with a utopian and regenerated future. This dialectic frames the behaviour of
the fanatic and powerfully suggests the need to form myriad strategies in order
for them to achieve the switch from the former to the latter. Further, it is in this
latter category – the utopian future – that the fanatic has generated a new
psychological homeland, rendering the present as a state characterised by a
sense of liminality. This dialectic between the degenerate present and a utopian
future is central to a fanatic’s subjective perception of the world, and allows for
the creation of an increasingly Manichaean perspective on political events that
rationalises ideological praxis by eschewing ‘grey’ areas for simplified binary
opposites. The politically dominant force in the present is seen as the cause of
the senses of decadence, degeneration and anomie that are perceived by the
fanatic. This political hegemony, obviously, becomes the target for the fanatic’s
ire and attack. It is the destruction of the ruling interloper – who is perceived to
be intruding into the longer historical or communal narrative of the society to
which the fanatic identifies – that forms the basis of the fanatic’s goals. There-
fore, the ideology of the fanatic intuits not only the ‘sense of an ending’ of the
existing political hegemony, but also contains countervailing narratives of hope
to establish a new hegemony, one that has, as its basis, the redemption of the
people and society to which the fanatic identifies, and to provide for them an
authentic psychological homeland.
In sum, the ‘chrono-ethological’ perspective suggests a reading of politically
fanatical activity – notably suicide or martyr acts of terrorism – that highlights
the role played by certain key mythopoeic aspects relating to the subjective
experiences of ‘personal’ and ‘cultural’ time, as perceived by their perpetrators.
In particular, this approach highlights, first, that the fanatic attempts to live out
a hero myth that, secondly, justifies self-sacrificial acts including, in extreme
cases, suicide in order, thirdly, to create a milieu of self-sacrificial martyrdom
which has the wider aim of achieving the overthrow of a hegemonic force, and
which will lead to societal rebirth. The employment of poetic discourse and
ritual behaviour to enact out the numinous experiences of a higher, ‘sacred
time’ – kairos – that is infused with possibility for change is central to the
profound connection, established in the fanatic’s mindset, between a mytholo-
gised past and a vision of a utopian future. By studying the actions of extrem-
ists as being conditioned by such a psychology, it becomes possible for
outsiders to their movement to develop an empathetic understanding of the
delusion whereby acts of terrorist violence and self-immolating activity appear
legitimate and even sacred to their perpetrators.
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 51

Bosnia in the Twentieth Century and Resources for Ideological Constructions

of Crisis14

Before examining the Young Bosnia movement, it is worth briefly summarising

the historical context surrounding the Archduke’s assassination, in order to
sketch the historical background against which the ideology of the movement
evolved. The region of Bosnia and Herzegovina, composed of Serbs, Croats and
Muslims, was until 1878 ruled by the Ottoman Empire. After the kmets (serfs)
rising of 1875 that sought to overthrow Ottoman rule, the region was transferred
to a Habsburg occupation at the Congress of Berlin in 1878. With the legal shift of
responsibility to Austro-Hungary came a small phase of modernisation to the
region. However, in the main the region remained predominantly underdevel-
oped, highly illiterate and agrarian. The new Habsburg occupier suppressed
political opposition, though underground networks of counter-hegemonic
political activity did exist. These were connected with forms of piecemeal cultural
awakening and not political violence.
To the east of Bosnia lay Serbia, itself growing in stature as an independent
South Slav nation, with Belgrade presented as the ‘Piedmont’ of the Balkans.
Within Bosnia, desires for achieving autonomy from the great powers were often
focused upon Belgrade; within Serbia various plans were also formed for creating
unified South Slav political structures. At the turn of the century, the future of the
region was increasingly unstable. It became the geographical site for a number of
differing international political projects: a possible return to Ottoman rule,
consolidation as an Austro-Hungarian frontier land or, potentially, the key
Serbian acquisition in the construction of either a federal Yugoslavia or a new
Greater Serbia.
This uncertainty was compounded on 6 October 1908, when the region was
fully annexed by the Austro-Hungarian authorities. They were fearful of, among
other factors, either an attempt to recapture the region by the Ottoman Empire –
itself radicalised by the Young Turks movement – or a Serbian invasion. After
the annexation of 1908, a fundamental change in cultural and political attitudes
towards Austro-Hungary can be observed throughout the Balkan region. In
Serbia, the organisation Narodna Odbrana (National Defence) was created to
combat Austro-Hungarian domination through counter-hegemonic literature. Its
primary purpose was to radicalise Serbian, as well as South Slav, youth organi-
sations in Macedonia, Bosnia, Croatia and Slovenia. Within a few months,
National Defence boasted over 5,000 members across the South Slav region.
National Defence was augmented by another organisation in Serbia, which had
the specific agenda of creating a Greater Serbia, rather than a unified Yugosla-
via. This group was an offshoot of the Serb Army and was called Union or
Death, more commonly known as the Black Hand. Union or Death was created
in 1911 and was dominated by the charismatic and bellicose Serbian general,
General Apis.
In Bosnia, the cultural reaction to the annexation was one of renewed hostil-
ity towards the Habsburg rule. Among politically conscious students, there was
a marked shift away from the piecemeal cultural awakening associated with
dominant ideologues such as Thomas Masaryk. This was replaced with far
more ascetic, bellicose and revolutionary ideas that were similar to those of
National Defence. These radicalised Bosnian youths began to gain a public
profile through the organisation of secret societies, street demonstrations and
52 P. Jackson

other subversive activity, and came to be known as the Young Bosnia move-
ment. Broadly, this was a shift away from the earlier emphasis on forms of
piecemeal cultural metamorphosis – which now appeared no longer credible as
an agent of change – and towards a radicalised political and cultural world
view, often through violent acts and embracing an openly revolutionary rheto-
ric. This new ‘palingenetic’, mood that sensed the need for violent ideological
praxis was expressed many times, for example here by Borivoje Jevti ć, one time
ca[cue]t

roommate of Gavrilo Princip:

Masaryk realism, good for the northern country and its inhabitants at a
much higher level of civilization, was not applicable to Bosnia, which had
no corresponding culture and which for its awakening needed the smell
of blood more than the ‘three Rs’.15

To get a clearer idea of their general ideological rubric, we can read the objectives
of one society attended by Gavrilo Princip:

1. To oppose everything national and antinational in the material and spiritual

life of our peoples by means of:
a. Radical anticlericalism.
b. Radical elimination of destructive alien influences and promotion of
Slavization of our culture against Germanization, Magyarization and
Italianization.
c. Fighting against attitudes of servility, sneaking and contemptibility and
raising of national honour and pride.
d. Expropriation of estates, liquidation all prerogatives of aristocracy and
all social privileges and the democratisation of political consciousness
and the political awakening of people.
2. A national defence against alien spiritual and material forces; national offen-
sive to reawaken the subjugated and half-lost parts of our people by spiritual
and material means.16

What becomes clear from this and other sources is the fusion of a sense of national
identity, defined as a spiritual, collective entity, thereby promoting a sacralised
politics; the desire for the removal of foreign influences, expressed in a language
concerned with senses of both spiritual and national alienation; a socialist-
inspired politics with a progressive programme of wealth redistribution; the
desire for a new politics seen as just, or legitimate; the appeal to abstract human
qualities such as honour and pride, implying an acute sensitivity to a lack of
dignity in the then present political dynamic; and the use of rhetorical tropes of
rebirth – ‘political reawakening of people’ and ‘reawaken the subjugated’, for
example. This can all be seen as expressions of an ideology both sensitive to crisis
and seeking to find hope through a deeply held sense of renewal.
The ideas that fed into this project were highly diverse, and included anarchists
such as Kropotkin and Bakunin, utopian socialists such as William Morris, Marx-
ist revolutionaries such as Trotsky, philosophers such as Nietzsche, and romantic
national revolutionaries such as Mazzini, Garibaldi and various figures from
German nationalist movements. Though these thinkers are highly idiosyncratic,
they all typified the ‘palingenetic condition’ of modernity insofar as they sought
to achieve counterfactual futures that moved away from a present perceived as
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 53

being in a state of crisis and decadence, and presented a variety of alternate

visions of idealised futures. These diverse ideologues appear to have been used
syncretically by the Young Bosnia movement collectively to forge the rationalisa-
tion of desires for a reconnection with the idea of national independence, one
sympathetic to ideas of redistributive socialism. Moreover, thanks to this broad
ideological synthesis, the young intellectuals of Young Bosnia, notably Princip
himself, felt they were living in a distinctly modern milieu in which they formed
part of the cultural and political avant-garde. This is a situation that, as
Kermode’s model suggests, encourages the experience of contemporary history in
terms of a kairos, pregnant with possibilities, rather than a dead chronos. Also, this
was an intellectual dynamic sensitive to a sense of spiritual ambivalence, due to
the wider impact of the partial secularisation of European society, often associ-
ated with definitions of modernity. For example, one Young Bosnian article called
‘The National Milieu and Modernism’, published in 1908, stated:

It is not important which attitude a man has regards to today’s problems.

One could be a Socialist, an individualist, a spiritist, a theosophist, a
Buddhist metaphysic – whatever he likes – but the most important thing
is to feel our pain and our efforts, to understand today’s problems. The
one who feels this agitation of our time, who is trying to find the remedy
for today’s calamities, is modern, despite his opinion as to what this
remedy consists of. Modern man is the one who in this epoch of democ-
racy and libertarianism, feels in our country the whole absurdity of an
anachronistic system, who feels hunger and the lack of justice for our
poor masses and who is fighting for bread and freedom for a naked and
starved people.17

Again the sensitivity to the present as a time of crisis and the attempt to articulate
this as a period of kairos is overwhelming.
In the post-annexation period, the growing cohesiveness of national identity
and sense of social injustice developing among the Young Bosnians was further
radicalised by the stories of violent conquest by South Slavs in the Balkan wars.
Ivo Andri ć, the author and one-time member of the Young Bosnia movements,
ca[cue]t

described this impact on the new intelligentsia in his Nobel Prize-winning The
Bridge over the River Drina:

These were a new sort of young men, educated in various cities and states
and under various influences … With every summer they brought back
with them free-thinking views on social and religious questions and an
enthusiastically revived nationalism which recently, especially after the
Serbian victories in the Balkan wars, had grown to a universal conviction
and, in many of these youths, to a fanatical desire for action and personal
sacrifice.18

Such a passage highlights the role played in modern palingenetic movements by

the myth of an ‘anthropological revolution’ pioneered by a new ‘breed’ of human
beings – the ‘new man’ attuned to the needs of an imminent new era.19
In 1910 what had previously been a subject of speculation was transformed into
a historical act. A Young Bosnian named Bogdan Žeraji ć was determined to shoot
Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

Emperor Franz Joseph on 3 June during his visit to Sarajevo. However, despite
54 P. Jackson

following Franz Joseph on parts of his official tour, Žeraji ć was unable to pluck Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

up the courage to carry out the assassination. He regained his resolve on 15 June,
and at 11.20 a.m. he made an attempt on the life of the new governor of the
region, General Marijin Varešanin. As the governor returned from the Bosnian csao
r[n]

Sabor (parliament), Žeraji ć fired five bullets at his carriage. Vare šanin himself was
Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t scao
[rn]

not injured; all Žeraji ć’s bullets missed him. Vare šanin then stopped the coach in
Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t scao
[rn]

order to find the perpetrator, who had by this time had turned the gun on
himself, and the Governor found Žeraji ć’s body lying on the bridge from where Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

he had fired.
Myths soon developed around the new martyr. Princip’s roommate recalled
that the governor had kicked Žeraji ć’s body repeatedly, saying ‘you scum, you Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

scum’, though no proof for this exists. Others claimed his dying words were: ‘I
leave my revenge to Serbdom’. One youth later recalled the impact of the event:

I was then in the fourth class of the Sarajevo school. Up to that time we
had only read about the terrorist exploits of the revolutionaries, which
stirred our imagination, but we never dreamed that something like that
could happen in our own town … It seemed as if the eyes of the youth
were suddenly opened. Young men passing by the Emperor’s Bridge,
where Zeraji ć killed himself after the unsuccessful attempt on the life of
ca[cue]t

the Governor, started to pay him homage by taking off their caps.20

This sense of respect for Žeraji ć’s sacrifice subsequently took a more clearly Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

sacralised turn. The Young Bosnians discovered Žeraji ć’s grave in the Sarajevo Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

cemetery; it then became a shrine for the movement. As early as 1912 Princip gave
an oath on Žeraji ć’s grave to redeem his death. Other Young Bosnians decorated
Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

his grave with flowers, only for the police to remove them the next morning. The
movement now had a martyr to add to its mythopoeic armoury.
One highly influential ideologue of the Young Bosnia movement promoting
this myth of individual martyrdom was Vladimir Ga ćinovi ć. His underground ca[cue]t ca[cue]t

writings often attempted to intensify the longing for the sacred in the ideological
sensibilities of the Young Bosnians. For example, the following quotation demon-
strates how the pervasive metaphors of awakening and renewal, as well as
appeals to past traditions, were used to foster a revolutionary spirit:

These young people, not yet awakened, will be our apostles, the creators
and cross-bearers of new religions and new hearts. They will awaken our
dead gods, revive our fairies who have withered away because of sadness
and love, they will bring a new empire of liberty and man, and save the
Serbian soul from vice and decay.21

After Žeraji ć turned himself into a national martyr, Ga ćinovi ć wrote a highly
Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t ca[cue]t ca[cue]t

influential underground pamphlet called ‘Death of a Hero’, one that marked the
mood among many radicalised youths of the Young Bosnia groups. Here, we can
again find tropes of cultural degeneration that could only be transcended through
the actions of a ‘new man’ embracing vitality and change. Ga ćinovi ć continued ca[cue]t ca[cue]t

that in the face of the ‘resignation and apathy of the age … there comes upon the
stage a man of action, of strength, of life and virtue, a type such as opens an
epoch, proclaims ideas, and enlivens suffering and spellbound hearts’.22 He then
continues to extol the virtues of sacrifice, presenting Žeraji ć’s act as the actions of Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 55

a heroic type of ‘new man’ that is ‘artistic’ and in solidarity with ‘the unfortunate
and downtrodden’, before summing up the immediate future’s predicament:
‘Young Serbs, you who are rising from the ruins and foulness of to-day, will you
produce such men? It seems as though this sums up the whole Serbian problem,
political, moral, and cultural’.23 Note here the notion that sacrificial activity is
seen as both a creative and a performative act, one that is seen to transcend the
merely tactical aims of an assassination attempt and rational explanations for the
suicide – such as to protect the organisation’s secrets from the authorities – and
works on a rhetoric level to draw on the mythopoeic qualities of martyrdom. This
is consciously designed to have a didactic, ideological impact. Further, from a
‘chrono-ethological’ perspective, this performative act is steeped in mythologis-
ing a sense of rebirth. The underlying notion of the death of the individual self to
the ‘higher’ national cause expressly holds, for Ga ćinovi ć, the potential to open a
ca[cue]t ca[cue]t

new epoch, where a new society is able to emerge, as if like a phoenix, from ‘the
ruins and foulness of to-day’. He then directs this social narrative of regeneration
through sacrifice towards other individuals, questioning their ability to meet the
call to arms and building on the sense of crisis and opportunity.
The notion of a united South Slav region was not only debated by Young
Bosnians and Serb groups: Slovene youths were also becoming more radical and
were developing an interest in the notion of revolutionary methods for achieving
national self-determination. As in Bosnia, the incursion of cultural ‘Germanisa-
tion’ through Habsburg rule, especially in school lessons, led to a radicalised
youth seeking to forge the emergence of Slovene culture. Many in Slovenia, espe-
cially among older generations, were wary of the notion of a Greater Serbia, of
which Slovenia would be a subordinate region. However, youth groups like the
Slovene secret society Preporod (Rebirth) were interested in forging a common
South Slav state through the revolutionary overthrow of the Habsburg monarchy.
In its underground journal of the same name, the group published Article 35 of
the French Declaration of the Rights of Man claiming the right to revolution. As with
their neighbours, this radicalisation was peppered with localised metaphysical
resources. One article from 1913, drawing on the symbolism of the God Perun –
the Serbian God of thunder, war, strength and creation – sent a message of
solidarity to the Young Bosnians that read thus:

Among Us Is the Powerful God, Perun … We hear that the struggle has
been waged in your part as well, that the voice of the God Perun is echo-
ing. Do not be afraid, our friends. Do not waiver, because we, from the
Bosnian mountains, are with you, with our soul, hearts, and the devastat-
ing thunder of Perun’s gift to us. Forward bravely for our joint deed, in
the great struggle for Yugoslavia.24

Croatia was also experiencing a radicalisation of youth groups directed against

the Habsburg monarchy. There were demonstrations at the University of Zagreb
in the early months of 1912, including a protest against the dictatorial rule of Count
Slavko Cuvaj. Here, for the first time, the protestors included Orthodox, Catholic
and Muslim youths. This sparked sympathetic demonstrations in Bosnia, attended
by, among others, Gavrilo Princip. In July 1912, after acquiring weapons from the
Black Hand, Young Bosnian Luka Juki ć unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate
ca[cue]t

Cuvaj in a Zagreb street. Yet his actions nevertheless managed to kill a policeman
and the Chief of the Croatian Department of Information before being arrested.
56 P. Jackson

The Habsburg reaction was to crack down sharply on student activities, which
itself served to enhance Young Bosnia’s sense of alienation from the ruling class.
In response, Juki ć’s death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in a bid to
ca[cue]t

cool the atmosphere. Within the palingenetic mindset of Bosnian ultra-nationalists,

such persecution by the ‘enemy’ only fed the sense of the deepening crisis and the
imminent need for national rebirth. Across the South Slav region, youth groups
were increasingly alienated from, and disillusioned with, Austro-Hungarian hege-
mony. Consequently, they turned to ideological violence and direct action, and
desired a self-governance that they could perceive as legitimate.
Given this multi-ethnic sense of alienation and desire for national renewal, it is
worth stressing that there existed a common unifying narrative to the collective
sense of South Slav identity, especially given the centrality of its role in providing
mythopoeic resources to the Young Bosnians. The symbolism of the enforced rule
of the South Slavs stretched back to the defeat on 28 June 1389, on Kosovo Field,
of Prince Lasar of Serbia by invading Turkish forces. This battle has since been
seen as the symbolic defeat of the South Slav region more generally and led to the
infliction of hundreds of years of Ottoman rule. Important here is the sense of a
common South Slav identity existing before the defeat, and that a discrete body of
people since the defeat had been oppressed for hundreds of years by alien forces,
thereby providing a continuity between a distant, mythologised past and the
present. This single historic event became highly mythologised over the following
centuries and, through oral traditions and later through written romantic verse,
became symbolic of a powerful formative myth for the construction of common
South Slav identities as an oppressed people. A series of national martyrs was
created around the event, including Prince Lazar, and also figures such as Milo ć ca[cue]t

Obili ć, who reputedly killed the Turkish commander the night before the battle of
ca[cue]t

Kosovo Field. The Serbian Orthodox Church consecrated 28 June as St Vitus Day,
the most sacred day in the Serbian calendar.
One key author who influenced the Young Bosnians was Petar Petrovi ć Njego š,
ca[cue]t scao
[rn]

whose romantic poem from 1847, Mountain Wreath, drew on the legend of
national subjugation at the hands of a foreign power.25 Njego š was a poet likened
scao
[rn]

in stature to the Serbs as Shakespeare is to the English, and Princip among others
knew much of Njego š’s verse by heart. Njego š’s poem explores the themes of
scao
[rn] scao
[rn]

national struggle and freedom from oppressive external rule, heroic martyrdom
and the right for Serbians and South Slavs to live peacefully and independently
from the oppression symbolically commencing with the defeat of 1389. For Young
Bosnians, the cultural production based upon the symbolic sense of defeat signi-
fied by the Kosovo legend – which like Njego š’s poem presented poetic and
scao
[rn]

quasi-philosophical commentary on its injustice – contained the underlying

‘esoteric’ mythopoeic elements central to their ideological project: heroic acts;
idealised self-sacrifice for the national cause; a bifurcation between a suppressed
and sacred community and a profane tyranny; and the idea of renewal and
redemption through the defeat of the Turks. The Young Bosnians transposed this
traditional enmity from the earlier Ottoman rule to the Habsburg monarchy, and
therefore were able to use the Kosovo legend, and the myriad cultural products
that surrounded it, to legitimise their own fanatical self-sacrifice. Through such
‘exoteric’ dimensions, they could develop an ideology that also held currency
with the wider cultural and political ‘awakening’ in the South Slav region.
From this necessarily highly condensed account, it can be seen that the South
Slav region was experiencing, at least among sections of its youth, sporadic and
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 57

unpredictable acts of revolutionary demonstrations and violence committed by

extremists convinced that they were the vanguard of national renewal. They
perceived the Habsburg monarchy to be tyrannical, and were attempting to both
build on old myths and forge new ones in attempts to ‘awaken’ their own cultural
milieus against the background of an even more generalised sense of the crisis of
the modern world, and the need for a new beginning for society.

The Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and its Aftermath

The decision for the Archduke to visit Sarajevo in the summer of 1914 was made
for several reasons. First, the Archduke’s visit was intended to demonstrate the
Habsburg Empire’s power in the area and, more specifically, to demonstrate that,
after the Balkan wars, the monarchy retained its interest in the region. Also,
General Potiorek, the region’s governor, wanted the Archduke to inspect the
troops, thereby fulfilling his duty as Inspector General of the Armed Forces.
Potiorek was also keen for a member of the royal household to visit, as no prince
had visited since Emperor Franz Joseph’s tour in 1910. Among the Habsburgs, the
visit appeared to be nothing out of the ordinary, nor is there any reason to believe
that they purposely chose a state visit on St Vitus Day.
We have seen how an ideology of revolutionary national liberation was form-
ing among sections of the South Slav intellectuals, especially among a radicalised
younger generation. Now let us focus on one subgroup within this dynamic, that
of Gavrilo Princip and his associates. This ‘cell’ was headed by schoolteacher,
Serbian soldier and intellectual, Danilo Ilić. Like Gaćinović, Ilić was one of Young
ca[cu
e]t ca[cu
e]t ca[cu
e]t ca[cu
e]t

Bosnia’s leading intellectuals with connections to the Serbian revolutionary soci-

eties, and was therefore a valuable contact for other Young Bosnians especially
those based in Sarajevo. Ilić and Princip were old friends, and first met in 1907
ca[cu
e]t

when Princip moved to Sarajevo to study at the city’s Merchant School and rented
the spare room in the Ilić household. Already, Princip was a committed revolu-
ca[cu
e]t

tionary. He was also very well read and held ambitions to become a poet, an
elision between the political and the creative not only evocative of Njego š, but scao
[rn]

also important to his later ideological development. In personality he was ascetic,

abstaining from vices like alcohol and tobacco, and also refrained from romantic
relationships. In 1911 Princip began taking part in street demonstrations and was
expelled from school in February 1912. Following this, he moved to Belgrade,
initially to join the komite (the irregular Serbian units). However, Princip was
turned down for being ‘too small and too weak’. This was a humiliation Princip
would not forget, and the dismissal must be seen as a key factor in his resolve to
find another way to fight for the Serbian and Yugoslav cause.
By 1914 Princip was living in Belgrade and studying at the First Belgrade High
School. The news of the Archduke’s forthcoming visit in the summer, around the
anniversary of the defeat of Kosovo Field, was publicised from mid-March. Upon
hearing the news, Princip met with a fellow Young Bosnian, Nedeljko Čabrinovi ć, C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

who was also in Belgrade. Princip put the idea of an attempt on the heir apparent
to him in a local park, and at the trial, Čabrinovi ć recalled: ‘After a short moment’s
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

hesitation, I accepted this offer. We gave each other our word of honour, shook
hands and departed’.26 Princip, deciding they needed more recruits, then asked his
roommate Trifko Grabe ž to join the plot, and he enthusiastically accepted the offer.
zcao
[rn]

Offering an insight into Princip’s mental state during this formative period of the
plot, friends observed he was often in deeply melancholic moods, though this was
58 P. Jackson

contrasted with a more optimistic view on the potential of a change in the region’s
political system. For example, he underlined the following lines in the poem ‘Our
Today’:

Even if we have not created anything ourselves,

We shall at least have put an end to the misery of our time.
Our graves will be the new foundation
Of the new life without the flaws of today
Of the better life which at least leads somewhere …

From a ‘chrono-ethological’ perspective, what stands out from these lines is the
way individual death is seen as a prelude to communal rebirth. It highlights his
sense of wanting to be a key player in an imminent social revolution, and his
underlining suggests that a true turning point in his society is only achievable
through self-sacrifice, a task for which, as we shall see, he felt ready.
The three nationalists decided to procure weapons for the plot from the komite.
Princip and an old friend, Milan Ciganovi ć, himself an ex-komite soldier, appear ca[cue]t

to have then contacted each other. As to the arrangements for the assassination, a
lack of reliable sources means that here the story becomes vague. We have to rely
mainly on a narrative of the events written by a bookshop owner and fellow
conspirator, Du šan Slavi ć, some 14 years after the event. It appears from the text
scao
[rn] ca[cue]t

that Milan Ciganovi ć and several other figures created a new secret society, based
ca[cue]t

in Belgrade, sympathetic to the cause. These included Djuro Šarac, a fellow S[cao
rn]

Young Bosnian, and Slavi ć himself. This society was called Death or Life, and
ca[cue]t

again drew upon many mythical and symbolic practices, thereby imbuing the
ideology with a distinctly sacralised concept of the nation. For example, the
council of seven members who headed Death or Life explicitly drew on the 1389
legend, naming themselves the Spirits of the Avengers of Kosovo. The level to
which the individual was subordinate to the will of the organisation was demon-
strated by a membership ritual that required not only the swearing of an oath
promising secrecy in all activities, but also for a letter written to the Council of
Spirits pledging the member’s suicide, if ever requested by the council, after the
completion of a mission. To symbolise their enmity towards the Habsburg
monarchy, the council held at least two meetings on the site of the 1868 assassina-
tion of Serbian Prince Mihailo Obrenovi ć, who was killed, reputedly, with the aid
ca[cue]t

of the Austro-Hungarian authorities. It appears that at these meetings Princip and

the others were ‘officially’ proposed as the future assassins and were called to join
the society.
After Princip, Grabe ž and Čabrinovi ć were sworn into the society they were
zo
acr[n] C
[cao
rn] ca[cuet]

issued with weapons and trained in their use. Milan Ciganovi ć acquired the ca[cue]t

bombs and guns for the assassination from General Tankosi ć – the general who ca[cue]t

had previously refused Princip a place in the Serbian komite. (Incidentally, Prin-
cip, on hearing of the general’s involvement, refused the latter’s request for a
meeting, not forgetting his humiliation.) Tankosi ć then offered to help the three ca[cue]t

conspirators travel from Belgrade to Sarajevo. This supply of weapons and

passage is the most significant link between the assassination attempt and the
Serbian terrorist organisation the Black Hand – often incorrectly cited as the
perpetrators of the assassination – as Tankosi ć was a member of the society’s ca[cue]t

central committee. Death or Life’s Council of Spirits also furnished the three
conspirators with cyanide poison, which they were then instructed to take after
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 59

the assassination of the Archduke. Princip reputedly claimed he would take his
directly after the assassination. The three men thereafter made their way back
across the border with the weapons and poison, crossing the checkpoint undetec-
ted with the help of the Black Hand’s connections to the Serbian Army, and then
on to Sarajevo. This ‘underground’ activity can all be seen as adding to the poetic
quality of the assassin’s senses of ‘mission’ and ‘destiny’.
Meanwhile in Sarajevo, Danilo Ili ć had been in contact with Princip and had ca[cue]t

recruited more assassins for the operation. He initially contacted Mehmed

Mehemedba ši ć, the only Muslim among the conspirators. Ili ć and Mehemedba ši ć
scao
[rn] ca[cue]t ca[cue]t scao
[rn] ca[cue]t

had a history of such activities: they had been co-conspirators with the Black
Hand’s General Apis in an attempted assassination on General Potiorek in 1913,
though this had failed. Ili ć met Mehemedba ši ć in March 1914 and the two agreed
ca[cue]t scao
[rn] ca[cue]t

to stall their plans to mount another attack on Potiorek in favour of the new plot
to kill the Archduke. Ili ć also recruited two students from a younger, more
ca[cue]t

radicalised generation of Young Bosnians, who were fully committed to the

revolutionary overthrow of the Habsburgs and the creation of a culturally and
politically unified South Slav state. First, Vaso Čubrilovi ć contacted Ili ć indepen- C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t ca[cue]t

dently, having his own ideas for an assassination, and secondly, in late May 1914
Čubrilovi ć discussed the idea of an assassination with fellow student Cveto
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

Popovi ć, and he too joined the growing number of would-be assassins.
ca[cue]t

The seriousness of the attempt was not lost on these youths. Popovi ć noted the ca[cue]t

profound new outlook he acquired in the run-up to the attempt, especially in its
relationship to the Kosovo Field mythology:

After I gave my word to join the plot I spent the whole night thinking and
dreaming about the assassination. In the morning I was quite a different
man. Convinced that I only had until June 28th to live, Vidovdan – St
Vitus Day – I looked upon everything from a new angle … Only one
thought tormented me: that we might not succeed and thus make fools of
ourselves.27

Čabrinovi ć wrote to a couple he was friendly with a day before the assassination,
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

and similarly asserted this reorientation of life in the face of – to his mind at this
point – certain death. In an expression of hope for the future, this letter simply
read:

DEAR FRIENDS,

On the eve of my death, deadly ill, I wish you and your wife all possible
happiness in our new and free fatherland.28

The only conspirator who appears to have demonstrated second thoughts over
the endeavour was Danilo Ili ć. This was not only through his own moral ques- ca[cue]t

tioning of the merits of the assassination, but also on account of the reservations
of General Apis, who, sources suggest, did not support any such assassination
attempts as they may have engendered a war between Austria and Serbia at a
time when Serbia was ill-prepared for such an eventuality. In mid-June the Chief
of Death or Life, Djuro Šarec, went to Bosnia in an attempt to pass on this S[cao
rn]

message. Unable to enter Sarajevo, as the authorities there knew him to be a

subversive figure, he met with Ili ć in Bosanki Brod. Ili ć’s growing unease was ca[cue]t ca[cue]t
60 P. Jackson

further influenced by his own reasoning that the reaction of the authorities to the
assassination would only lead to greater suffering for the Serb people. Also, Ili ć ca[cue]t

was having doubts about the strategy of an assassination without the presence of
a cohesive revolutionary party able to capitalise on the situation. However, it
appears that Princip’s stronger will to action led to Ili ć’s continued willingness to ca[cue]t

participate. At the initial inquiry, Princip claimed: ‘I was not in agreement with
the postponement of the assassination because a certain morbid yearning for it
had been awakened in me’.29
Perhaps through Princip’s force of personality, Ili ć accepted his role in the ca[cue]t

events and prepared plans for the placements of Life or Death’s assassins, based
upon a newspaper report of the Archduke’s route through Sarajevo. Ili ć issued the ca[cue]t

plans and weapons to the conspirators on the afternoon and evening of 27 June.
Indicating the importance of earlier martyrs as figures to help inspire action, Ili ć ca[cue]t

then went and spent some time at Žeraji ć’s shrine. Čabrinovi ć later did the same.
Z
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

Gavrilo Princip sat drinking with friends until around 11.00 p.m., and then also
visited the grave, leaving flowers. On the morning of the assassination, the seven
assassins took up positions along the imperial party’s route, mingling freely with
the crowds gathering to see the Archduke. The first assassin to make an attempt
was not Princip but Čabrinovi ć. When he saw the approaching convoy, he asked
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

a police agent which car the Archduke was travelling in, to which the police agent
enthusiastically indicated the third one. Čabrinovi ć then took his bomb, activated
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

it and threw it towards his target. He missed, and the bomb exploded on the street
behind the car, injuring around a dozen people. Čabrinovi ć then took his cyanide
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

and jumped into the river Miljacka. Seconds later, he was dragged from the
shallows, and when questioned who he was, he exclaimed, ‘I am a Serbian hero’.
It appears the cyanide was in some way defective and did not have the desired
effect, and Čabrinovi ć was taken to the local authorities.
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

The Archduke then travelled swiftly to the town hall to be greeted by an

unaware Lord Mayor, who began his speech: ‘Your Imperial and Royal Highness,
your Highness! Our hearts are full of happiness on the occasion of the most
gracious visit …’. After realising the gravity of the situation, the Mayor discussed
with General Potiorek and the imperial party a new plan of action. An alternate
route, away from the crowded Apel Quay where Čabrinovi ć had launched his C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

bomb, was decided upon and the Archduke headed back to the motorcade. Back
on the streets, his driver failed to take the new turning off Apel Quay for the
alternate route. Realising his mistake, the driver braked to turn around and, at
this point, Princip stepped forwards. In his own words, speaking just 45 minutes
later to the local judge:

When the second car arrived, I recognised the Heir Apparent … At that
same moment I was filled with a peculiar feeling and I aimed at the Heir
Apparent from the pavement … I believe that I fired twice, perhaps more,
because I was so excited. Whether I hit the victim or not, I cannot tell,
because instantly people started hitting me.30

Princip also tried to take his poison, but vomited. He then tried to raise his pistol
to his head, but was prevented from pulling the trigger as he was dragged away.
The Archduke and his wife were declared dead around an hour later.
The wider international consequences of the assassination are out of the scope
of this article, but are well known to all who know the history of the origins of the
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 61

First World War.31 It is worth highlighting that the European public was highly
conscious of the unfolding events, as reported in the popular press, which
increasingly whipped up the war fever so marking the summer of 1914.32 Locally,
there was a crackdown on Serbian organisations as the authorities followed up
leads gained by the arrest of Čabrinovi ć and Princip. Apart from Mehemedba ši ć,
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t scao
[rn] ca[cue]t

who avoided detection, the conspirators were tried in October 1914 with a
number of others connected with the assassination. At the trial only Ili ć was old ca[cue]t

enough at the time of the assassination to qualify for the death penalty. He was
hanged. Čubrilovi ć received a 16-year jail sentence, and Popovi ć 13 years.
C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t ca[cue]t

Princip, escaping the death penalty by one month, was sentenced to 20 years hard
labour, as was Grabe ž and Čabrinovi ć. Of those sentenced, only Čubrilovi ć and
zo
acr[n] C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t C
[cao
rn] ca[cue]t

Popovi ć survived the war; the rest died of tuberculosis whilst in prison. No
ca[cue]t

members of the organisation Death or Life, despite a brief investigation into the
possibility of its existence, were prosecuted and the organisation escaped official
detection.
We can glean further insight into Princip’s thoughts on the assassination from a
series of notes taken by one Dr Pappenheim, a psychiatrist who conducted a
series of prison interviews with Princip before he died of tuberculosis in 1918. In
these interviews, Princip asserted his belief that his act would spark a wave of
nationalist fervour – one that would be the prelude to an irresistible movement of
national liberation. The role of the Bosnian intellectuals was, therefore, crucial.
Pappenheim noted that Princip

considers that if he prepared the atmosphere the idea of revolution and

liberation would spread first among the men of intelligence and the later
in the masses … Thought that if Austria were thrown into difficulties
then revolution would come. But for such a revolution one must prepare
the ground, work up feeling. Nothing happened. By assassination this
spirit might be prepared. There had already been attempts at assassina-
tions before. The perpetrators were like heroes to our young people …
Thought that thereby attention of the intelligentsia would be directed
upon it. As for instance Mazzini did in Italy.33

Pappenheim asked Princip to write down some of his own understandings of his
motives during these interviews. Princip’s thought was clearly marked by a deeply
held sense of utopian revolutionary nationalism, a varient of a palingenetic mindset:

There must be created a realization where differences equalise, (adds) are

equalised, between European peoples. But we as nationalists, although
we had read socialistic and anarchistic writings, did not occupy ourselves
much with this question, thinking that each of us had another duty – a
national duty.34

As for the timing of Princip’s sense of destiny in murdering the Archduke, his
testimony shows that once he learned of the Archduke’s visit, he put aside more
general ideological activities and he became focused solely on the assassination
attempt. He immersed himself in reading material that would prepare him
psychologically for the assassination and the suicide that would follow it.
Pappenheim noted that he ‘Read much in Sarajevo. In Sarajevo used to dream
every night he was a political murderer. Read much about the Russian revolution,
62 P. Jackson

about the fightings. This idea had taken hold of him. Admits the earlier
constraints had vanished’.35 Interestingly, Princip showed he was aware of the
contemporary instabilities in Europe that many intellectuals claimed portended a
world war:

it is all indifferent to him, on account of his illness and the misfortune of

his people. Has sacrificed his life for the people. Could not believe that
such a World War could break out as a result of an act like this. They did
indeed believe that a World War might break out, but not at that
moment.36

Pappenheim’s notes go on to say that Princip was unable to feel contrition:

‘cannot feel responsible for the catastrophe’; and that he felt that no good had
come of the action: ‘fears he did it in vain’.
However, the Young Bosnians viewed Princip’s actions as those of a national
hero. For example, fellow conspirator Čubrilovi ć commented thus upon the
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dynamic between the Kosovo Field defeat and the regenerative heroism of Prin-
cip’s double murder: ‘The Serbs carry on a hero cult, and today with the name of
Milos Obili ć they bracket that of Gavrilo Princip; the former stands for Serbian
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Heroism in the tragedy of Kosovo Field, the latter for heroism in the final libera-
tion’.37 Ivor Ili ć, a schoolboy and Young Bosnian from Tuzla on the day of the
ca[cue]t

assassination, noted the impact of the assassination:

it proves that Young Bosnia is alive, that there exists an element which is
prepared to be martyred … The life of a nation exists in blood, blood is
the God of a nation, death superseded the insurrection, and the assassina-
tion is the insurrection of the nation.38

In the literature that developed around the subject in Yugoslavia, Princip was
often hailed as a national hero, especially in hagiographic biographies like Bora
Jetvi ć’s. In post-1918 Yugoslavia there were also attempts to appropriate the
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episode as part of the creation a historic sense of national identity by attaching the
conspirator’s names to cultural and political institutions. Further, Marxist histori-
ans of the region have often attempted to portray Young Bosnia critically – as a
movement lacking a coherent ideology – but Princip generously, as a key agent of
change in the Marxist conception of history.39

Conclusions and Tentative Suggestions

Poets – unlike other men – are faithful only in the hour of calamity and
leave those who are enjoying well-being. We poets are born for struggle;
we are passionate hunters, but we do not eat the prey. A thin and almost
invisible fence divides us; it is not as keen as the edge of the swords but
nevertheless it is just as lethal. Without damage to my soul I could not
cross this line, because we can endure anything but authority.40

Ivo Andri ć, ‘A Story From Japan’

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This article has shown that the Young Bosnia movement attempted to become the
nucleus of a popular movement of national reawakening by unifying the most
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 63

extreme elements of Serbian and other South Slav nationalisms, and that this was
part of a more general phenomenon which saw radicalised youth organisations
unifying around the common enemies of external rule. We have also seen the
presence of a distinctly sacralising semiotics at the heart of this movement’s
ideology, a feature that is crucial to understanding how the movement was able
to inspire acts of violence and self-sacrifice. Consequently, it seems appropriate to
consider the Young Bosnia ideology to be one partially assuming the form of a
political religion among its less committed and fringe membership, in addition to
becoming a fully-fledged one for its core membership. This is because it drew not
only on elements of faith that are common to all forms of ideological commit-
ment, but also because it contained an overtly metaphysical axis far removed
from a simply materialistic conception of secular nationhood, or progressive
political movement, for its core followers, such as Princip. Further, the Young
Bosnians can be seen to have been motivated by particular aspects of a mytholo-
gised past and a utopian sense of the future that, to their minds at least, elevated
their behaviour above the everyday and turned them into an esoteric body of
actors (a self-conscious vanguard). These cells, via their individual struggle,
terrorist activity and, ultimately, readiness for self-sacrifice, enacted at an individ-
ual level the sense of apocalypse needed to inspire action that, on a Societal level,
would destroy the old hegemony of the Ottomans and Habsburgs, and would
redeem the masses of the population in a new future. We can therefore see that,
for the committed members of Young Bosnia, their project clearly contained
mythopoeic tropes of sacralised ideological praxis.
By interpreting their psychology in this way, we are offered a heuristically
usefully approach to Young Bosnia’s motivations: believing they were living
during a time that was ‘out of joint’, they devoted themselves to generating hope
for fundamental change, and they envisaged that ideologically motivated murder
and self-sacrifice were perpetrated in order to find a wider sense of societal redemp-
tion. The various political instabilities of the region in the period leading up to the
assassination, combined with the growing desire for national self-determination in
the body politic of the region, fed into this development of esoteric palingenetic
ideologies. The period also produced events that seemed to bear out the conclusions
of the mythopoeic ideological constructions that were created by the region’s radi-
calised youth. This inculcated, on a societal level, a faith in the rebirth of the nation,
and on an individual level induced the archetypal hero figure prepared to sacrifice
his life for the greater good. In this, the Young Bosnians believed themselves to be
the harbingers of a new era of unified independence for the South Slav region,
exemplifying the trope of rebirth symptomatic of the palingenetic condition.

Notes
1. For a lengthy and useful discussion of the concept of ‘political religion’ and sacralised elements of
ideology, see Emilio Gentile, ‘The Sacralisation of Politics: Definitions, Interpretations and Reflec-
tions on the Question of Secular Religion and Totalitarianism’, Totalitarian Movements and Political
Religions 1/1 (Summer 2000), pp.18–55; and for a summary of the role of the mythopoeic elements
present in all ideological constructs, and the powerful psychodynamic force they can hold over
behaviour, see Christopher Flood, Political Myth: A Theoretical Introduction (London: Routledge,
1996).
2. For a full explanation of this approach, see Roger Griffin, ‘Shattering Crystals: The Role of “Dream
Time” in Extreme Right-Wing Political Violence’, Terrorism and Political Violence 15/1 (Spring
2003), pp.57–94.
64 P. Jackson

3. Herman Broch, The Sleepwalkers (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), p.296.
4. Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in idem, Illuminations (London: Pimlico,
1999), pp.245–55.
5. The allusion is to Hamlet, Act 1 Scene 5, when Hamlet is told by the ghost of his dead father that he
was murdered by Claudius, and therefore learns of the unjust nature of Claudius’s reign as the
new king.
6. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1967).
7. Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974).
8. Mercia Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (San Diego, CA: Harvest Books,
1987).
9. Joseph Campbell, The Hero With a Thousand Faces (London: Fontana Press, 1993).
10. Ernst Bloch The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
11. Jacques Derrida, The Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, and the New
International (London: Routledge, 1994).
12. Griffin (note 2), pp.60–1.
13. Campbell (note 9), p.30.
14. In addition to texts already cited, the following were of general assistance in conceiving this
section: Misha Glenny, The Balkans: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers, 1804–1999 (London:
Penguin Books, 1999); Davis MacKenzie, ‘Serbian Nationalist and Military Organisations and the
Piedmont Idea, 1844–1914’, East European Quarterly 16/3 (1982), pp.323–44; Carole Rogel, The Slov-
enes and Yugoslavism 1890–1914 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977); Starvo Skendi,
Balkan Cultural Studies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980); and Wayne S. Vucinovich,
‘Mlada Bosna and the First World War’, in Robert A. Kann, Béla K. Király and Paula S. Fichtner
(eds.), The Habsburg Empire in World War I: Essays on the Intellectual, Military, Political and Economic
Aspects of the Habsburg War Effort (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp.45–70.
15. Borivoje Jevtić , as quoted in Vladimir Dedijer, The Road to Sarajevo (London: MacGibbon and Kee,
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1967), p.238.
16. Dedijer (note 15), p.217.
17. Mitrinović , quoted in ibid., p.232.
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18. Ivo Andrić , The Bridge over the River Drina (London: Harvill Press, 1959), pp.231–2.
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19. The concept ‘anthropological revolution’ is derived from Emilio Gentile’s observation of the
phenomenon of modern palingenetic ideologies and state structures generating idealised images
of redemptive male figures, such as the Nazi Aryan man or the new Soviet Man. For more on the
function of this concept within totalitarian ideologies, see Gentile (note 1); for more on the roles of
idealised images of the male figure in politics throughout the twentieth century, and the ‘new
man’, see George L. Mosse, The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1996).
20. Dragoslav Ljubibrati ć , quoted in Dedijer (note 15), p.249.
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21. Gać inović , quoted in ibid., p.213.

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22. Gać inović , as quoted in R.W. Seton Watson, Sarajevo (London: Hutchinson, 1925), pp.70–1.
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23. Gać inović , quoted in Seton-Watson (note 22), pp.70–1.

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24. Dedijer (note 15), p.222. On the use of traditional gods as a part of the semiotics of nationalism and
violent ideological constructs, it is also of interest to note that another European god of thunder,
war and states of trans-like holy madness, Wotan/Wodin, not only played a key role in the völkisch
thought that fed into Nazism, but also the same god was evoked by the Latvian proto-fascist
movement the Thunder Cross.
25. Petar Petrovitch Nyegosh, The Mountain Wreath (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1930).
26. Dedijer (note 15), p.290.
27. Ibid., p.305.
28. Čabrinović , quoted in ibid., p.281.
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29. Dedijer (note 15), p.309.

30. Ibid., p.321.
31. For an extended discussion of the July Crisis, see Hew Strachan, The First World War: Volume I: To
Arms (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp.64–102.
32. For a longer discussion on the role of the media in the generation of war fever during 1914, see
Steven Kern, The Culture of Time and Space 1880–1918 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
2000), pp.260–1.
33. Hamilton Fish Armstrong, ‘Confessions of the Assassin Whose Deed Led to the World War’,
Current History (August 1927), pp.699–707, 703–6.
 ‘Sacred Time’ in the Dynamics of Nationalist Terrorism 65

34. Ibid., p.705.

35. Ibid., p.706.
36. Ibid., p.704.
37. CČubrilović , quoted in Dedijer (note 15) p.260.
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38. Dedijer (note 15), p.324.

39. See Vucinovich (note 14), esp. pp.59–62.
40. Ivo Andrić , ‘A Story From Japan’, reprinted in Dedijer (note 15), pp.233–4.
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