Misfire

Abstract

Abstract Shot through the neck, choking on his own blood with his beloved wife dying beside him, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire, managed a few words before losing consciousness: “It’s nothing,” he repeatedly said of his fatal wound. It was June 28, 1914, in the Bosnian capital of Sarajevo. One month later, what most Europeans also took for “nothing” became “something” when the Archduke’s uncle, Emperor Franz Joseph, declared war on Serbia for allegedly harboring the criminal elements and tolerating the propaganda that prompted the assassination. The First World War—the seminal catastrophe of the twentieth century—had begun not with the bang of Gavrilo Princip’s gun, but with the whimper of European statesmen unable to resolve the diplomatic crisis that ensued. The history of the Sarajevo assassination and the origins of World War I rest on a rude irony: the vast disproportionality between a single deadly act and an act of war that would leave ten million dead. Consequently, the Archduke’s murder has assumed mythic proportions—the “first shots of the First World War” fired by a “fanatic Serb nationalist” backed by the “secret” Black Hand “terrorist” society in the “primitive, violence-ridden Balkans.” This book brings Sarajevo back to earth. By narrating the assassination in a broad historical context bereft of its usual embellishments and distortions, Misfire reminds readers that the real causes for the world war lie in “civilized” Europe rather than an amateurishly organized, if eternally fascinating, political murder.