{"id":1183,"date":"2026-08-10T13:41:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T13:41:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bestbook.hr\/?p=1183"},"modified":"2026-08-28T11:07:16","modified_gmt":"2026-08-28T11:07:16","slug":"on-the-assassination-of-stjepan-radic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bestbook.hr\/en\/on-the-assassination-of-stjepan-radic\/","title":{"rendered":"On the assassination of Stjepan Radi\u0107"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In a television podcast, Member of Parliament Stipe Mlinari\u0107 \u0106ipo speaks out against one specific Croatian Serb. He states that he was the wartime mayor of Vukovar, and that at the time he renamed Stjepan Radi\u0107 Street and gave it the name of Radi\u0107\u2019s killer \u2013 Gavrilo Princip. The audience listening to the significantly titled podcast Croatian Defender (Hrvatski branitelj) is disgusted and enraged. The mere mention of the Serb\u2019s name is enough for them; what the dignitary \u0106ipo adds to that name gives their anger its final excuse and form. While, with sweaty hands, they grip the cowhide-covered steering wheels of their Japanese and German cars and angrily press the gas, imagining that with the tips of their shoes they are crushing the Serb\u2019s testicles<\/strong>, thirty-one years after the end of the war these people persist in their own emotion from 1991. They do not allow time, not even for a day, to flow toward the future, because the Serb has not been punished for having been the mayor of occupied Vukovar and for having then done something so vile, something deeply incomprehensible to the mind of the good Croatian man and the gentle Croatian children: he renamed the street that bore the name of the murdered Croatian leader Stjepan Radi\u0107 after the name of Radi\u0107\u2019s killer, Gavrilo Princip. The undisturbed anger of the community in Croatia in 2026 is not shaken even by the fact that, at least according to the conception of reality hitherto accepted, Gavrilo Princip was not the killer of Stjepan Radi\u0107. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One hundred and twelve years after the Sarajevo assassination, we find no trace of how Stjepan Radi\u0107 reacted to Princip\u2019s act. That June of 1914 he had just turned forty-three; he was at the head of the Croatian People\u2019s Peasant Party, which in 1913, in the last prewar elections for the Croatian Sabor, won three seats <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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But may we still be so certain that Princip did not kill Radi\u0107? Or that it is still possible to insist on that reality, on that parallel universe in which truth was established on the basis of certain factualities? At the time, namely, things were approximately like this: on June 28, 1914, in Sarajevo, Gavrilo Princip, an unfinished gymnasium student from Obljaj near Bosansko Grahovo, not yet twenty years old, fires a pistol in a narrow side street off Apel Quay and kills Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie Chotek, Duchess of Hohenberg. Afterward, he tries to kill himself, which a witness present prevents him from doing. He is arrested and, as a minor, sentenced to twenty years in prison<\/strong>. He serves his sentence in the Terez\u00edn fortress in Bohemia, near Litom\u011b\u0159ice, the place where during the Second World War the German model concentration camp Theresienstadt would be established. He dies of tuberculosis<\/strong> on April 28, 1918. He is buried in an unmarked grave, but one of the soldiers who digs the pit remembers the place and reveals it soon after the war. On July 7, 1920, Princip\u2019s bones are buried with a Christian rite, together with the bones of several other Young Bosnians, in the newly built Chapel of the Vidovdan Heroes, at the Cemetery of the Holy Archangels George and Gabriel in Sarajevo.

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One hundred and twelve years after the Sarajevo assassination, we find no trace of how Stjepan Radi\u0107 reacted to Princip\u2019s act. That June of 1914 he had just turned forty-three; he was at the head of the Croatian People\u2019s Peasant Party, which in 1913, in the last prewar elections for the Croatian Sabor, won three seats. Radi\u0107 was a journalist, a politically highly conscious and well-informed man, a European, a fierce fighter against the Magyarones and Hungarian political and cultural hegemony, as well as against the suppression of Croatian and all Slavic identities, an irreconcilable opponent of the Habsburgs, ill-disposed toward Croatian subservience to foreigners. In the book Croats and Serbs, which he published in 1903, he writes of the unity of the two peoples<\/strong> as a precondition of their survival, and that a politics of eradication of ours or yours necessarily leads to the eradication of both ours and yours, as well as that \u201conly a cretinous mind or a criminal soul can preach a medieval destructive tribal hatred.\u201d Although Radi\u0107 was not inclined to violence, nor did he subscribe to the fashion of political assassinations that marked the age, we are free to assume that he did not condemn Princip\u2019s act, although something in him must have rebelled against such undertakings. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stjepan Radi\u0107 during the 1920s (Photo: Public Domain)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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Immediately after the Great War, through a combination of political, cultural, and life circumstances, Stjepan Radi\u0107 became the undisputed leader of the Croatian, and to some extent already South Slavic, peasantry. On the one hand, he was made so by the ban on the Communist Party, which in Croatia in the first postwar years had been very influential, and by the fact that the numerous scattered rights-based factions were deeply compromised, among them especially the pro-Vienna and pro-German ones. And since the peasantry constituted the majority of the Croatian people, Radi\u0107 rose to become the undisputed national leader as well. Anticlerical, a tribune and orator, and in some strange way also an iconoclast and dismantler of new and old myths, legends, and beliefs, Stjepan Radi\u0107 was, quite logically, also a republican. <\/strong>But what drew the general fury of his enemies was not so much that he had little respect for the king and the monarchy; after all, he himself was ready to make compromises on that point, because for him the meaning of a republic was not in its form but in its substance; but something else in which Radi\u0107 was absolutely uncompromising and unyielding. What was unacceptable to him was the model according to which the Croats had lost the war while the Serbs had won it. He had no respect for war veterans, the Salonika volunteers, and that whole newly formed military and heroic social class, whose war merits were to be the building blocks of the new state and the guarantee that the Croats and all other noncombatants would keep quiet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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If only Croatia were at issue, or if Croatia in 2026 were merely a civilizational aberration and exception in Europe and the world, as to some extent the Kingdom of SHS was at the moment when Puni\u0161a Ra\u010di\u0107 pulled the pistol, we could, at the risk of danger, mock the hero, just as Radi\u0107 and his comrades mocked him on June 20, 1928, in the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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A full ten years after Princip\u2019s death, on June 20, 1928, in the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in Belgrade, a fierce quarrel broke out between the opposition and the ruling party, in which the opposition accused the ruling side of corruption, while the latter tried to blackmail the opposition with their war merits. Harsh words were exchanged, and one of the ruling deputies pulled out a pistol and opened fire on Radi\u0107 and his people. He killed two of them and seriously wounded Stjepan Radi\u0107. How did a parliamentary deputy have a pistol in his pocket? Legally he could not have possessed it at that moment, since one does not enter any parliament with a weapon, but essentially speaking, that man, by the name of Puni\u0161a Ra\u010di\u0107, had the pistol by his right as a war veteran, a fighter, and a volunteer. If we describe the event from the experience of Croatia in 2026, everything happened exactly like that. With the proviso that with those two parliamentary murders, and with the death of Stjepan Radi\u0107, who dies from the consequences of his wounding after about fifty days of illness, on August 8, 1928, any possibility vanished of establishing communication, even quarrelsome communication, between two opposed discourses: one which said, you have enslaved us with your mostly false legends of wartime heroism<\/strong> and have already begun killing us, and the other which said, you deceived and betrayed us, and you do not respect the blood we shed in war for your freedom as well. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stipo Mlinari\u0107 \u0106ipe, by his civilian occupation, is a shoe technician; that is, a cobbler, a shoemaker, but he never practiced that trade. He describes himself as a war hero; after being captured in Vukovar, he was an inmate of a camp in Serbia. He was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when he came out of the camp, but what he would do until 2026 would be determined exclusively by the circumstances of the war of 1991. Anyone who ever finds themselves in a position to communicate with him, or with his name, image, public appearance, will find themselves blackmailed by what Stipo Mlinari\u0107 \u0106ipe in 1991 created as his social qualification. In Croatia there is no stronger or more convincing blackmail than that, and previous experiences, personal, familial, and historical, including the experience of Stjepan Radi\u0107, confirm to us that one does not play with it. The moment a state founds itself on the suffering of an individual and on his wartime heroism, as the Kingdom of SHS founded itself on the suffering and heroism of Puni\u0161a Ra\u010di\u0107, anyone who has some problem with it has put a price on their head <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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And what then are we to do when Stipo Mlinari\u0107 \u0106ipe says that Gavrilo Princip killed Radi\u0107?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Gavrilo Princip in his prison cell in 1915 (Photo: Public Domain) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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What are we to do if an indisputable social authority, on which Croatia in 2026 is founded, and at the same time a deputy in the state parliament, who with his mind and voice forms the majority on which power in the state rests, says that Gavrilo Princip killed Radi\u0107 \u2013 what are we to do when the clip from the podcast in which he says this, in order to show the people in his country what danger threatens them from the Serb<\/strong> who renamed Radi\u0107 Street after the name of Radi\u0107\u2019s killer, spreads across social media and the internet more virally than the germ of some deadly disease, and spreads because thousands of people, protected by their own anonymity, are joking at the expense of one tragic Vukovar shoemaker, war hero, and national martyr? If we ourselves are anonymous, we can joke about it for as long as we remain anonymous, but how are we to look at it, and what are we to do, if we are not anonymous, but could be identified as enemies of the Croatia that \u0106ipe is creating?

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The bullet that fatally wounded Stjepan Radi\u0107 in 1928 (photo: \u017deljko Hladika\/Pixsell)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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If only Croatia were at issue, or if Croatia in 2026 were merely a civilizational aberration and exception in Europe and the world, as to some extent the Kingdom of SHS was at the moment when Puni\u0161a Ra\u010di\u0107 pulled the pistol, we could, at the risk of danger, mock the hero, just as Radi\u0107 and his comrades mocked him on June 20, 1928, in the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. The problem, however, is that \u0106ipe\u2019s world and his consciousness, \u0106ipe\u2019s lack of obligation to those facts which we once believed formed our reality, for example, the fact that in that reality Gavrilo Princip could in no way have killed Stjepan Radi\u0107, since by the time of Radi\u0107\u2019s death he was already dead, are in complete technical harmony with the world and consciousness, the attitude toward facts, as well as the attitude toward other people\u2019s lives, held by Donald Trump and his secretary of war Pete Hegseth<\/strong>. The latter, namely, has neonazi and crusader signs and slogans tattooed all over his body, along with calls for the destruction of Islam and all Muslims. If we still lived in some previous world, we might say that the American secretary of war has inscribed on his own skin the program and goals of the war he and his chief have waged against the Islamic Republic of Iran, or which they previously waged against the Palestinian Arabs, but after Donald Trump became the owner, though not the recipient, of the Nobel Peace Prize in the year 2025, the factual substrate of the world has been transformed in such a way that we are no longer in a position to know when and to what extent we are permitted to connect causes with their consequences. Is connecting causes with consequences in today\u2019s world, and especially in Croatia, an anti-state activity directed against the people and their heroic and martyred history? <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Stipo Mlinari\u0107 \u0106ipe (Photo: Robert Ani\u0107\/Pixsell)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

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June 20, 1928, was a Wednesday. In Belgrade the day was bathed in sunshine, and the summer heat had begun much earlier this year, so most of the city\u2019s people, together with the poor, had gone down to the rivers. The city bathing places and Ada Ciganlija teemed with life. Naked children ran about all around. Young men in striped bathing costumes chased women\u2019s movements as they ran across wooden docks and, with obligatory figures in the air, dived headfirst into the river. Ladies in white, and among them the occasional Amazon in love with her own sex, muscular and in a man\u2019s costume, with coquettish white parasols, as in the paintings of the French Impressionists, maintained a distance between the two sexes divided by physiology and custom, but all of them too, as if in a moment of total madness, were gazing at the great water. To someone watching all this from the side and not well acquainted with the laws and rules of life on Earth, because he had found himself in Belgrade as a guest
from the universe or from the distant future, it would seem on that Wednesday, June 20, 1928, that warm-blooded primate mammals, pink-skinned and mostly hairless, are in some secret ceremonial of Mother Nature at that very moment transforming into amphibians, and that the whole human race is turning into fish. Here, in that place, in the city at the confluence of two great rivers, human history ends and the fish history of humankind begins. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A few kilometers away, in the lee of a vast building site where for years, almost since the state has existed, the grand palace of the future parliament has been rising, being built, if it may be said, as the Tower of Babel was built before time began, there stands a cramped and unimpressive building at the corner of Queen Natalija and Prince Milo\u0161 Streets, where, in entirely unsuitable premises under low ceilings, the parliamentary life of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes is taking place<\/em> There, through those long-unwhitewashed corridors, rooms, and offices, move middle-aged and elderly men, large and small, tall, asthenic, obese, swollen, <\/strong>flushed, full of all manner of life dissatisfaction and fanatically convinced of their mission in life, and all dressed the same: in heavy black wool suits with waistcoats under jackets which in French we call sacques, in white linen shirts, and with black ties or bow ties, beneath which lies the heavy intimate underwear, mostly of peasant origin, and black thread stockings. Their shoes are for the most part worn-down salon shoes, short and double-laced for tying, but there are also concealed boots for snow and mud, porter\u2019s shoes and formal military city shoes, and all manner of footwear imitating the footwear appropriate for deputies in the highest legislative body of the state, whose word only the king may contest <\/em> Among the several hundred people who on that Wednesday find themselves in that temporary parliamentary
building, at the session of the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes: parliamentary deputies, ministers, assembly clerks, assistants, servants, and bodyguards; perhaps only five or six are in modern Parisian or Viennese underwear, in silk white shirts and black suits of cotton or linen, and in neat shallow shoes for the theater, their heads tied with fine silk ties. But even with them, those ties are all black in turn, because in the parliamentary life of that kingdom there had not yet appeared a single such man who would dare come to an assembly session in a dark blue tie, or a tie the color of clotted blood, as old Georges Clemenceau had appeared at the peace conference in Versailles, to demand too much for France, because \u201cthis peace treaty is, like all the others, only a continuation of war, and can be nothing else,\u201d as he then said. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Ladies in white, and among them the occasional Amazon in love with her own sex, muscular and in a man\u2019s costume, with coquettish white parasols, as in the paintings of the French Impressionists, maintained a distance between the two sexes divided by physiology and custom, but all of them too, as if in a moment of total madness, were gazing at the great water<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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Upon the flimsy wooden structure over which red roof tiles have been set in regular rows, the strong summer sun beats mercilessly, heating the attic full of junk, and beneath the attic the assembly hall, which until recently, they say, had been an officers\u2019 stable, though perhaps it had not: maybe those too are only rumors, and in that hall, in the surrounding corridors, offices, and government rooms, are one, two, perhaps three hundred men in black wool suits with waistcoats, and white shirts of heavy tablecloth-like cloth. The only woman in the temporary building<\/strong> of the National Assembly is named Fadila, the coffee-maker, a fifty-year-old Turkish woman from Prizren, emancipated and self-aware, so that without any inner fear or strain, without unnecessary shame, she brews coffee, pours it into fild\u017ean cups, and when needed talks with these men, who from her point of view are all the same. To some of those all-the-same men she secretly pours rakija into those same little cups, fierce Montenegrin grape brandy, which they toss back in one gulp and shudder like wet dogs <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The sun strikes from above, and from below those several hundred men exhale hot air. The heat in the building is unbearable, so that the lucky ones who have a chance to step outside for a moment are seized with a pleasant shiver at the outer coolness. That coolness before which the people of Belgrade have descended to the water and turned into fish and amphibians. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The South Slavs are divided into a series of heroic tribes, which, like most other Europeans, thickened at the end of the nineteenth century into different nations. With a few rare exceptions, these nations are made up of an illiterate or poorly educated people founded on a firm masculine principle. Among the South Slavs, lyricism is for womenfolk, epic is for menfolk. If you are a man, you are obliged, in accordance with the highest epic commandment, to be fearless. Therefore, only Fadila the coffee-maker has the right to fear and despair, because inside it is so hot. The other several hundred men in black wool suits<\/strong> with black wool waistcoats, in heavy linen shirts, necks tightened in the nooses of ties, are instead of the lyrical feeling of despair pervaded to the bone by epic rage <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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What might happen in the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, housed in that utterly unsuitable building while it waits for the parliamentary palace to rise over Belgrade \u2013 a completion that will be stretched out so long that the ridiculous kingdom will not live to see it \u2013 has been prepared in language for a very long time. For months already in the poorer Belgrade press and among the more heroic Radical husbands, all of them veterans of the Salonika campaign and favorites and beneficiaries of the court, there has spread a rumor that if Stjepan Radi\u0107 does not finally fall silent, he will pay for the words he speaks with his head. It began after Radi\u0107 repeatedly mocked the government and accused certain Radical leaders or their sons of plundering public property and corruption, and in this way, in the perception of those directly exposed to attack, exposed the king and the kingdom to ridicule and spat on the blood spilled in the fight<\/strong> for our common homeland. Although he never said it, those attacked began hearing in their ears that Stjepan Radi\u0107 was shouting: fuck the Salonika Front, fuck Salonika and Zejtinlik! The first time, perhaps, it was a lie and a dangerous slander cast upon Radi\u0107, but after who knows how many repetitions, precisely like tinnitus, the words echoed in the ears of the Radical Salonika volunteers: fuck the Salonika Front, fuck Salonika and Zejtinlik, and those words stuck to Radi\u0107 so firmly that he could no longer rid himself of them. And in the epic world and among men such words were paid for only with one\u2019s head. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With time, the words spoken by those directly hit spread among their like-minded people, party comrades, brothers, and sympathizers, while what Radi\u0107 says is repeated by those close to him, his party comrades, as well as those trying to ingratiate themselves with him. Stjepan Radi\u0107 is a talented man, more gifted than the Croats will ever have among their politicians. He has a perfect sense for how those to whom he speaks will hear his words and what they will feel in them. And at the same time he addresses the illiterate and uneducated Croatian peasantry<\/strong>, the lumpenproletariat from the city outskirts, and that among the Croats very thin layer of the learned and educated, but he is so gifted that with the words he speaks he knows how to address at once not only his brothers, the Serbs from across the Drina, but also that extremely suspicious and distrustful Serbian peasant who, together with the Serbian army in 1915, shed his blood in Albania, all while fighting for king and fatherland, only now by some miracle to believe some man whose words fall like stones on the heads of those close to the king. People believe Radi\u0107 because of his mastery with words, but they believe him for one more reason: there is no tsar, priest, or pope before whom he would renounce his convictions. To none of those whom he addresses is he a stranger. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Such, then, is the state of affairs in Belgrade on Wednesday, June 20, 1928. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In Terez\u00edn, ten years earlier, it was Sunday, April 28, 1918, when the prisoner Gavrilo Princip dies in prison. He has not yet turned twenty-four, his left arm was amputated at the elbow some time ago, tuberculosis has probably spread from his lungs to his bones. He was serving the sentence of twenty years of imprisonment to which he had been condemned as a minor for the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and Duchess Sophie. The sentence had been aggravated by a month-long fast every year, along with a special order that every June 28 he spend in a completely darkened solitary cell sitting on a hard bed. He had spent three Vidovdans there. <\/strong>He was a very quiet and calm prisoner, complained about nothing, and according to the testimony of one visitor said that what he missed most were newspapers. He knew that a war was going on outside, but nothing more than that. At the trial he declared himself an anarchist, a socialist, a Yugoslav. He did not believe in God. There is no report that during his imprisonment any of that changed.

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Upon the flimsy wooden structure over which red roof tiles have been set in regular rows, the strong summer sun beats mercilessly, heating the attic full of junk, and beneath the attic the assembly hall, which until recently, they say, had been an officers\u2019 stable, though perhaps it had not: maybe those too are only rumors, and in that hall, in the surrounding corridors, offices, and government rooms, are one, two, perhaps three hundred men in black wool suits with waistcoats, and white shirts of heavy tablecloth-like cloth.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

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The next day, on Monday, he was secretly buried, without any kind of rite, in a secret place. Sergeant E, a sixtyyear-old prison guard and drunkard, led the three young soldiers carrying the roughly hewn wooden coffin with the body at around four in the morning to the local cemetery and ordered them to dig a grave two meters deep outside the cemetery fence, to the northeast, toward the pine forest. After they had dug barely a little deeper than a meter, they came upon a tiny skeleton, probably that of some illegitimate and unbaptized child. The sergeant ordered them to fill in the hole and dig a few meters farther on. At the second spot they also came upon a skeleton, this time a large one, the half-decayed body of someone recently buried. By the third digging they had already come quite close to the forest, so they struggled with the roots, but at least there were no more skeletons of illegitimate children, suicides,<\/strong> strangers, unbaptized ones… Dawn was already breaking, they had no more time, the grave remained shallow, no deeper than a meter and a half, when Sergeant E ordered them to stop and \u201cdump out the coffin and fill in the hole.\u201d The deceased, no larger than a child, one-armed, tumbled headfirst into the pit and remained lying face down. The youngest soldier wanted to turn him over, but the sergeant stopped him roughly: \u201cLeave it, fill it in!\u201d Thus Gavrilo Princip was buried. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Two of the young soldiers were Germans from Prague; the third was listed in the documents as from Moravsk\u00e1 Ostrava, though as a baby he had been adopted by a Jewish family from Terez\u00edn. Dark-skinned, probably of Romani
origin, his name was Maksimilijan. He was the youngest, and he wanted to turn the deceased over so that with his dead eyes he would look at the sky, just as all the dead look up at heaven and hope for it. Sergeant E and the two young Germans soon forgot this unpleasant early-morning event of Monday, April 29, 1918, but the young Czech, named Maksimilijan, remembered it because of a guilty conscience. In summer and autumn, the fortune of war turned around, Germany was comprehensively beaten<\/strong>, Austria-Hungary disintegrated before our eyes into the tiniest fragments, and the fate of Europe and the questions of good and evil were now being decided by those whom
the prison guards in Terez\u00edn fortress had by the logic of things experienced as factors of evil. Yesterday\u2019s prisoners became the righteous, and their judges the unrighteous. It is as if language itself falters before this, powerless to express fully what befell Europe and the lives of all Europeans after that early-morning burial of Princip\u2019s dead body, which weighed not even forty kilos. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Less than two years later, Maksimilijan confides to a war comrade and fellow believer from Terez\u00edn fortress the place where they buried Princip\u2019s corpse, and tells him to report it to the legation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, but not to mention him, Maksimilijan, rather to say that he himself took part in the burial. Maybe they will reward him, give him some money. No, Maksimilijan does not want to share the reward with him, let him keep it if there is any reward, but what matters to him is to free himself of that burden on his conscience, and he is afraid, because he is not a real Czech, does not look Slavic at all, to go himself to the legation. His friend fulfilled his request<\/strong>, and his name entered historical documents and newspaper testimonies, but he got no reward whatsoever <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Soon afterward, in cooperation with the Czechoslovak police, grave-diggers from Sarajevo arrived and began digging at the marked spot. They exhumed twelve male and female skeletons, large, small, and tiny, but among them there was no skeleton without a left forearm. In its place they selected at random the skeleton of a smaller adult person, such as Gavrilo Princip had been, removed the left forearm from it, packed it into a metal case, and transported it by train to Sarajevo<\/strong>. No one then noticed, nor would anyone ever notice, that by mistake a female skeleton had been chosen for the role of the assassin of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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In Sarajevo, accompanied by a memorial service and liturgy led by the highest Orthodox clergy, together with several other found remains of Young Bosnian conspirators, Gavrilo Princip too was buried according to the
rules. Withdrawn and shy, both in poetry \u2013 he did not dare show his poems to anyone \u2013 and in erotic love, Gavrilo, a virgo intacta, was buried in a woman\u2019s body. First he rested in the grave, next to the graves of his comrades, only eventually, at the end of October 1939, to be buried in the Tomb of the Vidovdan Heroes, built in the same Cemetery of the Holy Archangels George and Gabriel,<\/strong> designed by the architect Aleksandar Deroko, whose work also includes the Church of the Holy Transfiguration in New Sarajevo. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Thus, for everyone, until the very last among the last days of humankind, Gavrilo Princip was buried there. And no one, until the very last among the last days of humankind, was ever supposed to find out that instead of his body, an unknown woman, perhaps a prostitute from Terez\u00edn, perhaps a suicide, was buried under his name. Or perhaps, unhappy creature, she had been both, and for that reason deserved to be buried outside the cemetery fence, like a dog or a cow whose belly had burst from damp clover. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maksimilijan had lied to his friend. Something else had been troubling him: for months the little assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been returning to him in dreams, the one he had carelessly dumped into the grave face down. No one deserved that, Maksimilijan thought, to have the heavens behind his back. Every deceased person, no matter what evils he committed in life<\/strong>, even the one being so heartlessly buried without God\u2019s service, deserves the hope of going to paradise. And then, as soon as the news of the end of the war was announced, Maksimilijan went one night to dig up Princip\u2019s grave and return the deceased to a human position. He dug at the place where grass had not yet had time to grow. The earth was hard, wintry, but the grave was empty. Only in the place where, several months earlier, the deceased\u2019s face had fallen had the earth hardened, harder than the hardest stone, and in that earth, there was impressed, like a death mask, the face of the one who was no longer in the grave. For a moment Maksimilijan did not know what to do, so, not knowing why himself, he lay face down in the grave and tried to fit his own face into that hard imprint in the earth. But it did not work; his cheekbones were broader than Gavrilo\u2019s, so it seemed to him that with his face he hovered over the
mask in the petrified earth. It seemed to him that he had plunged his face over hell <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, not knowing what else would happen, he sent his friend to the legation of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes to report the location of Princip\u2019s grave. Later he read in the newspapers that the assassin\u2019s grave had been exhumed and his body transferred to Sarajevo,<\/strong> where it was buried among the local national heroes. This relieved Maksimilijan\u2019s conscience, although Gavrilo Princip came to him in dreams until death, turned with his back to heaven, imploring him, mouth full of earth, for mercy and for a view of the skies. After the Nazi occupation, Maksimilijan, together with his adoptive parents, was first in the Theresienstadt ghetto, while his adoptive parents ended up in the crematorium in Auschwitz on the very day of arrival, and he himself became until death the victim of the monstrous experiments of Doctor Mengele, who dyed his coal-black eyes blue. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Marija and Stjepan Radi\u0107 in the hospital after the assassination (Photo: HSS)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On that June 20, 1928, in the assembly hall in Belgrade, around 11:15 a.m., the mercury in the thermometer with hygrometer mounted on the wall has already climbed to 47 degrees Celsius. The curses, threats, and insults spoken at that time are only partly entered into the parliamentary record that is well known to us because it has been published in most books on the subject of the Belgrade assassination. Exactly ten minutes later, stepping to the parliamentary lectern, directly opposite Stjepan Radi\u0107 and his comrades sitting in the front row, comes a Radical politician, a Serb from Andrijevica in Montenegro, a veteran of the Serbian wars and one of the conspirators in the failed assassination attempt against the Montenegrin King Nicholas I Petrovi\u0107, and prepares to draw a pistol from his pocket. At that moment there spreads through the hall, at nearly fifty degrees Celsius and among the hundred or so men in wool suits exhausted and dehydrated by long sweating, a heavy and sweetish smell, unbearable to the human mind, of rotting human flesh after lying half a year in damp earth. Under that olfactory sensation, some faint, others for a moment lose their minds, and after the shooting is over, only the bulky figure and dull gaze of the Radical deputy Puni\u0161a Ra\u010di\u0107<\/strong> will remain in people\u2019s eyes as he keeps clicking and pulling the trigger of an emptied pistol. The other one, whom in that terrible haze they had seen moving around the lectern with pieces of worm-eaten flesh falling from him, one-armed and one-eyed, a bare bony skull, no one will, perfectly logically, remember, because that other one is an apparition, a consequence of the excessively high temperature in the hall. This is the Balkans, gentlemen: no one here readily admits, even to himself, that he has, even for one minute, as long as the massacre in the temporary building of the National Assembly of the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes lasted, lost his reason and seen something human eyes had never seen! <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When in October 1944 the Partisan judges at the summary court purely formally asked him why he had killed Stjepan Radi\u0107 and the others,<\/strong> Puni\u0161a Ra\u010di\u0107 answered: but it was not I who killed him, Gavrilo Princip killed him, my pistol was empty, someone deceitfully took my bullets! His words were experienced as mere empty cynicism, were documented nowhere, and the former Radical deputy was shot on the spot. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the wall of Princip\u2019s cell there remained recorded, according to legend, an inscription that reads: \u201cOur shadows will walk through Vienna, wander about the court, frightening the gentry\u2026\u201d These are the last, without doubt also the most effective verses of that unrealized young poet, written at the time of his greatest suffering, but with no notion whatsoever of what was happening in the world around his cell. When, unburied as he was, he rose from the grave, persecuted by his own conscience \u2013 because he had killed that innocent woman who, while a bloody stain spread across her dress, looked like the wife of Professor of Latin, Mr. Albini, Mrs. Marijeta, who had always been so good to him; Gavrilo Princip flew on angel\u2019s wings and set off toward Vienna,<\/strong> but there was there no longer any court or gentry, only some ordinary, very sad people, and whenever he approached them he saw that all the men had the faces of Professor Albini and all the women were Mrs. Marijeta, with red bloody stains on their breasts. And there Gavrilo understood that the world against which he had fought no longer existed, just as he himself was dead and should no longer exist. But it was not so; what continued to live was his tormented conscience: God, why did he shoot good Mrs. Marijeta?

<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then he wished to go to the country for which he had fought, to Yugoslavia. But that country was not there either. Instead of the unity of all Yugoslavs, liberation, and justice for all, he saw there a malevolent kingdom<\/strong>, millions of the angry and the desperate, and priests of all faiths egging people on to hate one another. He saw something in which he recognized neither himself nor all his own. There was no longer his homeland, nor the Sarajevo he had hated, nor the Belgrade he had never loved any more than that. That place was more terrible than the grave from which he had risen, driven by the conscience of having killed Mrs. Marijeta, the innocent Duchess Sophie. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, on that June 20, 1928, the only voice he could still hear, though Gavrilo, the godless one, could not know whose voice it was, said into his ear that he must kill Stjepan Radi\u0107 and two other men who were just as innocent as Mrs. Marijeta had been. Or even more than that: they were the men from whom he had imagined making Yugoslavia. But only if he killed them would his conscience, Gavrilo\u2019s, be calmed after still a long, long time, and after many more heaven-crying evils<\/strong> that still had to unfold, because he had killed Mrs. Marijeta. And so Gavrilo Princip, desiring peace for his soul, killed Stjepan Radi\u0107. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, powerless and dead, now reduced to a bare white skeleton, he watched how his deed drew after it ever greater and more terrible evils. He saw the suffering of his people in the Independent State of Croatia, <\/strong>watched Jadovno and Jasenovac from close up, saw those hanged at Marijin Dvor in 1945, watched Maks Luburi\u0107 boil people alive in cauldrons in his Sarajevo villa, saw the Drina run red with Muslim blood, and saw some of his Young Bosnian comrades, for example that foolish Jev\u0111evi\u0107, leading Chetniks in the slaughter of Muslim women and children. Then he saw columns of prisoners driven on foot by their tormentors from Austria to eastern Serbia, and murdered along the way in a desperate effort to satisfy Mother Revenge, insatiable; then he saw the martyrs on Goli Otok, and saw thousands of women in black waiting for their missing husbands, and found himself among the millions of tormented consciences of people who were rotting dead in their graves, but whose consciences, like his own, could not be calmed. He saw all this, our ill-fated Gavrilo, and for all of it he knew, very clearly and unambiguously knew, that it was his fault. For had he not first pulled the trigger of his pistol, he would not have drawn after him and set in motion that indescribable chain of evil. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

The calming of Gavrilo Princip’s soul occurred only on the day when a shoemaker from Vukovar, who had never engaged in that trade but had briefly defended his city from attackers and then spent some time in camp torture chambers, only to live the rest of his life exclusively remembering that suffering because he was not permitted to do anything else but remember, announced the news that Gavrilo Princip had killed Stjepan Radi\u0107<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then, after a brief and ominous pause, it all continued in 1991 and 1992. Gavrilo saw Dubrovnik burning, saw Vukovar disappear, saw the suffering of his people, this time the Croats, because in his unchanging understanding they too are his people, and then in the summer of 1995 the suffering of his people again, now the Serbs<\/strong>, and he saw what no one else from his generation could still have seen, for they had all already been calmed, deadened, buried. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The calming of Gavrilo Princip\u2019s soul happened only on the day when a Vukovar shoemaker, who never practiced that trade, but briefly defended his city against the attackers and then spent some time in camp torture chambers, only later to live out his life remembering that torment alone, because he was not permitted to do anything else except remember, announced the news that Gavrilo Princip had killed Stjepan Radi\u0107. Half of Croatia and a barely smaller part of Gavrilo\u2019s other countries snickered at what this little shoemaker said, who, had he been lucky in life, would have lived in Andersen\u2019s fairy tale, but in his words Gavrilo Princip at last found his peace. Dead, he sighed, which was felt as a light breeze in Sarajevo down the Miljacka, in Belgrade down the two rivers, in Zagreb down the Sava embankment along which high-rise dogs run merrily. And all those dogs stopped for a moment, pricked up their ears for an instant, and then Gavrilo finally disappeared<\/strong>, united with the bones that were the last and final proof that he had once existed. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, then, by the measure of this writer, hastily sketched, the story of how Gavrilo Princip killed Stjepan Radi\u0107 might look like this: the only story that in today\u2019s Croatia could preserve the integrity of a world founded on causes and consequences, without which there is no reality. Stories like this, with or without a moral, in different forms and for different occasions, should be written in shock-worker fashion by writers throughout the world, especially those who command genres far removed from reality, or who have the gift of imagining a world without reality. The greatest among them could be charged with linking causes to utterly incredible and unheard-of consequences in the case of the most striking dissolvers of the reality of our age. For Donald Trump<\/strong>, for example, Salman Rushdie could be assigned; for Elon Musk, perhaps Peter Handke. The meaning of their task would be to make an impossible reality possible, and in the end probable, through literary fiction. For it is easy, after all, to justify the claim of the dear shoemaker from Andersen\u2019s fairy tale, who in 2026 forms the majority in Andrej Plenkovi\u0107\u2019s government, that Gavrilo Princip killed Stjepan Radi\u0107, because after we have only talked a little, after we have created for every hero in our story his ethical, social, and emotional framework, we shall understand that Andersen\u2019s shoemaker is right, and that Princip really did kill Radi\u0107; but for what Salman Rushdie would have to narrate<\/strong>, without which there will be neither salvation for this civilization nor some future humanity, passion and imagination are needed of a kind the reader can hardly imagine. Something much greater is needed, something more than what Salman Rushdie possessed while writing The Satanic Verses, when somewhere deep in the background he was creating causal links for the world of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. That outburst of magnificent imaginative power perhaps saved the world then, but it also drew Khomeini\u2019s fatwa onto Rushdie\u2019s neck, and its consequences would follow him to the end of his life. But all that was still within the limits of what could be imagined, or so it may seem to us, Rushdie\u2019s readers, after all of his work we have read. Once the world was saved, it seems to us almost predictable that it had to be saved. But what imagination is required to bring Donald Trump\u2019s actions within the reach of reason and to create around them the appearance of causal links? That is the great literary question: life in hell brings the greatest, and always unexpected, pleasures to the reader <\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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