A Hero or a Villain, a Terrorist or a Liberator?

Abstract

“And so they’ve killed our Ferdinand.”¹ Indeed, Franz Ferdinand’s death and the subsequent World War One (WWI) were relived many a time for the Sarajevo Assassination² has been, for almost a century now, the focus of much historiographical attention. Some dozen films depict these events, though very little scholarly interest has been given to the importance of the cult of self-sacrifice and martyrdom in conditioning the actions of Gavrilo Princip and his fellow Young Bosnians.³ Considering the role of the self-proclaimed heroism in the actions of the assassin, this chapter will focus on the following questions: What have the filmic representations of Gavrilo Princip since the late 1960s indicated about his popular perception? Was he a hero and/or a villain? A terrorist and/or a liberator? I will examine how Princip has been portrayed by different directors at different times in a series of Yugoslav historical films from 1968 to 1990. The films discussed here are Sarajevski Atentat by Fadil Hadžić (1968), The Day That Shook The World (Atentat u Sarajevu, 1975) by Veljko Bulajić, and Last Waltz in Sarajevo (Belle Époque ili Poslednji Valcer U Sarajevu, 1990) by Nikola Stojanović.⁴

I would like to express my gratitude to Professors José María Caparrós Lera of the University of Barcelona, Spain, and Paul Miller of the University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, and to the friendly and helpful staff of the Belgrade and Sarajevo Film Archives for their assistance in my work on this text.