Franz Ferdinand’s three deaths

In the previous post about Sarajevo’s syagogues, a cuckoo’s egg slipped in about the Yugoslav memorial plaque of Gavrilo Princip, unscrewed from the wall by the German army marching into the city in April 1941, and sent to Hitler for his birthday. Now the cuckoo hatches from the egg and spreads its wings.

In fact, the removal of the plaque was considered so important by the German official newsreel Deutsche Wochenschau, that they dedicated an entire half minute to it out of the twenty-four-minute broadcast of the truly glamorous events of the week. By clicking on it, the video starts right at 11:38, at the beginning of the scene.


“In Sarajewo. Hier wurde am 28en Juni 1914 der österreichische Tronfolger Erzherzog Franz Ferdinand durch das feige Attentat eines serbischen Studenten niedergestreckt. Diese Schüsse waren das Signal zum Weltkrieg. – Die Marmortafel, die diesem Ort von Volksdeutschen entfernt, und dem deutschem Wehrmacht übergeben. Sie trägt die Inschrift: »An dieser historischen Stätte erkämpfte Gavrilo Princip Serbien die Freiheit.« Der Führer überwiest die Tafel der Berliner Zeughaus.”

“Sarajevo. On June 28, 1914, the infamous terror attack of a Serbian student killed Austrian Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand. This gunshot gave the signal to the Great War. – This marble plaque was removed by the Volksdeutsche and handed over to the German army. Its inscription: «In this historic place, Gavrilo Princip achieved freedom for Serbia.» The Führer forwarded the plaque to the Zeughaus in Berlin.”

The newsreel emphasizes that the plaque was removed not by the army, but by the Volksdeutsche, the local ethnic Germans, and it was they who then handed it to the army. However, the spontaneity of the dozen of young people, dressed in flawless white shirts and ties, and performing a well-choreographed little march, is quite questionable. Not to mention that the field musicians and officers of the Wehrmacht are assisting in this action, obviously just as spontaneously. And if we also know that the pictures were taken by Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer, who then immediately boarded Hitler’s private train Sonderzug Amerika, especially sent for the plaque, to photograph the next day the Führer, celebrating his fifty-second birthday in Mönichkirchen, as he is intensely looking at the plaque, then it will be clear that it was a well-planned and prepared symbolic event.


Hitler is also beholding extremely spontaneously the plaque surrounded by two and half zombies. We know that only Hoffmann was allowed to take photos of him, and only while posing, in poses worthy of a great statesman. These poses were borrowed from the topos repository created by classical and romantic painting and sculpture, which also offer us a clue to understanding them. The one we see here is “the great general contemplating the ruins of Rome” pose. Which also suggests that this plaque meant more to him than merely spoils of war from an unnatural state created by Versailles.

Hitler agreed with Franz Ferdinand’s removal from the throne, even though he condemned the assassins. The Slavic-friendly crown prince, who had a Czech consort, meant to him and to his associates the danger of a compromise with the Slavs and the diminution of the weight of the German element. It is no wonder that he celebrated with relief on Munich’s Odeonplatz the war that settles accounts with Serbia and Russia threatening the German Lebensraum. By accident, this moment was photographed by Hoffmann, who, twenty years later, found the future Führer it in, at his request. No matter whether the figure is really the young Adolf, or, as some say, some retouching by Hoffmann was also necessary to make the identification. The point is that Hitler wanted be in that picture, he wanted to be at the starting point of the glorious German Sturm. It was the zero point of the Sarajevo pistol shot that launched him and the German people on the right track, and now that this track – despite the humiliation of Versailles and through its obliteration – would soon reach its zenith with the overcoming of Russia, the Führer looks back at this starting point when contemplating the Princip plaque.


In 1930 the Yugoslav state, by placing a plaque on the spot of the Princip attempt – albeit setting it as a private initiative – with the inscription “На овом историјском мјесту Гаврило Принцип навијести слободу на Видов-дан 15. јуна 1914” – “From this historical place Gavrilo Princip brought us freedom on St. Vitus’ Day, 15 June 1914” (that is, on the 28th of the Gregorian calendar), managed to achieve the outbreaks of not only its former World War enemies, but also of its own allies. That Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung calls it a “monstrous and intolerable provocation”, is just natural from the German side. But also London Times wrote, that the plaque immortalizes “an act which was the immediate cause of the Great War, of its attendant horrors, and of the general suffering which has been its sequel”. Churchill, in his contemporary The Unknown War calls it the monument of infamy, which, erected by Princip’s fellow countrymen, “records his infamy and their own”. And according to the contemporary British historian Robert William Seton-Watson, the plaque “was an affront to all right-thinking people”.

The Sarajevo Volksdeutsche handing the Princip plaque to the German Army

However, we cannot understand the real cause of the establishing of the plaque if we do not know the myth that it fits within. The clue is offered by the seemingly unnecessary archaism of Vidovdan, St. Vitus’ day, in the text. On this day, 15 June 1318, the whole Serb nation, led by Prince Lazar, was martyred on the plane of Kosovo, confronting the Ottoman army to the last warrior. This is the zero point of Serbian history. One has to get back here, and here one has to restart history, which at that point took a regrettably wrong turn. This is the so-called Kosovo Myth, which was coined by 19th-c. Serbian romanticism, and to which we can lead back all the 20th-century Balkan wars that started from Belgrade. To kill a tyrant on St. Vitus’ Day is an archetypal act, as was done by the legendary Serbian warrior Miloš Obilić, who struck the Sultan after his victory. And vice versa: if a Serbian warrior kills someone on Vidovdan, it symbolically attests that he was a tyrant. Princip’s Vidovdan bullet in one moment produced the archetypal constellation required by the Serbian military leadership to represent the fight for the re-devision of the Balkans as a sacred national war. From then on, the struggle for Bosnia was not just a dog-fight over the territories left by the Turks, but a necessary historical act leading to the correction of national history, which had taken a wrong turn in 1389. This zero point and this myth was faced with the myth and zero point of the Führer contemplating it in the railway wagon in Mönchkirchen.

Princip and his fellow conspirators as Vinovdan heroes. Below: The “chapel of the Vinovdan hroes”, erected upon Princip’s ashes, in Sarajevo’s old Orthodox cemetery

The plaque was then moved to the Zeughaus in Berlin, which was then a military museum called Arsenal. Here, a huge exhibition of the symbolic booty was organized, with Princip’s plaque in the middle. They also brought here the French rail car, in which in 1918 the German capitulation was signed, thus washing away the shame of Versailles. The building is today Deutsches Historisches Museum, where similar objects still often pop up, now of course as exhibition objects. Like the Zagreb bronze plaque, which attempted to give a new consciousness to the young South Slavic state by stamping the Hungarian coat of arm under its figures’ feet.

The Gravrilo Princip plaque on the booty exhibition in the Zeughaus

During the siege of Berlin, the plaque was destroyed together with the German myth. In Sarajevo, the Yugoslav partisans replaced it on 7 May 1945, a day before the German capitulation, with this inscription: “With eternal thanks to Gavrilo Princip and his comrades fighting against the German invasion.” For now, the Serbian myth gained the upper hand, in a new, popular tuning. In 1953, when the building was converted into a museum of the Young Bosnia movement, which had organized the assassination, a new plaque was set up with a new text: “On June 28, 1914, from this place Gavrilo Princip expressed with his pistol shot the people’s protest and centuries-old aspirations for freedom.” This plaque disappeared between 1992 and 1996, when the people of Sarajevo also expressed with machine gun shots from this place their aspirations for freedom and protest against the tyranny of Serbian nationalism, keeping the city under a bloody siege. Today it only says in Bosnian and English: “From this place on 28 June 1914 Gavrilo Princip assassinated the Austro-Hungarian throne Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sofia.”

On 28 June 2014, when this  plaque was inaugurated, another monument was also solemnly set up in Sarajevo. The small square is located at the westernmost end of Sarajevo, which is nevertheless called East Sarajevo. This is the part of the town where the Serbs moved out during the siege, and where, after the war, new housing estates were built for them from international aid. There are no physical boundaries between the two parts of the city, yet there is virtually no contact and no public transport between them. Here, a new, heroic statue of Gavrilo Princip was set up, and at the same time one of the first public spaces of the new district in formation was also named Gavrilo Princip Park. The myth lives on.

The new Princip monument in Google Street View, and its inauguration at the centenary

However, the first souvenirs of the assassination were much earlier than the 1930 memorial plaque. Already a hundred years ago, the local paper shops entered into the service of catastrophe tourism, and immediately started publishing picture postcards, which do not merely represent the Latin Bridge and its environs as a city view, but rather as the scene of the assassination, sometimes marking the exact spot with a small cross.

The souvenir postcards were usually provided with the Franz Ferdinand memorial stamps, which represented, besides the princely consorts, the Sarajevo Basilica, planned but never realized in their memory (see below).

And in 1917, on the third anniversary of the attempt, the first plaque appeared on the spot, marking the location for all subsequent plaques. This plaque was set up by the Austro-Hungarian government on Moritz Schiller’s deli, from which Princip stepped out to shoot the crown prince. The only Bosnian-language plaque with cross and imperial crown said: “In this place, Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his consort, Duchess Sophie Hohenberg suffered a martyr’s death at an assassin’s hand.”

The plaque in front view, and seen from the quay and from Franz Josef street.
Last photo: the scaffolding used to affix the plaque.

Already in 1916, the government of Bosnia-Herzegovina announced a competition for a grand martyr’s monument of the princely couple. It had a Hungarian winner, the excellent Art Nouveau sculptor and architect Jenő Bory (1879-1959), later rector of the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts, who in January 1915 was commissioned to Sarajevo as a military engineer. Here Pater Puntigam, the director of the archbishop’s seminary, and the chief promoter of the Archduke’s cult, showed him the Archduke’s bloody shirt, and introduced him to the conception of the story which was to be visualized in the memorial.

Since there was no room for a monument in the narrow Franz Josef Street, only a 2×1-meter cast steel plate was sunk into the pavement, with the Latin inscription: “Hoc loco die 28. Junie 1914. vitam et sanquinem fuderunt pro Deo et patria Franciscus Ferdinandus archidux eiusque uxor ducissa Sophia de Hohenberg.” (“In this place Crown Prince Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Duchess Sophie Hohenberg gave their lives and blood for God and the homeland.”) Probably this sunken panel gave the idea of that much later, post-1953 monument, which sank the assassin’s footprints into the pavement of the walkway.

No legible photo of the sunken panel has survived, and different sources remember slightly different texts. This one is from Belgischer Kurier, a local version of Deutsche Kurier published in occupied Belgium.

The actual monument was set up on the opposite side of the quay, at the head of the Latin Bridge opposite the house. Two tall columns held the bronze relief of the princely couple, with a small Pietà statue and an eternal flame under it. For the sake of symmetry, a semicircular marble bench was also built at the other bridgehead, where it was possible to meditate on the historical scene.

The memorial column with the relief, and with different mourning groups

The model of Jenő Bory’s relief. Tolnai Világlapja, Aug. 10, 1916

The three units of the monument at inauguration

And this was just the beginning. Pater Puntigam began collecting more tribute to erect even larger memorial buildings to the princely couple: a huge Neo-Romanesque church in memory of Franz Ferdinand, and a youth home named for Duchess Sophie. Both were designed by Jenő Bory. The first three million golden crowns were collected, and Bory was already involved in the execution, when the Monarchy was forced to armistice, and then to retire from Sarajevo. The church was never realized. However, Jenő Bory recalled to have been inspired by it for his own home and studio in Székesfehérvár, the famous Bory Castle. The Serbian troops marching in Sarajevo removed both memorial plaques and the monument. Only the arched bench remained in the site, as an apparently innocent abbreviation of the story, which, however, spoke volumes to the initiates.

The model of the Franz Ferdinand memorial church, and a summary of Jenő Bory’s other monumental designs in Sarajevo. Új Idők, 1916/2, 21-22.

But the story is not over yet. It turned out that the original bronze relief of the monument also survived the stormy century in the cellar of the museum. In 2001, it was proposed in the City Council to restore the columns, and set it up in its original location. For the time being, they erected a plexi plate at the memorial site, with a small drawing of the original sculpture, and a historical explanation.



All this fits well with the new conception of Bosnian history outlined in recent decades, the three pillars of which are the independent medieval Bosnian kingdom, the rich culture and tolerance of Ottoman Sarajevo, and the Austro-Hungarian era of economic and intellectual revival. The public buildings and achievements of Austrian times are emphasized throughout the city. The former Young Bosnia Museum has been converted into a museum presenting the Austro-Hungarian Golden Age in Bosnia. At the centenary ceremony in Sarajevo, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra played Haydn’s Imperial Hymn. The epoch of Austria Felix has become a new zero point for Bosnian history. The monument of the assassination stood in the service of a new myth.

Colossus

The final scene in the Czechoslovak film Holubice (“The White Dove”, František Vláčil, 1960) may contain a little surprise for audiences nowadays, if they know Prague, and if they look closely. The scene consists of a single shot, from a camera placed at a high vantage point somewhere on ul. Revoluční, during which the camera pans nearly the entire daytime skyline of Prague at the time of the film’s production, ca. 1959-60.


As we look up Revoluční to the south, we soon see the arched windows and crenellations of what is today the Palladium shopping center (then Josefská Kasárna, barracks for the Czechoslovak Army). Further around, other familiar buildings pass by, as Prague’s many famous turrets and spires can be seen through the haze. The twin gothic spires of the 13th-century Church of Our Lady before Týn float past, and far in the distance on a light gray hilltop is the Petřínská rozhledna of 1891 (a lookout tower inspired by the Eiffel Tower in Paris), which marks the hill of Petřín. After the second rooftop television antenna, we see what is probably Prague’s most identifiable landmark, the Prague Castle, Hradčany. Then, we come to a mystery.

What in the devil’s name is that?


Those familiar with today’s skyline will no doubt remember that atop the hill at Letná (the red arrow in the photograph), which overlooks the city from one end of the bridge named for Svatopluk Čech, stands a monumental kinetic sculpture resembling a metronome. In 1959, however, something very different stood there. We can see, in the picture above, the rather dim outline of a fat slab of rock, but from this indistinct image taken from afar, we cannot decisively make out what it was.

For reference, this is what stands there now.


The kinetic sculpture entitled Stroj času (“Time Machine”), by the sculptor Vratislav Karel Novák, is popularly known as the “Prague Metronome,” although the mechanism is completely different from the familiar metronome invented by Mälzel. It was erected in 1991 to mark 100 years of industrial exhibitions in Prague, and reflects that theme in its use of industrial forms and materials. It was intended to be temporary, but, as we will see, the temporary can unintentionally become permanent, while things intended for permanence may endure only for a shockingly brief time.

And, as we will further see, this post will end with a bang.

A Monument for the Ages

In 1948, soon after the Communists took power in Czechoslovakia, a decision was made to honor Stalin for his 70th birthday with a large monument for a prominent location in Prague. But the internal politics of various planning committees and other forms of political oversight virtually guaranteed that the project would take longer than expected. Much, much longer. It was over a year before a competition for the design was officially announced in 1949.

The artists of Czechoslovakia were invited to volunteer their visions for the monument, one of which would be selected for construction on the hill at Letná, a high vantage point that overlooks the city center. It was widely understood that, if you were a sculptor of any prominence, your voluntary submission was, in fact, mandatory.

The story is told that the artist Otakar Švec, a recognized sculptor who had created a noteworthy body of work during the interwar period, sat down over a dinner of goulash with a painter friend, and asked him to sketch a design. Švec liked the sketch, made some adjustments, worked it into a proposal, and submitted it, probably believing the matter closed.

Švec did not anticipate winning the competition. He had simply assumed the outcome would be politically fixed, and was quite surprised when he found out that his design had been selected from among the 90 works submitted. The casual manner by which it was designed (apparently his friend had sketched it on a napkin) suggests that he did not really care to put a great deal of thought into the project.

Švec was suddenly trapped. The competition bureaucrats subjected him to an unending series of official visits to his studio with nitpicks and small adjustments with which Švec really had no choice but to comply. As the delays accumulated, it became clear that a simply large monument wasn’t enough; it would have to be gigantic. In fact, what started as a napkin sketch morphed into the largest monument to Stalin anywhere in the world, and the largest group statue in Europe.

It would represent Stalin at the front of two lines of figures, the ones on the left representing the Soviet Union, and on the right, Czechoslovakia. It was to be more than 15 meters high and 22 meters long. Alone, Stalin’s head would weigh 52 tons; the entire work, 17,000 tons. A team of over 600 people, artists, builders, stonemasons, were employed working on the monument. With an understructure of reinforced concrete and an outer cladding of high-quality Czech granite, it would be monument built for the ages.

Сталинский закон. Пётр Киричек, дуэт с С. Хромченко

The following eight photographs of the Stalin monument were taken from the Fortepan online community (fortepan.hu), a continuously growing Hungarian archive of private photographs shared voluntarily by their owners. They are published here for the first time outside of the Fortepan site.

The unfortunate Švec probably knew that he had given birth to a monster, and entertained doubts that it could ever be constructed. He believed, perhaps hoped, that not enough high-quality granite could ever be found, but eventually, matching granites were found in two places. At the time, no crane existed in Czechoslovakia that could manipulate such massive pieces of stone, and so German „Panzer“ tanks, spoils from the war, were used to move the stone blocks. Pressure from the Kremlin seems to have been strong. To accommodate the transport, roads into Prague had to be widened, and bridges strengthened, all at great expense.

The construction phase began in earnest on 25 February 1952, an official holiday called „Soviet Army Day“, when the first blocks of granite were laid. Stalin was dead within a year, but the work, of course, continued. It was too late to back out now. Švec apparently became increasing mortified at his involvement in the project. Once the small napkin sketch was enlarged to such epic proprortions, its deficiencies became glaringly obvious. Švec solved some of the design problems by simply putting flags in the figures’ hands to obscure empty surfaces not accounted for in the original sketch. One account states that he was humiliated one day when a taxi driver pointed out that the third figure on the Czech side of the sculpture, depicting a woman, seemed to be reaching for the crotch of the man following closely behind her.

Jan Lukas: March 1953 (Stalin and Klement Gottwald)

Funeral march in Prague’ St. Václav’s Square on the day of Stalin’s burial, 9 March 1953

The monument was finally dedicated on 1 May 1955. The verdict of Comrade Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev: “Too big, too late.” Local wags dubbed the monstrosity “fronta na maso” – the waiting line for meat, a none-too-subtle reference to food shortages under centralized planning. The artist, Otakar Švec, was not present at the ceremony. He had commited suicide a few weeks before, possibly due to the earlier suicide of his wife, combined with his remorse over the monstrosity he had created, perhaps in combination with the pressure of constant surveillance by the secret police.

Khrushchev in Prague. “Too big, too late”

The precise date of Švec’s death has seemed, until recently, difficult to pinpoint, and has enjoyed something of the quality of legend. Some sources have casually declared that he died the day before the dedication of the monument on 1 May, as if to state that the sculpture itself was the overriding reason. But the Czech Wikipedia entry on Švec marks the date as 4 April, while the English Wikipedia entry puts it on 3 March, a month earlier. The latter date seems to be a result based on Czech archival sources, uncovered as research for the book Gottland, by Mariusz Szczygieł, published in 2008, and so seems the most credible.

An Eternity of Only Eight Years

On 25 February 1956, three years after the death of Stalin, Khrushchev addressed the 20th Party Congress of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R. with a report entitled, О культе личности и его последствиях (“On the Cult of Personality and Its Consequences”). It was a sharp denunciation of Stalin and the cult of personality that had formed around him. From that day on, the Prague Stalin monument’s days were suddenly numbered. It had swiftly been transformed from a prestigious and very public project into an outright embarrassment to the Communist Party. It would have to go.

Much as they no doubt would have liked to, the Party could not destroy such a massive structure in secret. Instead, they chose to undertake demolition of the monstrosity in a quick, cataclysmic manner using dynamite. In November, 1962, eight hundred kilograms of explosives were used to blow it up. Although the blasts were no doubt heard clearly throughout the vicinity of Letná, on this matter, the Czech press of the time were entirely silent. It was officially forbidden to document it photographically, but some images were created, nonetheless.

It took about a year to clear the platform of the pieces of the monument that remained after the detonations. The platform then stood embarrassingly vacant for the next 29 years, until the “Prague Metronome” was finally found its place there.

A Reservoir of Public Memory

Another film gives us a look at the what happened after that. Made in 1963, not long after the demolition of the Stalin monument and after all the rubble was cleared away, the film Postava k podpírání (“A Character in Need of Support”), a Czech film that presaged the coming New Wave, was produced in Prague. The filmmakers Pavel Juráček and Jan Schmidt made prominent use of the vacant platform in a significant image near the end of the film, going so far as to overdub the sound of a man falling down some stairs while carrying a boiler tank (extending the sound from the previous scene) at precisely the moment when the stone Stalin, now gapingly absent, should have made its appearance.


This image seems to proclaim a change of polical weather; a loosening of the contraints, a thaw. The main character’s futile search for the elusive bureaucrat Josef Kilián, in an effort to free himself from the burden of a rented cat, was inevitably described as “kafkaesque” by foreign critics, and marked a fresh tolerance by the censors for implicit criticism of the workings of the state. Freed from Stalin’s stony panopticon gaze that once looked directly into the heart of the city from on high, the sun finally came out. The Czechoslovak New Wave would then blossom, and after it, a Czech Spring, born of optimism at the promise of a new “socialism with a human face.” We all now know of course that that optimism was, tragically, premature.

Interestingly, the public memory of the Stalin Monument has been much more resistant to destruction even than granite and reinforced concrete. There are people in Prague who still say “meet me at Stalin,” instead of “meet me at the metronome.” The site is a reservoir for public memory, and its vibe has been exploited again and again since the Velvet Revolution for politics and publicity. In the early 1990s, the pirate station Stalin Radio operated out of the chambers under the platform. In 1996, an effigy of Michael Jackson was placed there to promote a concert tour. During parliamentary elections in 1998, a billboard promoting Václav Klaus’ candidacy appeared there.

In honor of Švec’s work, and to commemorate the 51st anniversary of his suicide, the Czech artist Martin Zet in 2006 prepared the exhibition Osud národa - sochař Otakar Švec (“The Fate of a Nation - The Sculptor Otakar Švec”), including images of Švec’s earlier work. The venue for the exhibition was Artwall, the outdoor gallery mentioned in this post, and which lies on the riverside face of Letná hill.

In 2011, as part of the Prague Quadrennial festival, the words “The Tears of Stalin” appeared in six-meter-high white letters in front of the metronome, likely in part a reference to “Stalinovy slzy” (Stalin’s Tears) a brand of vodka sold in Prague tourist traps. Most recently, on the first day of the 2013 parliamentary elections held in October, a huge poster depicting Russian Federation President Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, costumed as a Stalin-like dictator, was raised on the site by a group seeking to warn against the threat of a return to a communist government in the Czech Republic.

There was once a common saying in the Eastern Bloc, sometimes stated in earnest, sometimes with bitter irony, “Пока Сталин живёт, всё будет хорошо” (“As long as Stalin lives, everything will be all right”), which, these days, can be heard paraphrased thus: “So long as the metronome stands, all is well in Prague.” The Prague Stalin Monument is long gone, but none the less, the site atop Letná hill holds a strong political charge, still vivid in public memory, that has yet to dissipate.