Up in Flames - Gavrilo Princip and the City

In this paper the author makes use of the few biographical facts about Gavrilo Princip to elaborate on the hypothetical connection between migrant’s issues and political radicalization. The assassin’s life-story has been used and misused in socialist, nationalist and revisionist history-writing. For socialists, Princip was the personification of a dialectic struggle; for nationalists he was the symbol of an ancient nation and for a lot of western historians Princip was a naïve protagonist in a rebellious, Balkanist-flavored narrative about Balkan hotheads. In order to clear up these politically infected stories, the author suggests to take a microhistorian’s perspective and observe Gavrilo Princip as a single person, in his own social context. Using modern sociological ideas about migration and urbanization, it may be possible to gain new insights into the radicalization of the Sarajevo assassin.