The Princip principle

His head was full of Europe—all those obscure languages in tenebrous places where took place all those killings—in the streets, in the woods. He stuck to the residues of tyranny, of tragedy, of confusion.

Cynthia Ozick, The Messiah of Stockholm.

Abstract

Quite surprisingly, some novels in contemporary France still deal with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria by Gavrilo Princip on June the 28th 1914. This is the case in Sarajevo omnibus by Velibor Čolić: a six-part novel focused on the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie, as a way to tell the story of Sarajevo—the city the author had to leave to seek refuge in France during the separatist war in the 1990s. The story of the Sarajevo’s attack is told as if History would have preferred, both ironically and literally, to surrender itself to a Princip Principle (“un Principe Princip”)—which is like a phantom pain of the past, and an uncertainty principle for writing and interpreting History.