Archival series: As the shock of the Sarajevo assassinations spread, the leading liberal Berliner Tageblatt warned of serious consequences if nationalists around Europe seized on the killings to advance their cause.
- Derek Scally
The Sarajevo Bloodbath — The Youthful Heir — Clearly a Planned Act — Bureaucratic Indolence — Serbia and Austria — Nationalist Sabre-Rattling — Official Warnings
By Paul Michaelis
The murder of the Austrian heir apparent and his wife is one of the worst in a long series of political assassinations. The civilised world reacted quickly with paralysing horror to news of the bloodbath, with disgust towards the heinous murder gang, and with deepest sympathy towards Kaiser Franz Josef who, in his long life, has been spared almost nothing. Regardless of one’s views of the murdered heir’s world view and [political] programme, the whole world was aware that he viewed his obligations with great earnestness and that his thoughts focused squarely on how he could keep the Danube Monarchy strong, viable and united...
Following the honourable Kaiser Franz Josef will be, aged 26, the youthful Archduke Karl Franz Josef. He is, by nature of his youth, an unknown quantity and, through the murder of Franz Ferdinand, all previous calculations have to be thrown on the scrapheap... One can only seriously wish that Kaiser Franz Josef is able to overcome this stroke of fate. But, overnight, one has to reckon with a period of increased uncertainty about the future leadership of the Austrian-Hungarian monarchy.
Turning from the victims to the assassins, there can be not even the least doubt that that this was not the act of a single, immature person but a well-prepared plot ... Further investigations make clear that the unwitting heir apparent and his wife drove along an entire cordon of murderers. The investigation remains outstanding into how it was possible for the Sarajevo police, in utter cluelessness, to send the heir to a certain death... Clearly the Sarajevo authorities thought they could escape the looming danger of Serbian extremists by looking the other way. This official indolence, which sadly appears to be almost part of the Austrian system, has wreaked terrible havoc.
This much is clear: relations between the Austrian monarchy and Serbia, which many times have been on a knife-edge, will now be ratcheted up even further. ...
In Vienna, Serbian shop windows are being smashed and the Serbian flag burned. This outburst of Austrian feelings may soon pass. But something is likely to remain to escalate [negatively] the Austro-Serbian relationship still further...
The fate of the murderers is incidental. But, in good and bad, the civilised world is unlikely to get around the dispute between the greater Serbian fantasists and the conditions of the Austria-Hungary monarchy ...
Our German people, too, will not escape a period of self-reflection ... our own nationalists and chauvinists want the security of smashing foreigners’ windows without having to concern themselves with the question of who eventually pays for the damage...
The murders ... have to be linked to nationalist force. As such the German government is correct for warning that we, more than other nations, have a reason to watch carefully that we do not suffer disadvantage as the result of remarks that fall under the term chauvinism.
Berliner Tageblatt
July 5th, 1914