The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Crown Prince of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on July 28, 1914 is the most consequential assassination in history. Not only did it spark off a general European war that killed over 10 million people, it brought the German, Austrian, and Ottoman Empires crashing to the ground, with consequences we still live with today. The Man Who Defended Gavrilo Princip, a Serbian movie about Rudolf Cistler, an ethnic German from Zagreb, Croatia appointed to the defense team, examines the events of the Summer and Fall that followed that fateful day.
While most of us learn about Gavrilo Princip in high school, we learn little more than his name, and that he was a member of a Serbian “anarchist” organization called The Black Hand. We don’t learn that Princip was from Bosnia and Herzegovina, not Serbia, that the Black Hand was a nationalist, not an anarchist organization, or that Princip was member, not of the Black Hand, but of Young Bosnia, a group that included not only ethnic Serbs, but Slovenians, Croatians and Muslims. In fact, most of us in the west are so confused about the Assassination of Franz Ferdinand that I almost referred to Princip as an “Austrian citizen” when in fact he was born in 1892 and Bosnia and Herzegovina only became a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1908. It was Austria Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908 that not only motivated Princip and Young Bosnia to plot Franz Ferdinand’s assassination, but that makes up the basis of Rudolf Cistler’s surprisingly energetic defense, a defense that got him marched out of the country at gunpoint by the Austrian authorities.
The Man Who Defended Gavrilo Princip’s director’s Srđan Koljević decision to cast the well-known Serbian actor Nikola Rakočević as Cistler and Milos Djurovic as Gavrilo Princip is no accident. Part of the reason that so few people outside of Serbia know much about Princip is that he’s usually considered an unimportant character, a scrawny, insignificant little boy who was simply in the right place at the right time. Yet Milos Djurovic’s gives him a dark, passionate intensity that makes it seem almost inevitable that he would become the most famous gunman, not only in Balkan history, but in European history. Unlike his co-conspirators, who seem at times to be searching for their world-view and motivation, and waffling between hope that they might live and despair that they’re going to find themselves at the end of a hangman’s rope, Princip knows exactly who he is. He knows exactly why he shot Franz Ferdinand, and he’s not only willing to die. He accepted it as inevitable a long time ago. Indeed, there’s something powerfully compelling about a man who’s willing to die, over whom no government or policeman in the world has the slightest power. Gavrilo Princip was a small sickly young man, yet his presence in the film is terrifying, unnerving, heroic.
The film opens with Rudolf Cistler, who looks like Princip’s double, Princip if he had been brought up in a middle-class family, in 1941, 27-years after the assassination. The Germans, who had been drawn into the Balkans by Mussolini’s defeat in Greece, have just conquered Yugoslavia, the Pan Slavic federation Princip died for but never got to see, and have not only made a point of removing the plaque honoring Princip from the Latin Bridge near Sarajevo, but of arresting Cistler, and putting him in a holding cell, where he awaits transportation to a concentration camp, or worse. When he tells his fellow prisoners his name, a German name, they’re shocked. Why have the Germans arrested another German and thrown him in a cell with a bunch of Serbian nationalists? With nothing else to do he sits backs and tells them his story, a framing device that’s surprisingly effective. It shows the former defense attorney, now a prisoner of arbitrary, unjust state power, a man caught in a horrifying irony, but a horrifying irony that confirms his decision so long ago to take on such an unpopular case.
In June of 1914, Rudolf Cistler, a young apprentice attorney not yet fully certified to practice law, was only a few years older than Gavrilo Princip. After the assassination, Leo Pfefer, a Prosecuting Magistrate in Sarajevo, the rough equivalent of a senior District Attorney, decides to give Cistler an easy first case, an appointment to the defense council of a kangaroo court, a way to earn his law license without even doing his job. But Cistler has other plans, having seen, and heard, a beautiful young Serbian detainee outside the jail where Princip is being held singing so well he turns and tips his hat, recognizing her humanity, and realizing that the state orchestrated pogroms against ethnic Serbs in Sarajevo are dangerous and unjust. Later it turns out that the woman, played by Vaja Dujovic is the wife of Veljko Čubrilović, Vuc Kustic, a 24-year-old school teacher who was only peripherally involved in the plot, but who, at the age of 24, is in serious danger of being executed. Austro-Hungarian law did not allow the death penalty for people under 20.
In fact Austrian-Hungarian law also did not allow the death penalty for simple murder, only for high treason. Little by little, Cistler’s defense, that the Empire has no right to try Bosnian nationals for treason, that the annexation of 1908 was illegal and unjust, draws him closer to Princip, his seeming opposite. After all, Cistler is a lawyer, an officer of the court, a man of order and civilization, and a German. Princip is a left-wing assassin, the son of a peasant, a violent, intense man willing to die for his beliefs, and a Slav. Yet they are both small, slim, delicate young men of exceptional eloquence and intelligence. Indeed, Young Bosnia was not a group of criminals. Just the opposite, they were the best and brightest their society had to offer, literate, educated young men who put their country above their careers. They see themselves as part of the long Serbian struggle against oppression dating all the way back to June 28, 1389, the date of the fateful battle of Kosovo — and not coincidentally of Franz Ferdinand’s foolish, provocative visit to Sarajevo —- where a legendary Serbian hero named Miloš Obilić managed to stab Ottoman Sultan Murad I at the moment of the Ottoman victory. Nedeljko Čabrinović, once of Princip’s co-conspirators even corrects a prosecuting judge for misquoting the Montenegrin poet Petar II Petrović-Njegoš, whose epic poem The Mountain wreath provided the inspiration for Young Bosnia.
Eventually we learn that Cistler has a left-wing past of his own. He had been a Social Democrat as a student. Cistler also draws closer and closer to Veljko Čubrilović, smuggling in letters from his wife and photos of his daughter, overlooking the fact that Princip quite possibly perjured himself by his confession that Veljko Čubrilović only went along with the plot because of his threats to his family, becoming, in a sense, a parallel legal, social democratic mirror of Princip’s Propaganda of the Deed. Cistler is not only determined to save Veljko Čubrilović’s life. He’s determined to resist the madness Europe is rushing into, the crushing ultimatum of the Austria Hungary to the tiny Kingdom of Serbia, whose intelligence services may or may not have providing Young Bosnia with weapons and entry into Bosnia from Belgrade, the mobilization of the great powers of Europe, the state sanctioned persecution of Bosnian Serbs, the coming apocalypse. In the end, of course, Veljko Čubrilović is right. Cistler can’t save his life. All along he’s been part of a kangaroo court. The judge simply sentences all the men over 20 to death and all of the teenagers to long sentences in harsh prisons he know they won’t servive for more than a few years. In fact, Cistler really only converts one man, a cowering timid little Czech law clerk who begins the trial begging to be released from what he knows will be a dangerous job, and ending up providing a thorough, well-researched brief on why Austria Hungary’s annexation of Bosnia and Herzagovina was indeed illegal and why the charges of high treason are indeed illegitimate.
The Man who Defended Gavrilo Princip is above all a compelling story of a little man fighting a rigged system, and a tiny country fighting for its national identity against an imperial juggernaut.