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Biljana Andonovska, PhD
Institute for Literature and Arts, Belgrade, Republic of Serbia

 

ON PRINCIP ABOUT HIMSELF: THE HISTORY AND RECEPTION OF THE TEXT

Vol. XLIV, 2/2026, pp. 337–358
https://doi.org/10.29362/ist20veka.2026.2.and.337-358

 

ABSTRACT/RESUME:

The paper critically reconstructs the circumstances surrounding the emergence, as well as the various versions and translations of an important historiographical source related to the Sarajevo assassination. The source in question is the pamphlet Princip About Himself, published simultaneously in Zagreb, Belgrade, and Vienna in 1926. It contained a transcribed and edited stenographic record of conversations with Gavrilo Princip conducted in 1916 in Terezín by the Viennese psychiatrist Martin Pappenheim. Drawing on the new archival and periodical sources, the paper addresses the question of the text’s genesis and the diverse contexts in which it appeared from 1919 until the commemorative year 2014. Particular attention is devoted to the role played in the dissemination of this document by Martin Pappenheim, Ratko Parežanin, and Hamilton Fish Armstrong. The first publication of the document resulted from the initiative of Martin Pappenheim himself, who as early as August 1919 submitted excerpts from his conversations with Princip to the Viennese Social Democratic newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung. This publication is significant as an unequivocal gesture of authentication of the document, which, upon its first integral publication in Serbo-Croatian translation in 1926, contained almost no reliable indicators of authorship. The subsequent publication of the pamphlet in Vienna in German (1926) further contributed to its authentication. The broader international dissemination of the document, announced by its editor and translator Ratko Parežanin, appears not to have been realized. Nevertheless, an echo of this initiative may be seen in the English translation of Pappenheim’s conversations with Princip in Current History (1927), prepared by Hamilton Fish Armstrong, editor of the influential journal Foreign Affairs. Special attention is given to the political context of the document’s publication and to the role it may have played in the contemporaneous polemics concerning war guilt.

 

KEYWORDS: Gavrilo Princip, Sarajevo assassination, World War I, Ratko Parežanin, Martin Pappenheim, Hamilton Fish Armstrong

 

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