... Serbien muss sterbien!

Date

• 1914

Summary

• That may be the sentiment of many Bosnians today, but in the summer of 1914 the fist which came down hard on Serbia, as the picture on this card makes plain, belonged to Austria. The Austro-Hungarian empire had been at odds with Serbia for years: in 1878 Austria-Hungary received a mandate to occupy and administer Bosnia-Herzegovina; and in 1908 it annexed that territory, fanning pan-Serbian sentiment and the terrorist tactics of the "Black Hand," a secret and ruthless revolutionary group which supplied weapons for the assassination at Sarajevo. Austria wasted no time in taking advantage of a circumstance which to many appeared as the result of a plot by the Serbian government. No matter that Princip and his fellow-conspirators denied at their trial any connection on the part of their government and that Austria's own official inquiry could find no evidence to support such a connection, Serbia would be punished. Grotesquely caricatured as a knife- and bomb-wielding terrorist (one of Princip's co-conspirators struck an ineffectual first blow at Franz Ferdinand by throwing at his open touring car a bomb, which exploded behind the vehicle, leaving the Archduke shaken but uninjured), Serbia is smashed as a Slavic vermin under Austria's punishing fist. This postcard was mailed on August 5, 1914. Seven days earlier, with a German "Blank Cheque" in its other fist, Austria declared war on Serbia. Four days earlier, Germany, eager to make that cheque good, declared war on Russia. Two days earlier, Germany declared war on France and sent its soldiers into neutral Belgium. And that very day, Britain joined France against Germany. Ironically, another two days would pass before Austria declared war on Russia, finally placing squarely against each other those two European powers whose differences with regard to Serbia had helped push the world to war.