BB: Gavrilo Princip between Transnational Memory and Popular Culture

This lecture focuses on the processes of creation and transformation of artistic and collective representations of Gavrilo Princip throughout the 20th and 21st centuries. As a member of the Yugoslav anarcho-nationalist movement Young Bosnia and the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo in 1914, Princip has been perceived as a highly controversial historical figure. Beyond this, he has also emerged as a complex political symbol, whose image has undergone numerous reinterpretations in literature, visual arts, and popular culture, and has been subject to various forms of commercialization. Such representations are often marked by ideological ambivalence and dichotomy, situating him Princip within political Left and Right-wing frameworks, socialist and nationalist ideologies, and casting him as either hero or terrorist. 

The lecture will present the ongoing work on the edited volume Gavrilo Princip between Transnational Memory and Popular Culture (edited by Biljana Andonovska and Goran Lazičić, under contract by Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming in 2027). The volume is an attempt to trace the representations of Princip beyond official historical, political, academic, literary, and artistic discourses, thus challenging and reassessing the polarized and stereotypical interpretations of one of the most enigmatic and symbolically charged figures in the modern history of Southeastern Europe.

Goran Lazičić is currently a Karl Kaser ERG Fellow at the profile area "Dimensions of Europe" with the project Gavrilo Princip between Transnational Memory and Popular Culture. He is a lecturer in Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian literatures and cultures at the University of Graz and the University of Klagenfurt. His research interests include Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav political literature and film, and nostalgia, paranoia, and conspiracy theories in post-socialist contexts. He recently co-edited the volume Women and Partisan Art. Aesthetics and Practices of Resistance in Yugoslavia and Carinthia (with Elena Messner, Cristina Beretta, and Markus Gönitzer, transcript 2025).