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The Issue of Serbian Textbooks in the Origins of World War I

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2017

Charles Jelavich
Charles Jelavich*
Affiliation:
Indiana University, Bloomington
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Extract

Geography and history textbooks used in Serbia contributed to the origins of World War I in probably the first instance in which one country used the contents of textbooks as one of its justifications for declaring war on another. Much has been published about Austro-Hungarian reactions to provocative statements by prominent individuals in Serbian newspapers and journals; however, no study has been made of the textbooks to which reference is made in the Habsburg ultimatum of 23 July 1914. The ultimatum listed ten specific demands, including one for the suppression of publications that incited “hatred and contempt” of the monarchy and threatened its “territorial integrity.” Point three, which is the focus of this study, called for the elimination “without delay from public instruction in Serbia both as regards the teaching body and the methods of instruction, all that serves or might serve to foment propaganda against Austria-Hungary.“

Alexander Musulin, the counselor in the foreign ministry who drafted the ultimatum, characterized the Serbian reply as “the most brilliant specimen of diplomatic skill that I know.” It stated in essence that Serbia was ready to satisfy Austria-Hungary's demand upon receiving proof of the charges. Concerning textbooks, the reply noted that Austria “made no representation except one concerning a schoolbook, and that on that occasion the Imperial and Royal Government received an entirely satisfactory explanation.”

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 48 , Issue 2 , Summer 1989 , pp. 214 - 233
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1989

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References

1. The literature on the origins of this war is voluminous. For differing points of view see Albertini, Luigi, The Origins of the War of 1914, trans. Massey, Isabella M., 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1953)Google Scholar; Dedijer, Vladimir, The Road to Sarajevo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1966)Google Scholar; Würthle, Friederich, Die Spur fürht nach Belgrad: Die Hinlergriinde des Dramas von Sarajevo 1914 (Vienna: Fritz Molden, 1975)Google Scholar; Fischer, Fritz, Germany's Aims in the First World War (New York: Norton, 1967)Google Scholar; Mitrović, Andrej, Prodor na Balkan: Srbija u planovima Auslro-Ugarske i Nemacke 1908–1918 (Belgrade: Nolit, 1981)Google Scholar. For a lively discussion see Remak, Joachim, “1914—The Third Balkan War: Origins Reconsidered,” Journal of Modern History 43, no. 3 (1971): 353–366 CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Schroeder, Paul, “World War I as Galloping Gertie: A Reply to Joachim Remak,” Journal of Modern History 44, no. 3 (1972): 319–345 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2. Bittner, Ludwig et al., Österreich-Ungarns Aussenpolitik von der bosnischen Krise 1908 bis zum Kriegsaushruch 1914 (Vienna: Österreichischer Bundesverlag, 1930) 8:515–518 Google Scholar. Austria-Hungary's concern with the views expressed in Belgrade is well summarized in an aide-mémoire that the government sent to its embassies on 25 July 1914. It was to be used to justify Austria's declaration of war. Ibid., 665–704; see also 415–426.

3. Bittner, Österreich 8:517; Albertini, Origins 2:287.

4. von Musulin, Freihcrr, Das Haus am Ballhausplatz: Errinerungen eines österreich-ungarischen Diplomalen (Munich: Verlag für Kulturpolitik, 1924), 241 Google Scholar.

5. Bittner, Österreich 8:662; Albertini, Origins 2:368.

6. The role of textbooks in Serbian history is discussed in Jelavich, Charles, “Serbian Textbooks; Toward Greater Serbia or Yugoslavia?” Slavic Review 42, no. 4 (1983): 601–619 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Bittner, Österreich 8:818–819; Albertini, Origins 2:368. Narodna Odbrana was a militant organization formed in 1908 to rally the nation against Austria-Hungary's annexation of Bosnia-Hercegovina. Subsequently, Narodna Odbrana advocated the cultural and political unity of the Serbian nation. It enjoyed broad popular support, especially among intellectuals, teachers, and students.

8. Jović, M. and Putniković, D. J., Zemljopis Srhije i srpskih zemalja za IV razred osnovne škole, 6th ed. (Belgrade: M. Iv. Živković, 1906)Google Scholar. (Future footnote references will be to this edition unless otherwise noted.) I briefly discussed the contents and the issues concerning this volume, but not its role in the origins of the war, in a festschrift honoring Šidak, Jaroslav, “Zemljopis Srbije i srpskih zemalja: An Episode in Austro-Serbian Relations, 1907–1912,” Hisiorijski zbornik 29-30 (1976–1977): 419–429 Google Scholar.

9. Haus-, Hof-, und Staatsarchiv, Politischcs Archiv 19, Scrbicn, Karton 75, Liassc XI-2, Serbische Lehrbiicher 1907–1912, Forgach to Aehrcnthal, no. 112-A, Belgrade, 7 December 1907, Beilage no. 4. Hereafter cited as HHS-SL. Because of the importance of the nationality statistics in the following pages, figures from the 1910 Habsburg census, generally regarded as accurate, will be given, as well as the basis of Serbia's claims to these lands.

The Serbian nationalist movement rested on the commonly held nineteenth century premise that a nation was identified by its language. Hence, since the Serbs and Croats spoke essentially the same language, generally known as Serbo-Croatian, some of the Serbian leadership concluded that the Croats were Serbs of the Roman Catholic faith who wrote in the Latin not the Cyrillic alphabet. Logically, therefore, the territories inhabited by the Serbs and Croats were Serbian lands. In other words, they rejected the historic integrity of the Triune Kingdom of Croatia, Slavonia, and Dalmatia and thereby the existence of a separate Croatian nation. Obviously, this premise was discounted by the Croats who could cite not only historical evidence to disprove it but census figures as well.

The 1910 census provides the following data. In that year Croatia-Slavonia had 2,621,954 inhabitants of whom 1,630,354 (62.5 percentl were Croats and 644,955 (24.6 percent) were Serbs. In Dalmatia, where the census only used language and religion as criteria, there were 505,334 (82.5 percent) Catholics or Croats and 105,355 (16.31 percent) Orthodox or Serbs. The remaining population was made up primarily of Italians. Istria, which the Serbian textbooks describe as cither “the largest Serbian peninsula” or “the smallest Serbian land,” had a population of 403,566, of whom only about 2,000 were Serbs, with the remainder including 168,143 Croats, 147,417 Italians, 55,134 Slovenes, and 13,735 Germans. In Banat and Bačka and in Vojvodina, the Serbs claimed a plurality of 35 percent by including the Croats, whereas in fact Hungarians made up the plurality.

Serbia's greatest emotional attachment, however, was to Bosnia and Hercegovina. In 1878 Austria-Hungary occupied them and then annexed them in 1908; the latter action produced a major crisis between Vienna and Belgrade. Animosity toward the Dual Monarchy was intense. The Serbian public always believed that nearly the entire population of the two provinces was Serbian even though the census, which was based exclusively on religion, gave the Orthodox only a plurality of 825,418 (43.49 percent). The remainder were Slavic-speaking Muslims who numbered 612,137 (32.35 percent) and Roman Catholics with 434,566 (22.87 percent); the overwhelming number of the latter were Croats.

10. Forgach to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. 112A-F, Belgrade, 7 December 1907.

11. Aehrenthal to Forgach, HHS-SL, no. 1711, Vienna, 28 November 1907. For two contemporary views of the general situation affecting the Habsburg monarchy and the southern Slavs, sec Baernreither, Joseph M., Fragments of a Political Diary, ed. Redlich, Joseph (London: Macmillan, 1930)Google Scholar, and Seton-Watson, R. W., The Southern Slav Question and the Habsburg Monarchy (London: Constable, 1911)Google Scholar.

12. Forgach to Aehrenthal, HHS-SI no. 112A-F, Belgrade, 7 December 1907.

13. Ibid., Beilage no. I. The exact references to which Forgach referred can be found in Jović and Putniković, Zemljopis, 64–96.

14. Forgach to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. ! I2A-F, Belgrade, 7 December 1907; Jović and Putniković, Zemljopis, 94–95.

15. Forgach to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. II2A-F, Belgrade, 7 December 1907; Jović and Putniković, Zemljopis, 96.

16. Forgach to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. 112B, streng vcrtraulich, Belgrade. 7 December 1907.

17. Ibid., no. II2C, strong vertraulich, Belgrade, 7 December 1907.

18. Aehrenthal to Forgach, HHS-SL, no. 1822, Vienna, 19 December 1907.

19. Forgach to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. 5, Belgrade, 27 January 1908.

20. Aehrenthal to Forgach, HHS-SL, no. 124, Vienna, 31 January 1908.

21. Forgach to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. 20B, Belgrade, 19 April 1908.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid., no. 21A-B, Belgrade, 21 April 1908.

24. Ibid.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid., no. 22A-C, Belgrade, 23 April 1908, and no. 24B, Belgrade, 4 May 1908.

27. Macartney, C. A., Hungary and Her Successors: The Treaty of Trianon and Its Consequences 1919–1937 (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), 25 Google Scholar. See also Forgach to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. 112A-F, 7 December 1907.

28. Wekerle to Aehrenthai, HHS-SL, no. 1981, Budapest, 11 September 1908.

29. Khuen-Héderváry to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. 625, Budapest, 11 February 1911. Aehrenthal to Khuen-Héderváry, HHS-SL, no. 857, Vienna, 20 April 1911.

30. Aehrenthal to Ugron, HHS-SL, no. 858, Vienna, 20 April 1911.

31. Ugron to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. 52B, Belgrade, 13 July 1911; idem, HHS-SL, no. 92, Belgrade, 7 November 1911; and Khuen-Héderváry to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, Budapest, no. 4263, 17 November 1911.

32. Ugron to Aehrenthal, HHS-SL, no. 101B, Belgrade, 5 December 1911, and Aehrenthal to Ugron. HHS-SL, no. 3262, Vienna, 16 December 1911.

33. Khuen-Héderváry to Berchtold, HHS-SL, no. 1903, 30 March 1912, and Ugron to Foreign Ministry, HHS-SL, no. 101 res., Belgrade, 26 April 1912.

34. Pflügl to Foreign Ministry, HHS-SL, no. 176, Belgrade, 7 August 1912, which contains a copy of the Serbian statement.

35. Ibid.; Foreign Ministry to Hungarian minister president, HHS-SL. no. 3,439, Vienna, 21 August 1912. Pflügl did not cite the date of publication of the books by Sokolović, Šreplović, Stanojević, and Jović, all of whom had published numerous editions.

36. Prosvetni Glasnik—Službeni list ministarstva prosvete i crkvenih poslova Kraljevine Srbije 26, pt. 1, (1905): 623–624.

37. Ibid. 2:36.

38. Milrović, Raša and Stanojević, Mih. M., Zemljopis Kraljevine Srbije sa kratkim opisom sviju Stpskih zemalja za učenike i učenice IV ruzreda osnovne škole po programu (Belgrade: Velimir Valožić, 1906), 3 (first quotation) and 86 (second quotation)Google Scholar.

39. Stanojević, Mih. M., Zemljopis Kraljevine Srbije i srpskih zemalja za učenike i učeniee IV razreda osnovne škole—podsetnik na predavanja iz zemljopisa (Belgrade: Velimir Valožić, 1912)Google Scholar.

40. Karić, Vladimir, Srbija: Opis zemlje, naroda i države (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1887), 240–241 Google Scholar.

41. Storck to Berchtold, HHS-SL, Politisches Archiv, 19:64, no. 173, Belgrade, 24 August 1913. Although Storck was correct in pointing out that the map stressed the lands or Tsar Dušan, the critical issue for Austria-Hungary was its depiction of those lands within the empire that Serbia claimed.

42. “Etnografska karta srpskih zemalja” (Belgrade: Institut cartographique à Fetâl-major général de Serbie, 1905). This map is in the Kriegsarchiv, BIIIc 64–6.

43. Prosvetni Glasnik 27 (1906): 1, 390.

44. Derok, D. J., Atlas Kraljevine Srbije i srpskih zemalja za IV razred osnovnih škola (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1911)Google Scholar. It is also found in the Kriegsarctiy, BIIIa 218–2B. Prosvetni Glasnik, 32 (1911): 695.

45. Vardar—Kalendar “kola srpskih seslara” (Belgrade, 1908): 94–98. Approval for the use of Vardar in schools was given in Prosvetni Glasnik 31 (1910): 1, 368, and 32 (1911): 122. The report by Skerlecz can be found in Bittner, Österreich 8:416.

46. Učitelj 27 (1907–1908): 23–28, 28 (1908–1909): 539–549, and 31 (1911–1912): 367–374, 648–658, and 754–766.

47. Prosvetni Glasnik 17, pt. 2 (1906): 138–153 and 180–184; 28 (1907): 492–517; 29 (1908): 494–527.

48. Ibid., 29(1908): 501.

49. Ibid. See, for example, 27 (1906): 2 and 150–152; 28 (1907): 517–519; 32 (1911): 117–122. All the course catalogs [izveštaji] listed the titles of the textbooks used in courses. For examples, see “Srpska kraljevska negotinska gimnazija,” izveštaj, 1908–1909, 10–11; “Gimnazija u Leskovcu,” izveštaj. 19081–09, 35–37.

50. S. Antonović and T. Radivojević, Zemlja—osnovna zemljopisna znanja za pmi razred, 9th ed. (Belgrade: Geca Kon, 1913); S. Antonović and N. Lazić, Zemljopis za II razred srednjih škola (Belgrade: Dositej Obradović, 1902): 74–75, 87–90, 93–96, 97–99. Although Pašić and representatives of the Serbian government had stressed that the Jović and Putniković volume had been authorized in 1902 under the Previous Obrenović dynasty and that, therefore, they could not accept responsibility for it, the 1912 or fifth edition of tne Antonović and Lazić book carried the notation “by directive of the Minister of Education of September 1902, no. 12,669, this book is authorized as a school textbook.” In other words, the book was mg used in 1912 based upon an authorization granted in 1902. Some modifications regarding Croatia-Slavonia were found in this edition; the inhabitants of the area were now identified as Croats and Serbs. The information on Bosnia, Hercegovina, Dalmatia, Banat, and Bačka, however, had not changed.

51. Protić, Ljubomir and Stojanović, Vladimir, Srpska čitanka za IV razred osnovnih škola u Kraljevini Srbiji. 7th ed. (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1907): 5, 77–79, 223Google Scholar.

52. I could not locate the twenty-seventh edition of Jović's work; the quotation is from Jović, Mihailo, Srpska istorija za IV raired osnovne škole, 35th ed. (Belgrade: Velimir Valožić, 1913): 144 Google Scholar. Vukičević, Milcnko, Istorija srpskoga naroda za srednje škole od polovine XV stoleća do danas (Belgrade: Davidović, 1902) 2:355–357; (1906) 2:165 Google Scholar.

53. Bittner, Österreich 8:316.

54. Storck to Berchtold, HHS-SL, Politisches Archiv, I 810, no. 109-B, Belgrade, 8 July 1914, which also lists the books sent.

55. Bittner, Österreich 8:352–353. After the war Dusan A. Lončarević published an informative book entitled Jugoslaviens Enlstehung (Zurich: Amalthea, 1924).

56. Bittner, Österreich 8:353; Protić and Stojanović, Srpska čitanka, 148–149.

57. Bittner, Österreich 8:353; Protić and Stojanović, Srpska čitanka, 157.

58. Bittner, Österreich 8:353; Protić and Stojanović, Srpska čitanka, 223.

59. Bittner, Österreich 8:353; Protić and Stojanović, Srpska čitanka, 217–221.

60. Bittner, Oslerreich 8:353; Protic and Stojanović, Srpska ćitanka, 223.

61. Bittner, Österreich 8:352–353; Šević, Milan, Srpska čitanka za srednje škole za II razred, 5th rev. ed. (Belgrade: Državna štamparija, 1911): 83–84 Google Scholar.

62. Bittner, Österreich 8:352–353.

63. Jović, Srpska istorija, 35th ed. (1913): 144.

64. Bittner, Österreich 8:353; Rad. Vasović, Geografija za srednje škole—zemlje balkanskog poluoslrva za II razred (Belgrade: Rajković and Čuković, 1914) 2:52.

65. Prosvetni Glasnik 33 (1912): 11. For recent studies on Serbia's attitude toward the question of Yugoslav unification see Janković, Dragoslav, Srbija i jugoslovensko pitanje 1914–1915 godine (Belgrade: Institut za savremenu istoriju, 1973)Google Scholar; Ekmečić, Milorad, Ralni ciljevi Srbije 1914 (Belgrade: Srpska književna zadruga, 1973)Google Scholar; Stanković, Djordje Dj., Nikola Paštć, saveznici i stvaranje Jugoslavije (Belgrade, Nolit, 1984)Google Scholar; idem, Nikola Paštć i jugoslovensko pitanje, 2 vols. (Belgrade: Beogradski izdavačko-grarički zavod, 1985); and Banac, Ivo, The National Question in Yugoslavia: Origins, History, Politics (Ithaca, N.Y.; Cornell University Press, 1984)Google Scholar.