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Death of a Schoolboy
192 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1974
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
January 6, 2020
Where the historian cannot read, the novelist writes. What drove Gavrillo Princip to assassination?
Here, the ripening proces is not merely a blueprint of growing into terrorism, such as we can reconstruct from conversations with ex-IRA. Princip remains plagued by doubt until the last moment over the human nature of Franz Ferdinand: he should've been God, ruling without emotion from a distance over the nameless nobodies, more coldly in his modern Divide and Rule than the Turk was cruel. By contrast, the act of rebellion is an expression of emotion.
There is no colonel Apis here, only a Balkan War veteran for pistol practice. Even when the Austrians round up 25 accused in total, everybody who has helped them in any capacity, "conspiracy" sounds like a paranoid fantasy, these patriotic students acted on their own accord.
In the icy oubliette of Theresienstadt, the Cold renders everything incoherent for the reader. There is no real contemplation on "war guilt" from the man who fired the fatal bullet. His friends die around him, like earlier Sarajevo peasants were hung under his cell window in retaliation. There are no proceedings in the archives of an empire whose very embodiment ran a never-ending avalanche of official papers until '16, so that history will not hear the Bosnian story. This must be the most thoughtless bit of artistic licence. The ending, in contrast, is a fiction, but all the more plausible for that.
Here, the ripening proces is not merely a blueprint of growing into terrorism, such as we can reconstruct from conversations with ex-IRA. Princip remains plagued by doubt until the last moment over the human nature of Franz Ferdinand: he should've been God, ruling without emotion from a distance over the nameless nobodies, more coldly in his modern Divide and Rule than the Turk was cruel. By contrast, the act of rebellion is an expression of emotion.
There is no colonel Apis here, only a Balkan War veteran for pistol practice. Even when the Austrians round up 25 accused in total, everybody who has helped them in any capacity, "conspiracy" sounds like a paranoid fantasy, these patriotic students acted on their own accord.
In the icy oubliette of Theresienstadt, the Cold renders everything incoherent for the reader. There is no real contemplation on "war guilt" from the man who fired the fatal bullet. His friends die around him, like earlier Sarajevo peasants were hung under his cell window in retaliation. There are no proceedings in the archives of an empire whose very embodiment ran a never-ending avalanche of official papers until '16, so that history will not hear the Bosnian story. This must be the most thoughtless bit of artistic licence. The ending, in contrast, is a fiction, but all the more plausible for that.
May 7, 2026
From the flyleaf of the 1977 hardback edition from Quartet books:
'"What I mean is, the only proper response to his visit, the only action that would be commensurate, would be, to kill him."
'From this hesitant, stammered suggestion evolved a plot which shocked the world. For while Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian schoolboy, spent the years from 1914 to 1918 chained to the wall of his cell in an Austrian fortress, the rest of Europe was fighting the war which he started. He was the assassin who shot the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Francis Joseph (sic), at Sarajevo on 28 June, 1914.
'Too young for capital punishment, Princip was sentenced to life imprisonment, and after nearly four years of undernourishment and mistreatment he died of tuberculosis a few month's before the war's end. Amid the mass slaughter and the collapse of empires he was almost forgotten, and has been left to Hans Koning to recreate his story in this brilliant, original and moving novel.
'The spare, restrained style of the author's writing and his respect for historical accuracy add great force to this political thriller. But as he relates the hatching, execution and aftermath of the assassination plot, Koning gives us much more than a narrative account of events in a far-flung corner of the Habsburg (sic) empire. He probes the psychology of his young revolutionary, posing and answering questions which arise increasingly in political situations today. 'We weren't political plotters; we were actors in a morality play. Or so, we felt' , muses Princip, and in this explanation of his motives for committing acts of terrorism we may discern attitudes which are peculiar neither to other times nor to other places.
'"The author succeeds brilliantly in making Princip and his friends convincing and their story provocative and significant in contemporary terms. The is nothing 'long ago and far away' about the tale." - ATLANTIC
'"Extraordinarily stirring." - THE NEW YORKER
'"Koning does a vivid job of re-creating the grim Balkan landscape and the pre-war spirit of sullen rebellion." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
'"An essay on the anatomy of tyrannicide and a powerful evocation of the mind of a teenage revolutionary...impressive and moving." - THE NEW YORK TIMES'
An extremely fine novel which displays the characteristics of really great literature in that while it is utterly of its time it speaks beyond it. As someone who was a schoolboy when this novel came out it is utterly apparent that Hans Konning was inspired by the student protests and terrorist activities that had preceded and plagued the years that followed. But he treads the parallels incredibly lightly (it is worth reading the full New York Times review available without paywall at: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/07/ar...). But for Konning this was ancient, near forgotten, history (which explains the howler in the jacket synopsis where the names of Franz Joseph is substituted for that of Franz Ferdinand) no one could imagine that fifteen years into the future Yugoslavia would be gone in blood drenched nightmare of violence and ethnic cleansing. Princip would, during the long ghastly siege of Sarajevo be so denigrated that his monuments would be removed and tomb used as a public toilet. At the same time the Austro-Hungarian empire would be re-examined and appreciated for being so much more than the 'prison house of nations' it was once condemned as.
Because Konning does not fall into any easy historical cliches he has created a portrait of Gavrilo Princip as the quintessential man trapped in the grip of forces that mean nothing to him but define his actions - he is traitor to an emperor and state he doesn't want to be part of - I couldn't help seeing in Konning's Princip all the other terrorists and traitors, like Roger Casement in Ireland, who simply by wanting to not to belong to the status quo are seen as wrong - until they are seen as right - usually after they are dead. In presenting that aspect of Princip Konning has created a novel with eternal resonances. How much imagination does it take in 2026 to see how an alien conquest is always repaid in kind?
A novel of far greater relevance then you might suppose.
'"What I mean is, the only proper response to his visit, the only action that would be commensurate, would be, to kill him."
'From this hesitant, stammered suggestion evolved a plot which shocked the world. For while Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian schoolboy, spent the years from 1914 to 1918 chained to the wall of his cell in an Austrian fortress, the rest of Europe was fighting the war which he started. He was the assassin who shot the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Archduke Francis Joseph (sic), at Sarajevo on 28 June, 1914.
'Too young for capital punishment, Princip was sentenced to life imprisonment, and after nearly four years of undernourishment and mistreatment he died of tuberculosis a few month's before the war's end. Amid the mass slaughter and the collapse of empires he was almost forgotten, and has been left to Hans Koning to recreate his story in this brilliant, original and moving novel.
'The spare, restrained style of the author's writing and his respect for historical accuracy add great force to this political thriller. But as he relates the hatching, execution and aftermath of the assassination plot, Koning gives us much more than a narrative account of events in a far-flung corner of the Habsburg (sic) empire. He probes the psychology of his young revolutionary, posing and answering questions which arise increasingly in political situations today. 'We weren't political plotters; we were actors in a morality play. Or so, we felt' , muses Princip, and in this explanation of his motives for committing acts of terrorism we may discern attitudes which are peculiar neither to other times nor to other places.
'"The author succeeds brilliantly in making Princip and his friends convincing and their story provocative and significant in contemporary terms. The is nothing 'long ago and far away' about the tale." - ATLANTIC
'"Extraordinarily stirring." - THE NEW YORKER
'"Koning does a vivid job of re-creating the grim Balkan landscape and the pre-war spirit of sullen rebellion." - PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
'"An essay on the anatomy of tyrannicide and a powerful evocation of the mind of a teenage revolutionary...impressive and moving." - THE NEW YORK TIMES'
An extremely fine novel which displays the characteristics of really great literature in that while it is utterly of its time it speaks beyond it. As someone who was a schoolboy when this novel came out it is utterly apparent that Hans Konning was inspired by the student protests and terrorist activities that had preceded and plagued the years that followed. But he treads the parallels incredibly lightly (it is worth reading the full New York Times review available without paywall at: https://www.nytimes.com/1974/04/07/ar...). But for Konning this was ancient, near forgotten, history (which explains the howler in the jacket synopsis where the names of Franz Joseph is substituted for that of Franz Ferdinand) no one could imagine that fifteen years into the future Yugoslavia would be gone in blood drenched nightmare of violence and ethnic cleansing. Princip would, during the long ghastly siege of Sarajevo be so denigrated that his monuments would be removed and tomb used as a public toilet. At the same time the Austro-Hungarian empire would be re-examined and appreciated for being so much more than the 'prison house of nations' it was once condemned as.
Because Konning does not fall into any easy historical cliches he has created a portrait of Gavrilo Princip as the quintessential man trapped in the grip of forces that mean nothing to him but define his actions - he is traitor to an emperor and state he doesn't want to be part of - I couldn't help seeing in Konning's Princip all the other terrorists and traitors, like Roger Casement in Ireland, who simply by wanting to not to belong to the status quo are seen as wrong - until they are seen as right - usually after they are dead. In presenting that aspect of Princip Konning has created a novel with eternal resonances. How much imagination does it take in 2026 to see how an alien conquest is always repaid in kind?
A novel of far greater relevance then you might suppose.
May 27, 2023
Not so much a novel as it is a "What if Gavrilo Princip had written an autobiography?" In that regard, the book is written very strongly and gives a good insight into the internal strife of a self-proclaimed revolutionary from the moment he and his cohorts commit to the act, all the way to his dying days in a secluded prison cell. This did kill the pacing for me quite a bit, making this a hard read at times.
October 14, 2013
Op 28 juni 1914 schoot een Servische scholier de Oostenrijkse troonopvolger Frans Ferdinand (1663-1914) neer. De moordenaar Gavrilo Princip (1894-1918) was net twintig jaar oud. Wat dreef de jonge jongen tot zo’n wanhopige daad? Hierop probeert Hans Koning antwoord te geven in de gefingeerde autobiografie Het fatale schot.
De jonge dader werd opgesloten in Terezin (in het Duits Theresienstadt), een fort dat in de Tweede Wereldoorlog gebruikt zou worden als concentratiekamp. Met veel inlevingsvermogen beschrijft Koning hoe Princip aldaar zijn dagen gesleten kan hebben. Lang verbleef hij er niet, op 28 april 1918 stierf Princip in het ziekenhuis van Terezín aan de gevolgen van tuberculose.
Koning beschrijft Princip vooral als een door idealisme gedreven gymnasiast. Exact deze idealistische motieven maken het boek onbedoeld actueel. Men denke bijvoorbeeld aan de Nederlandse moslimjongens die in Syrië meevechten. Radicaliserende jongeren zijn geen nieuw verschijnsel, die waren er in 1914 ook al.
Met Het fatale schot biedt Koning een boeiende inkijk in Princip's doen en denken.
Lees de volledige recensie van Simone Timmermans op http://bit.ly/17bLvu5
De jonge dader werd opgesloten in Terezin (in het Duits Theresienstadt), een fort dat in de Tweede Wereldoorlog gebruikt zou worden als concentratiekamp. Met veel inlevingsvermogen beschrijft Koning hoe Princip aldaar zijn dagen gesleten kan hebben. Lang verbleef hij er niet, op 28 april 1918 stierf Princip in het ziekenhuis van Terezín aan de gevolgen van tuberculose.
Koning beschrijft Princip vooral als een door idealisme gedreven gymnasiast. Exact deze idealistische motieven maken het boek onbedoeld actueel. Men denke bijvoorbeeld aan de Nederlandse moslimjongens die in Syrië meevechten. Radicaliserende jongeren zijn geen nieuw verschijnsel, die waren er in 1914 ook al.
Met Het fatale schot biedt Koning een boeiende inkijk in Princip's doen en denken.
Lees de volledige recensie van Simone Timmermans op http://bit.ly/17bLvu5
December 4, 2021
ATTENTION GOODREADS WEB MISTRESS AND MASTERS
THE AUTHOR’S LAST NAME IS KONING, NOT NOT NOT KONIG.
(I would expect better from a book site).
THE AUTHOR’S LAST NAME IS KONING, NOT NOT NOT KONIG.
(I would expect better from a book site).
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews