Assassin’s bullets shaped our world

On June 28, 1914, as Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria toured the city of Sarajevo, members of a Serbian nationalist group tossed a grenade at his car. The grenade injured bystanders, but missed its mark. The archduke, heir to the throne of a now-defunct empire, continued his tour.

After the failed assassination, plotter Gavrilo Princip stopped at a delicatessen for a sandwich. Incredibly, the motorcade carrying the archduke happened to take the wrong street and wound up in front of the same deli. Recognizing the error, one of the cars stopped, preparing to back up.

That was a fateful pause. Princip stepped up to Ferdinand's car, raised a revolver, and fired twice, killing Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg.

You know what happened next.

Austria-Hungary issued an ultimatum to Serbia. Russia supported Serbia. Germany backed Austria-Hungary. France and Britain took the side of Russia. At the end of the 'July crisis” came combat. The Great War, World War I, was underway.

I wonder what it was like, in the summer of 1914 in Cedar Rapids. The events unfolding in Europe would have seemed much farther away than a similar tragedy today. Travel and time were very different, but everything was changing. And the United States stayed out of the war until almost three years later.

During the four years of World War I, more than 9 million soldiers, including more than 100,000 Americans whose lives were snuffed out by bullets, shells, poisonous gas, torpedoes, aerial bombs and more mundane causes - disease and accidents, for example.

It wasn't America's bloodiest war, nor the world's. But World War I had a profound impact. It ended a 19th-century sense of optimism, and initiated the era that we live in now. It redrew the world map, often in capricious and ineffective ways, setting up problems that bedevil us today.

It was called the war to end wars. Instead, it disastrously became the peace that almost ended peace.

What does World War I mean to us now? It ended British domination of the world. It brought about a cascade of social-political revolutions. It changed the whole culture. Music, art, novels, movies - none would ever the same as artists and writers struggled to make sense of incomprehensible tragedy.

As a journalism professor, I would add that the war highlighted the need for a free press. One calamity of the war is that the German public, 'informed” by a slanted, state-controlled media, had no idea until November 1918 that the German army was overwhelmed. Defeat was a bitter surprise, and led to a generation convinced there had to have been a betrayal and a conspiracy.

That led to Adolf Hitler.

The assassin's bullets fired 100 years ago still echo today. I've been spearheading a series of events planned this fall at Mount Mercy University called 'A Century of Glory and Shame: Mount Mercy Reflects on How World War I Made Today.”

The free, public events will provide us all with a chance to ponder the many meanings of the Great War. The series kicks off Aug. 28.

I hope many of you will join us as we think about how one assassin's bullets 100 years ago still shape our world today.

' Joe Sheller is an Associate Professor of Communication at Mount Mercy University. Contact: jsheller@mtmercy.edu