Projects in Process
Two books and a film: that’s how I measure the remainder of my career. I’ll probably keep writing after these works, but for now, at least,
I’m laser focused on the following three projects:
“The Footprints of Gavrilo Princip:
Tracking the Myth of the Sarajevo Assassination”
This will hopefully be a book someday, though I can’t guarantee that the title will stick. Continuing my obsession with the Sarajevo assassination, “Footprints” is less a sequel to Misfire than a radical extension of what I first called the “Sarajevo myth” in an article entitled “‘Warn the Duke’” (Historical Reflections 45:1 [Spring 2019]: 93–112). Wait, what myth?! The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, is as much a fact as the French Revolution. What I mean by “myth” is not, naturally, the opposite of “truth,” but the sum total of ways in which this world-historical event is narrated and constructed, remembered and imagined. Drawing on the widest possible array of cultural, historical, and mnemonic sources, including fiction and film, museums and memorials, artwork and newspaper articles, my book will argue that the Sarajevo assassination is typically presented, processed, and assimilated through a mythological prism.
“Rezzori: A Life for Lost Times"
Ever since I first read Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, by Gregor von Rezzori, I have been obsessed with writing about him. Originally, this was because of how he complicated the question of antisemitism in that classic work. But the more I read by and about Rezzori, the more I realized that his literature is intimately intertwined with his life in ways which directly reflect on the fraught history of Europe’s twentieth century.
Born into Austrian aristocracy on the fringes of the Habsburg Empire, Rezzori, lived (from 1914 to 1998) in a state of constant exile and displacement, whether in his native Bukovina, Austria, Romania, Germany, France, Italy, or the United States. Yet there was one place to which he always returned in his writings: his hometown of Czernowitz (Chernivtsi, in today’s Ukraine), once known as “little Vienna” due to its diversity, including Romanians, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Poles, Jews, Roma, and Germans.
There is much nostalgic literature about East-Central Europe’s vanished melting pot of polyglot peoples. Rezzori himself has been described as the region’s “last great remembrancer.” In the cultural biography that I am currently researching, I intend to use his life as a prism through which to explore the larger era—in particular, the waves of violent change that washed over the twentieth century and remade the East-Central European world to which Rezzori was so intimately attached, yet mostly estranged.
Gregor von Rezzori in his study, courtesy of Beatrice Monti
Another film about the Sarajevo assassination?! Actually, the last one came out in 1975, and to watch it now is to be taken back to an entirely different era of motion picture making, not to mention its Yugoslav nationalism. By contrast, the screenplay that I am developing will not start and end in June 1914, or be told through a nationalist lens, but rather follow the complex lives of the assassin, Gavrilo Princip, and his victim, Archduke Franz Ferdinand (and his wife). Furthermore, it will continue into the aftermath of the Sarajevo murders through the outbreak of World War I.
Logline: American historian/diplomat George Kennan called the First World War “the great seminal catastrophe of [the 20th] century.” There are countless films about it. Yet the dramatic event that touched the war off—the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914—has never received full cinematic treatment. “Sarajevo” explores the outbreak of World War I through the lives of Bosnian peasant-assassin Gavrilo Princip and his victim, the heir to the throne of the Habsburg Empire.
If you are interested in the full, copyrighted “treatment” for the screenplay “Sarajevo,” please contact me directly. Thanks.