Sarajevo on film 1955 Austria
Sarajevo (Um Thron und Liebe)
The Austrian 1955 film of the 1914 assassination that proved so controversial in Vienna it was pulled from release.
- Director
- Fritz Kortner
- Year
- 1955
- Language
- German
- Country
- Austria
- Genre
- historical, drama
Sarajevo — released in Germany and Austria as Um Thron und Liebe, “For Throne and Love” — is the oldest of the 1914 assassination films and, in its way, the most revealing. Fritz Kortner, the Austrian actor and director, made it in 1955, and it portrays the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand with a degree of sympathy for the Young Bosnian conspirators that proved too much for the Austrian establishment: the film was withdrawn after its release and remained difficult to see for decades.
Kortner, who had fled Austria in the Nazi era, was a pointedly political filmmaker, and his Sarajevo is less a historical pageant than an argument about the Habsburg empire’s blindness — made from the imperial capital’s own perspective, forty years after the event. It stars Luise Ullrich and Ewald Balser, and it stands at the head of a line of assassination films that stretches from Bulajić’s 1975 epic to the 2014 centenary film.
For a visitor, it is the oldest surviving route into the city’s most famous date — a period film about the corner you can still walk, made before the century’s later wars had fully hardened the memory.
Critical reception
The film’s English-language critical record is essentially non-existent — no Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic listing exists — and it is remembered today through German criticism. The Lexikon des internationalen Films praised its capture of pre-war Europe’s atmosphere, and on the centenary Die Welt called it a classic.
Public reception and legacy
The film’s production was a casualty of the politics it depicted: the producers’ plan to shoot in Yugoslavia collapsed when the state studio demanded a film that was “a hymn to the assassins” — “Gavrilo Princip is our Wilhelm Tell”, its director said — and the production withdrew to Vienna, where Sarajevo was recreated on the city’s outskirts. The German distributor retitled it Um Thron und Liebe because “Sarajevo” meant too little to German audiences. Its cast includes Klaus Kinski as the would-be assassin Čabrinović.
What the critics said
“"Es ist nicht die historische Objektivität, die den Film auszeichnet, sondern das Gespür für eine Ära, die uns verloren gegangen ist." ("It is not historical objectivity that distinguishes the film, but the feel for an era that we have lost.")”Read the review →