How radio — and the digital age — help us to remember the first world war

Perhaps the most moving programme of all amid the huge range that will mark the coming centenary of the Great War will be on 28 June, the day when in 1914 Gavrilo Princip shot dead the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie while they were on a state visit to Sarajevo. On that night, Radio 3, along with other members of the European Broadcasting Union, will transmit live from Sarajevo a concert by the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, marking that first step on the road to war. But the evening will also inevitably reflect on how the aftermath of 1914–18 led ultimately to another war, this time in Bosnia, and to the three-year siege of Sarajevo (the longest siege of a capital city in modern times). So many layers of meaning will be contained in that single concert, heard simultaneously throughout the nations of Europe. So much hope, too, will be distilled in the joint broadcast, bringing people together to remember what will happen if we allow ourselves at any time to forget how brutally destructive and long-lasting war is.