Armistice day this year marks one hundred and one years since the guns were silenced on the western front. Four years of commemorations of the ‘seminal catastrophe’ of modern times, the calamity from which other calamities sprang, has also meant a wave of ‘new’ accounts of varying quality, none more so than for the causes of the conflict. But a book that has ‘turned up’ on the origins of the First World War could dramatically change our thinking about what really caused the world to go to war.
Written by a Serbian history professor, Vladimir Ćorović, between 1927 and 1935, The Relations of Serbia and Austria-Hungary in the 20th Century, was denied publication by the Yugoslavian authorities for fear it might upset relations with Germany. In 1941, its author was killed fleeing the Nazi invasion when his plane was shot down. For decades, the manuscript lay in the vaults of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University until its 1992 publication in Serbo-Croat.
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