1. Bosnia and Herzegovina (country), Bosnia-Herzegovina; 2. Bosnia (region)

1. Bosnian: Bosna i Hercegovina (abbreviation: BiH); 2. Bosnian: Bosna

Bosnia

The place name ‘Bosnia’ is derived from the name of the river Bosna.

The territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina has a roughly ‘triangular’ outline. Two sides of this triangle (to the north and south-west) extend wedge-shaped into Croatia. In the north, the River Save (Sava) forms the shared border with Croatia and, in part, with Vojvodina (Serbia). To the east, the country borders Serbia and Montenegro – mainly along the River Drina. Bosnia and Herzegovina has access to the Adriatic Sea at Neum (north of Dubrovnik). It covers an area of 51,197 km².

The modern state of Bosnia and Herzegovina is made up of two historical regions. Herzegovina, with its capital Mostar, lies in the south of the country and, even during the period of Ottoman rule (before 1878), constituted an independent administrative unit known as a vilayet or pashalik. It is traversed by the River Neretva (also known as the Narenta). Its western and eastern parts, inhabited mainly by Croats and Serbs, are characterised, like the Dalmatian hinterland, by fertile polje plains and the Dinaric karst mountains respectively . Bosnia, north of the Kupres Pass (Kupreška Vrata), with its capital Sarajevo, is by contrast a low-mountain landscape with a milder climate and abundant woodland. Individual peaks and ridges reach heights of up to 2,000 metres. To the north, this landscape, as part of the Pannonian Plain, extends into the Posavina (Sava Valley), opposite Slavonia, and further east as the fertile Semberija in the Sava–Drina triangle (near Bijeljina). Well-known from the history of the Serbs in Bosnia are the Krajina (‘borderland’) in the west around Banja Luka and the Romanija Mountains east of Sarajevo (around the climatic health resort of Pale).

Bosnia and Herzegovina had been of significance since the Middle Ages due to its mineral resources and mining, in the development of which the ‘Saxons’ played a key role at that time. Place names such as Srebrenica (silver) or Olovo (lead) reflect this tradition. In the 19th and 20th centuries, the focus was on iron (Vareš), lignite (including Kakanj) and bauxite (Mostar) took centre stage, with the result that, prior to 1918, Bosnia and Herzegovina had more industrial workers than Croatia or Serbia. As the use of hydropower was also greatly expanded later on (including the Jablanica reservoir), energy (electricity) is now, alongside timber and minerals, Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most important export. Waterfalls such as Kravice are among the symbols and attractions of tourism in Bosnia, as are mineral springs, the best known of which – dating back to the Austro-Hungarian era – is the spring in Ilidža near Sarajevo.

In the Early and High Middle Ages, part of the territory of Bosnia lay within the Frankish sphere of influence, then the Croatian, later the Croatian-Hungarian, and thus the Western Catholic sphere. For example, the Croatian King Tomislav (d. c. 928) is said to have been crowned in 925 on the Duvanjsko Polje in Herzegovina. This applies in particular to the regions in the west of the present-day state; further east, Byzantine or Bulgarian influence prevailed, at least at times, whilst in eastern Herzegovina Serbian influence prevailed. It is unclear to what extent these claims to sovereignty were enforceable or actually present in this mountainous and inaccessible country. From the time of the ban (the title for a viceroy in ancient Hungary) Kulin (1163–1204), Bosnia gained greater autonomy around 1180 and grew in political importance.

The Bosnian Church represented a distinctive feature of the late Middle Ages (12th–15th centuries). Whilst earlier literature regarded it as related to the Bogomil movement in Bulgaria, more recent research by John A. Fine emphasises its origins in the Roman Catholic Church; contemporaries compared it to the Patareni in northern Italy. In the 13th century, the popes organised several crusades against Bosnian heretics. Among the consequences was the dispatch of Franciscans by the Pope in 1347 at the request of Stjepan Kotroman II (d. 1353), who continue to shape Catholicism in Bosnia to this day. The Bosnian rulers of the Middle Ages, too, were almost without exception of the Catholic faith from the time of Kotroman II onwards.

Under Kotroman II, Bosnia succeeded in 1322 in freeing itself from the domination of the Croatian ban Mladen Šubić (c. 1270–c. 1341). His nephew and successor, Tvrtko, ascended to the throne in 1377. The standing of the Kingdom of Bosnia in the 14th century is evident from its dynastic ties; for example, Elizabeth (1340–1387), a daughter of Stjepan Kotroman II, became Queen of Hungary and Poland. Merchants from Dubrovnik played a decisive role in long-distance trade. According to the British historian Noel Malcolm, Bosnia and Serbia accounted for 20 per cent of Europe’s silver requirements in the 15th century. Buildings such as the Church of St Mary in Jajce and artefacts from this period bear witness to the region’s participation in the European Gothic artistic style.

With the conquest of Jajce Castle in 1463, the Kingdom of Bosnia fell under Ottoman rule. The relationship between conversion to Islam and the Bosnian Church remains unclear. Bosniak historiography assumes a continuity between the medieval nobility and the large landowners of the Ottoman period. Along the outer borders, intense warfare and skirmishing remained a constant feature in the centuries that followed. At the same time, the structure of the Christian population changed: on the one hand, Catholic groups in particular fled; on the other, Orthodox Christians – some of whom were known at the time as Vlasi – now settled in large parts of western Bosnia, where they henceforth formed the majority. A factor of lasting significance was that the Ottomans classified their subjects according to their religious denomination, each group being granted specific rights, its own jurisdiction and a form of ‘religious autonomy’ (the milet system). Although Ottoman Turkish was the official language, a body of so-called Alomohaden literature emerged in the Bosnian language, written using the Arabic script. From the 18th century onwards, the decline of the Ottoman Empire encouraged local military leaders (kaptane) in their quest for autonomy.

Following the uprising against the Ottoman Empire that had spread from Herzegovina throughout the Balkans in 1876, the territorial status quo was redefined at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 through the mediation of Otto von Bismarck (1815–1898): Whilst Serbia and Montenegro were recognised as independent states under international law, Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina. However, unlike Serbia and Montenegro, the Habsburg Monarchy was not a nation state but an empire. There was no mass exodus of Muslims from the region. Rather, this ‘transitional administration’ secured Bosnia’s territorial autonomy within the Habsburg Empire and included symbolic compromises, such as permission to mention the Sultan in Friday prayers or to display the Ottoman flag on Islamic holidays. The Habsburg administration in Bosnia and Herzegovina thus embarked on a cautious ‘path of transformation’. Although important steps towards integration were taken in the areas of customs and monetary policy, and in 1882 with regard to conscription, Ottoman laws initially remained in force and were only gradually replaced. In particular, the administration largely left the running of schools to the religious communities. Although new state schools were established and reformed Muslim primary schools (Ruždis) were supported, up to 80 per cent of the population remained illiterate prior to 1914. This was counterbalanced by a considerable expansion of infrastructure – namely the creation of a road and railway network, the establishment of a professional administrative structure and a health service – as well as modernisation in the social and cultural sectors, not least the emergence of a bourgeois middle class. In particular, the Habsburg administration safeguarded the traditional social order – that is, the established rights of Muslim large landowners – against demands for agrarian reform, particularly from Serbian smallholders. The promotion of Bosnian national patriotism in historical and cultural policy – ‘Bosniakism’ – appealed above all to a section of the Muslim elite. The annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina by Austria-Hungary, which took place following the Young Turk Revolt of 1908, escalated into an international crisis in which the Monarchy’s dependence on the German Empire became apparent. In the period that followed, important reforms were implemented in the ‘Reichsland’ of Bosnia and Herzegovina, such as the introduction of a ‘constitution’ (1909) and elections to the provincial assembly (1910), yet they did little to win the loyalty of the Bosnian Serbs, particularly the younger members of their intelligentsia. It was from their ranks that the assassin Gavrilo Princip (1894–1918) emerged. On 28 June 1914, in Sarajevo, he carried out the fatal assassination of the Austro-Hungarian heir to the throne, Franz Ferdinand (1863–1914), and his wife Sophie (1868–1914) in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, an act which triggered the First World War.

In the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, founded in 1918, political dominance lay with the Serbian part of the country. The unitarian state ideology was further intensified under the authoritarian ‘royal dictatorship’ and, from 1929, with the adoption of the name‘Yugoslavia’. Nevertheless, the ethno-confessional structure in Bosnia and Herzegovina continued to shape the political landscape, the press, civil society and everyday life. In 1939, the Yugoslav government accommodated the dominant regionalism of the opposition in Croatia by concluding an agreement on the establishment of an autonomous Banate of Croatia, which also included the Croatian settlement areas in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Following the German occupation of Yugoslavia in 1941, the Croatian fascist Ustaša movement proclaimed an‘Independent State of Croatia’. Whilst large parts of Dalmatia now belonged to Italy, this state encompassed the whole of Bosnia and Herzegovina and thus significant Serbian-populated areas. Muslims were regarded as Croats, whereas the Serbian population was persecuted by the Ustaša regime. Resistance movements formed in opposition to this: on the one hand, the royalist Četniks, who in turn committed crimes, particularly against Muslims, and increasingly collaborated with the Nazis and Italian fascists; on the other hand, the communist Partisans under Josip Broz Tito (1892–1980).

Bosnia became the focal point of the Partisan War, which the Communists ultimately won (the capture of Sarajevo, 6 April 1945). Unlike their nationalist opponents, the Partisans espoused an ‘internationalist’ programme. However, Serbs made up the largest proportion of their ranks, a fact that was later reflected in the structures of the party, the bureaucracy and the army of socialist Yugoslavia. Within this state, Bosnia and Herzegovina now formed a separate constituent republic, which, in the wake of federalisation trends from the mid-1960s onwards, did indeed gain greater autonomy. It was only now that the Bosnian ‘Muslims’ (under this name) were recognised as a nation with equal rights; not least, this was in line with a pro-Arab foreign policy. The socialist era was characterised, particularly in Bosnia and Herzegovina, by far-reaching social structural change and a virtually abrupt surge in development (literacy, urbanisation, industrialisation); cities such as Sarajevo and Banja Luka saw their populations multiply. As Bosnia was accorded strategic importance, it became a focal point of the Yugoslav arms industry, and various military installations were built. On the other hand, labour migration to Western countries began in the 1960s, particularly to Germany and Austria as ‘guest workers’; this was particularly pronounced in the predominantly Catholic strongholds of the Croats. In the 1980s, the economic situation in Bosnia deteriorated considerably; repression and show trials against dissidents returned, whilst various scandals involving corruption and mismanagement caused a stir.

In 1990, the Communists were voted out of power in most parts of Yugoslavia, but not in Montenegro and Serbia, where, under Slobodan Milošević (1941–2006), they led a nationalist mass movement. On the basis of a referendum boycotted by many Serbs, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence on 6 April 1992. The Yugoslav Army and Serbian militias responded with war, during which serious crimes were committed, particularly against the Bosniak civilian population. In the meantime, a ‘war within the war’ also broke out between Bosniaks and Croats (particularly in 1993). The 1995 Dayton Agreement formally restored peace, but in reality the country remained divided.

The German population migrated to Bosnia during the Austro-Hungarian era.^[2] According to the 1910 census^[3], there were 22,968 people: Around 8,000 ‘settlers’ lived in some twenty predominantly German villages in northern Bosnia, making their living from agriculture and crafts. In terms of religion, Protestants were in the majority, with the pastors mostly hailing from Germany. The oldest and most populous settlements were Catholic: Windthorst and the neighbouring Rudolfstal. After 1918, the colonists regarded themselves as a German minority; they shaped the image of the Bosnian Germans in the collective memory after 1945. By 1910, 5,246 native German speakers had settled in Sarajevo,^[4] accounting for ten to eleven per cent of the population. These included civil servants, military personnel, experts, entrepreneurs and so on. Two German-language newspapers were published in Sarajevo: the *Bosnische Post* (1884–1918) and its rival , the *Sarajevoer Tagblatt* ( 1908–1918).^[5] In addition, Germans lived in the various industrial centres as skilled workers and company employees, or on associated agricultural estates. This was the case, for example, at the Solvay soda works in Tuzla-Lukavac (1,237 Germans), in Zenica (778 Germans, iron and steel industry) and in Zavidovići-Podkleće (timber works).^[6]

The settlers arrived between 1879 and 1900 under very different circumstances: initially (Windthorst, Rudolfstal), they were Catholics who had come directly from the German Empire. Subsequently, Danube Swabians arrived, who had become acquainted with Bosnia whilst serving in the military (Franz-Josefsfeld). These people came on their own initiative and purchased their land from local landowners. In the 1890s, the state then leased out unused land owned by the public treasury (Ärar) to colonists, initially to locals; later, advertisements for this were also placed in newspapers in various parts of the Monarchy. Of these colonists, Poles and Ukrainians formed the largest groups, but there were also Germans from Galicia, Russia, Hungary and Croatia, as well as Italians, Czechs and others. Following the annexation of Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, the situation for the Germans threatened to deteriorate. The provincial parliament elected in 1910 resolved to cut subsidies to the Evangelical Church, and from then on, some school lessons were to be conducted in the local language. During this period, the ‘Association of Germans in Bosnia and Herzegovina’ and a cooperative federation grew in strength.

After the end of the First World War in 1918, a third of the Germans (mainly military personnel and civil servants) left the country. In the towns, some of the Catholics aligned themselves with the Croats. The two Sarajevo newspapers were forced to cease publication immediately. The problem of a shortage of teachers was exacerbated by the nationalisation of the school system, as teachers, now civil servants, were required to demonstrate a commensurate level of proficiency in Serbo-Croatian. Consequently, only a few larger German communities retained German schools. It is true that Georg Grassl (1865–1948), the former head of the education department in the Bosnian provincial government, became chairman of the ‘Swabian-German Cultural Association’, founded in Vojvodina in 1920, editor of the local *Deutsches Volksblatt* and a member of parliament for the German Party. However, in Bosnia, following the dissolution of the ‘Association of Germans’ and the umbrella organisation for cooperatives, intellectual leadership initially lay in the hands of the pastors: The ‘Bosnian Synod’ provided an organisational framework, and they had contact with ecclesiastical and civic-national aid societies in Germany and Austria. Some Aryan villages in Bosnia were poor and structurally underdeveloped; some families emigrated, moving to industrial centres or taking on work as migrant labourers. The ‘Kulturbund’ did not gain a political foothold in Bosnia until the late 1930s; on the whole, one can speak of ‘partial affinities’ towards National Socialism amongst the pastors.

Following the German attack on Yugoslavia, Bosnia became a major theatre of the Partisan War, the violent dynamics of which soon turned against the German villages as well.Thefirst‘resettlements’to Syrmia in 1941 bore the hallmarks of an evacuation and flight; in this sense, the majority of Bosnian Germans were ‘resettled’ in 1942. After being ‘shunted through’ camps around ‘Litzmannstadt’ (Łódź), the houses of displaced Poles were to be allocated to them under the so-called ‘Operation Zamość’ – effectively a pilot project of the ‘General Plan East’. This plan failed due to Polish resistance. Subsequently, further attempts at resettlement were made in Lorraine and Luxembourg. Some towns in Bosnia were held until October 1944. By the end of the war, the Bosnian Germans were scattered across Germany and Austria; those who returned to Bosnia were detained in camps.

• Carl Bethke: German ‘Colonists’ in Bosnia. Worlds of the Imagination, Ideology and Social Practice in Sources from the Protestant Church. In: Faculty of Philosophy, University of Sarajevo, Zijad Šehić (ed.): International Conference: Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1878–1918, held in Sarajevo on 30 and 31 March 2009. Proceedings [International Conference: Bosnia and Herzegovina within the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1878–1918. Held in Sarajevo, 30 and 31 March 2009. Proceedings]. Sarajevo 2011, pp. 235–266. URL: www.academia.edu/5920834/Deutsche_Kolonisten_in_Bosnien._Vorstellungswelten_Ideologie_und_soziale_Praxis_in_Quellen_der_evangelischen_Kirche.
• Vladimir Geiger: Bosnia and Herzegovina’s Ethnic German Human Losses during WWII and Thereafter (October 2013). URL: hrastovac.net/historical-information-2/bosnias-ds-losses-part-one/.
• Amila Kasumović: Modaliteti eksterne kolonizacije u Bosni 1890–1914 [Modalities of External Colonisation in Bosnia 1890–1914]. In: Prilozi 38 (2009), pp. 81–120. URL: iis.unsa.ba/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/38-prilozi_-%C4%8ClanciiRasprave-AmilaKasumovi%C4%87.pdf.
• Noel Malcolm: A History of Bosnia. Frankfurt am Main 1996.
• Nedad Memić: Borrowings from Austrian German in the urban dialect of Sarajevo. Frankfurt am Main 2006 (Schriften zur deutschen Sprache in Österreich 37).
• Ibid.: Rječnik germanizama i austrijacizama u bosanskome jeziku / Dictionary of Germanisms and Austriacisms in Bosnian. Sarajevo 2014.
• Robin Okey: Taming Balkan Nationalism: The Habsburg Civilising Mission in Bosnia, 1878–1914. Oxford, New York 2007.
• Leni Perenčević: ‘Far from the Land of the Ancestors’. On the construction of identity in Bosnian-German books on the homeland. In: Yearbook for German and East European Folklore 51 (2010), pp. 45–74.
• Lejla Sirbubalo: ‘How We Were Down There in ’78’: Images of Bosnia in German-language Literature. Würzburg 2012 (Epistemata, Literary Studies series, 745).
• Mary Sparks: The Development of Austro-Hungarian Sarajevo, 1878–1918. An Urban History. London 2014.
• Holm Sundhaussen: Sarajevo. The History of a City. Vienna, Cologne, Weimar 2014.

• Historijska traganja – Historical Searches, 2008 onwards (iis.unsa.ba/historijska-traganja/)
• Prilozi – Contributions, 1965 onwards (iis.unsa.ba/?s=Prilozi)

• www.iis.unsa.ba/ (Institute of History, Sarajevo)
• www.kakanien.ac.at/ (Kakania Revisited, an online platform featuring a wealth of research and theoretical articles, particularly on the Austro-Hungarian period in Bosnia)

• www.idoconline.info/ (Infobiro, digital archive of historical newspapers from Bosnia, 19th/20th centuries; access subject to a fee)
• www.dlib.si/stream/URN:NBN:SI:DOC-NNGU1FYP/891375a1-26c8-4773-b156-8eea431e4f3b/PDF (The results of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina of 10 October 1910. Compiled by the Statistical Department of the Provincial Government. With a map showing religious affiliations; accessed via the Slovenian National Library, Ljubljana)
• alex.onb.ac.at/tab_lbh.htm (Official Gazette for Bosnia and Herzegovina, Collection of Laws and Regulations for Bosnia and Herzegovina [1878–1918])
• doku.zentrum-gegen-vertreibung.de/archive/jugoslawien/kapitel-4-1-1-0-4.htm (Events in the German settlement of Schutzberg in Bosnia from April 1941 until the resettlement of the German population in November 1942. Report by the Reverend Ferdinand Sommer from Schutzberg/Glogovac, Prnjavor district in Bosnia. Transcript, proofread and confirmed by the author, spring 1958)

[1] For an example of this, see Tamara Scheer: ‘Minimal costs, absolutely no blood’. The Austro-Hungarian Presence in the Sanjak of Novi Pazar (1879–1908). Frankfurt am Main 2013 (New Research on the History of Eastern Central and South-Eastern Europe 5).

[2] On the medieval Sasi in Eastern Bosnia, see Konrad Gündisch: ‘Saxones’ in the mining industry of Transylvania, Bosnia and Serbia. In: Gerhard Grimm, Krista Zach (eds.): The Germans in East-Central and South-Eastern Europe. Vol. 2. Munich 1996 (Publications of the South-East German Cultural Association 73), pp. 119–132.

[3] The results of the census in Bosnia and Herzegovina of 10 October 1910. Compiled by the Statistical Department of the Provincial Government. With a map showing religious affiliations. Sarajevo 1912, p. 52: www.dlib.si/stream/URN:NBN:SI:DOC-NNGU1FYP/891375a1-26c8-4773-b156-8eea431e4f3b/PDF (accessed 11 February 2015).

[4] The results of the 1910 census (note 3), p. 46.

[5] The most comprehensive collections of both newspapers are held at the Austrian National Library, Vienna.

[6] The results of the 1910 census (note 3), p. 44.

Carl Bethke: Bosnia and Herzegovina. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2015. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32623 (accessed 17 January 2022).