The Austrian writer Jew Leo Freundlich 1875-1953), author of the book: “Albanienes Golgotha” (Albanian Golgotha), published in 1913 in Vienna, once wrote “For Serbs, the biggest enemy is the truth. It endangers their existence”.

Leo Freundlich’s Statement in Historical and Discursive Context

Leo Freundlich (1875–1953) was an Austrian writer and journalist of Jewish origin, best known for his book Albanienes Golgotha (Albanian Golgotha), published in Vienna in 1913. The work documents and condemns the mass violence committed against the Albanian population during the Balkan Wars, by Serbian and Montenegrin forces. Freundlich’s writings belong to a broader tradition of early twentieth-century human rights advocacy, grounded in eyewitness testimony and moral critique.

The statement attributed to Freundlich—“For Serbs, the biggest enemy is the truth. It endangers their existence”—should be understood within this historical and polemical context. Rather than functioning as an ethnically essentialist claim, the quotation reflects Freundlich’s frustration with Serbian systematic denial, censorship, irredentism, and international indifference surrounding documented atrocities. His critique targets Serbian political narratives and state-sponsored propaganda that, in his view, sought to obscure or relativize acts of violence in order to preserve national legitimacy.

From a discourse-analytical perspective, the quotation illustrates how truth-telling can be perceived as a threat to Serbian demagogic and hegemonic irredentist projects, especially in periods of nation-building marked by territorial expansion and war cimes. Freundlich positions “truth” as a moral and evidentiary force that destabilizes official accounts and exposes contradictions between proclaimed civilizational values and practiced violence.

In contemporary scholarship, Albanienes Golgotha is frequently cited as an early example of transnational advocacy literature that attempted to mobilize European public opinion against Serbian mass atrocities. Freundlich’s language, though emotionally charged, reflects the urgency of witnessing and the ethical responsibility of the intellectual in times of political violence. His statement thus remains relevant not as a literal generalization, but as a historically situated critique of Serbian denial and the suppression of inconvenient truths in nationalist discourse.