Friedrich Adler (politician)

Friedrich Wolfgang Adler (9 July 1879 – 2 January 1960) was an Austrian socialist politician and revolutionary. He is perhaps best known for his assassination of Minister-President Karl von Stürgkh in 1916.

Adler was born in Vienna, the son of politician Victor Adler (1852–1918), founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Workers' Party (SDAP), and his wife Emma, née Braun (1858–1935), sister of the German publisher Heinrich Braun. Following his father's wishes, he studied chemistry, physics and mathematics at the ETH Zurich, where he became a close friend of Albert Einstein. He committed himself to the Social Democratic Party of Switzerland and in 1897 joined the association of Austrian Social Democrats, working as a journalist. In 1910, Adler became editor of the newspaper Volksrecht in Zurich.

While still established at the ETH, Adler participated in the philosophical discussion about Ernst Mach, publishing Die Entdeckung der Weltelemente (zu E. Machs 70. Geburtstag) - The Discovery of the World-Elements (On the Occasion of E. Mach's 70th Birthday) published in Der Kampf in 1908. This was hostilely cited by Vladimir Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism, who called Adler a "naïve university lecturer". This was part of Lenin's attack on the Russian Machists. In 1909/10 he was being considered to chair the physics department, but deferred to Einstein's superior expertise and lobbied for Einstein's appointment instead.

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