By Alex Gordon
HAIFA, Israel — The assassination in Sarajevo of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian Habsburg throne, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was the most important political assassination of the twentieth century, for it was the trigger for World War I. However, this assassination, committed in 1914, was not the only resounding political assassination in the “Double” Empire, which had four years to live. On October 21, 1916, Count Karl von Stürgk, Minister-President (Prime Minister) of the Austro-Hungarian Empire was shot and killed during a dinner at a restaurant in the hotel Meissl and Schadn in Vienna by Social Democrat Friedrich Adler, a member of the Reichsrat (parliament), doctor of theoretical physics, private-docent of the University of Zurich, a peer and fellow student of Albert Einstein.
Fritz Adler was born in 1879 and grew up in the family of the venerable Social Democratic politician Victor Adler, a friend of Friedrich Engels. Victor Adler was the founder of the Austrian Social Democratic Party (1889). At the age of seven, Fritz was baptized, but then withdrew from Christianity. Einstein and Friedrich Adler were students at the Polytechnic Institute in Zurich. It was in Switzerland that Adler met his future wife, Katharina, a Lithuanian Jewess. At the same time as Einstein, Friedrich received his doctorate in physics from the University of Zurich in 1905. In Zurich, Adler lived in the same house as Einstein, one floor below Albert and his wife Mileva. In 1907, Fritz joined the Social Democratic Party of Austria, led by his father. The material situation of Friedrich, Katharina and their children was not good. And at this time he had the opportunity to significantly improve the family’s affairs ̶ he could take up a chair of physics at the University of Zurich: there was a vacancy there.
The cantonal government appointed a special search committee to determine the most suitable candidate. Adler’s scientific work had time to be recognized, and in addition, the members of the search committee were dominated by social democrats. Victor Adler was very popular with professors at the University of Zurich. His son had an excellent chance of obtaining the position. At this point, Fritz learned that Einstein had also run for the position. Fritz Adler was a man of “manic honesty,” as one biographer characterizes him. When he learned that Einstein was applying for the professorship, he submitted a formal note to the university: “If it is possible to get such a man as Einstein, it would be absurd to take me for the position. I must say with all sincerity that my abilities do not compare with those of Einstein. One must not lose in favor of political sympathies the opportunity to get to the university a man who can bring so much benefit to it by raising its prestige. The result — Einstein took the chair of physics, and Friedrich returned to the Austro-Hungarian capital.
Dr. Friedrich Adler became an assassin of the Prime Minister of Austria-Hungary. Friedrich describes the murder he committed as follows: “On Saturday morning I dressed well, put my revolver in my pocket and went to the Meissl and Schadn Hotel. I had long known that von Stürgk was dining there. It was my only opportunity. I also knew that von Stürgk was patronizing a certain coffee house, but I couldn’t remember which one. […] I said to myself, “Now the time has come.” But there were people walking back and forth around. Finally, at 2:30 in the afternoon, I saw that no one was around. I got up, went over to the table where von Stürgk was sitting, and took my revolver out of my right coat pocket. I had taken it off the safety beforehand, when I was waiting in the restaurant. I walked up to von Stürgk and shot him three or four times. At the same time, I said loudly: “Down with absolutism, we want peace!” […] I did not see von Stürgk fall, I only remember that there was blood on my left cheek after the shots were fired. I remember that I was holding the revolver in my half-bent hand. I do not remember whether I changed the position of my hand when shooting. I was immediately surrounded on all sides by people. Someone hit me on the back of the head, an officer hit me with his saber. Someone ripped off my glasses.”
Friedrich Adler’s murder of Stürgk shocked many people and, above all, his father, a psychiatrist, a classmate of Sigmund Freud. In a conversation with Trotsky, Victor Adler uttered: “War opens the door to all instincts, to all kinds of insanity.” “Insane,” the murderer turned out to be his son. Friedrich Adler explained his murder as follows: “If one really wants to get into the motives that prompted me to kill Stürck, I will say that I am not anti-patriotic. It was my love of my homeland and my devotion to my party that made me what I am. In my pamphlet concerning the inhumanity of war in general, I stated openly that I recognize as inhuman all violent deprivation of life. But you must understand that we live in an age of barbarism. If fathers and sons are currently sacrificing their lives in war in order to destroy other lives, it is natural to ask ourselves whether we should not sacrifice our own lives in order to end this barbarism.”
Many socialists in Europe did not believe the news from Vienna at first: how could the Marxist Friedrich Adler shoot the prime minister? After all, he is a real Marxist, and Marxists condemn the method of individual terror (but not collective, red terror…!). Trotsky supports Adler: “But Fritz Adler, as we knew him, was not a terrorist. A Social Democrat by family tradition and personally won conviction, a well-educated Marxist, he was by no means prone to terrorist subjectivism, to the naive belief that a well-directed bullet can cut the knot of the greatest historical problem.”
The own Social Democratic Party publicly condemned Adler’s act and dissociated itself from him. Albert Einstein came to his defense. He was ready to support his friend at the trial. In a letter dated April 29, 1917 Einstein wrote to his friend Michel Besso: “He has proven himself as a selfless, peaceful, hardworking, kind-hearted, sensible, and highly respected man, and therefore I sincerely wish to intercede for him.” That said, he also criticizes Adler: “He has a rather barren, rabbinical mind, stubborn, without a sense of reality. He is super self-sacrificing, with a strong tinge of self-sacrifice, up to and including suicide. A type of true martyr.”
The trial began on May 18, 1917. Friedrich Adler turned the trial into a platform for the propaganda of his views. If the state flouts all notions of justice, the citizen has a duty to fight it, he argued. Adler was sentenced to death. Emperor Charles did not dare to execute him. Friedrich was sentenced to 18 years in prison. But on November 1, 1918, in the last days of World War I, when the Austro-Hungarian Empire was on the verge of collapse, Fritz was pardoned by the emperor and released. He became one of the most popular people in Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Russia. The Bolsheviks in Soviet Russia at this time considered Fritz Adler, as well as another opponent of the World War — Karl Liebknecht in Germany — their comrades-in-arms and associates, heroes, and followed their fates with fervent sympathy. They named streets in Moscow, Petrograd, Kursk and Penza after him.
But Fritz Adler did not become a “real” revolutionary. The establishment of the Bolshevik dictatorship cooled Fritz’s feelings toward the new Russia. Adler, who came out of prison, deeply disappointed his Russian comrades: he became interested not in deepening the revolution in his country, but in defending the Russian Mensheviks. Speaking on November 27, 1918, Lenin said with extreme disappointment: “Just today I was handed a letter from Friedrich Adler, a man known for his revolutionary behavior in Austria. His letter, written at the end of October and received today, contains only a request: could the Mensheviks not be released from prison? He found nothing more clever to write at such a moment than this request. […]. This ridiculous mistake of the Western European Socialists is due to the fact that they look backward rather than forward and do not realize that neither the Mensheviks nor the Socialists-Revolutionaries (who preach socialism) are socialists”. And already in 1922 Trotsky supplied his old articles with new comments.
After prison, Adler became, in his words, “a traitor.” He responded to Trotsky’s accusations in 1936 with his book The Witchcraft Trial in Moscow. To Trotsky and the trotskyists, Adler replied that he saw no difference between them and Stalin. They lost, and he won. There are no other differences. On the one hand, he wrote that the Bolsheviks had been in power for 19 years, but had never learned how to rule without mass terror, that the common man of the USSR was deprived of his most elementary rights. On the other hand, he said that he did not call for an armed struggle against the Bolshevik system, but hoped for its internal evolution. Von Stürgk, who established less severe prohibitions, he killed, and to the Bolsheviks, who created a bloody dictatorship, he gives a chance for “internal evolution.”
Although Adler was baptized at the age of 7, his wife, a Lithuanian Jew, insisted on a Jewish wedding. In the book The Great War and Jewish Memory, American writer David Laskin quotes Adler as saying, from his granddaughter Steve Greenstein’s husband: “The fact that Jews were killed in mass executions by the same compatriots they fought for 25 years ago makes me look around in dismay.” During World War II, Adler lived in Switzerland and helped Jewish refugees. In 1949 he wrote: “I, like my father, always considered the complete assimilation of the Jews not only desirable but also possible, and even Hitler’s bestiality did not refute my view that Jewish nationalism necessarily leads to reactionary tendencies — namely, the revival of a language dead for nearly two thousand years and the resurrection of an obsolete religion.” He died at 81, on January 2, 1960, in the very Switzerland where he had studied physics with Einstein.
Failed physicist, failed philosopher-positivist, successful terrorist, former member of parliament, ardent opponent of World War I, passionate fighter against dictatorship and injustice, former hero of the Soviet Union, Friedrich Adler distanced himself from science, from social democracy, from the making of the revolution, did not believe in the world socialist revolution and coldly observed from outside, from safe Switzerland, the events of World War II. He was well aware of the Holocaust, but Hitler did not convince him of a Jewish solution to the Jewish question. Marx responded in this way to the French writer, the academician Maxim Du Can, who made a remark to him about his lack of Jewish patriotism: “How do you want us to be patriots when we have had no homeland since Titus!” During Adler’s lifetime, the Jews already had a homeland: the State of Israel.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.