Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf Würzbach (15 June 1886 – 14 May 1961) was a Nietzsche scholar, Nazi sympathiser and convinced propagandist.
[2] Würzbach's first publication in 1921 was a treatise on Dionysus which rehashed certain elements of Nietzsche's thoughts on the Manichean rivalry of Apollonian and Dionysian forces within cultures.
Apart from his doctoral thesis published 1924,where he offered an eccentric theory on prehistoric artifacts and tools,[3] his subsequent career was almost exclusively dedicated to his interpretation of Nietzsche.
According to a self-penned resume in 1934, and his later mercy-plea to Hitler in 1940, he gave a number of lectures railing against the "Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl".
[5] Whether in fact these lectures dealt with Husserl in an anti-Semitic manner, as his resume suggests, or whether this was simply the boastings of a pragmatic job-seeker has not yet been established.
One thing is certain however, during the 1920s Würzbach drifted toward certain readings of Nietzsche, and philosophy in general, which leaned toward the ultra-nationalist Nazi Weltanschauung which would emerge triumphant in Germany of the ‘30s.
[12] This was a fact he himself denied by falsely claiming that he had been born to a different mother, whose name his father had never told him, and thus, he urged, he was of ‘true’ Aryan stock.
As far as his philosophy was concerned, he continued to read Nietzsche as proffering a biological-hierarchical theory; as is evident in his claim in an essay written late in 1945, that we need a "hierarchy of Man, not according to our own standards, but according to the given hierarchical and power order".
[17] Furthermore, when he republished his 1932 polemic Erkennen und Erleben [Know & Experience] in 1949, albeit with some changes and under the new title of Grundtypen des Menschen;[18] he therewith demonstrated his lasting antipathy to, and misunderstanding of Edmund Husserl and his philosophy.
Personnel File from Reichsender München Bayerische Rundfunk Historisches Archiv (BRHA): Friedrich Würzbach, RV.