Edgar Julius Jung

Jung, c. 1925

Edgar Julius Jung (March 6, 1894 – July 1, 1934) was a German lawyer born in Ludwigshafen, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Jung was a leader of the Conservative Revolutionary movement in Germany, which stood not only in opposition to the Weimar Republic, whose parliamentarian system he considered decadent and foreign-imposed, but also to the mass movement of Nazism. He was killed by the Gestapo in the 1934 Night of the Long Knives purge.

At the onset of the First World War, Jung voluntarily joined the imperial armies and reached the rank of lieutenant. After the end of the war, he participated in the suppression of the Bavarian Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919 and in the resistance against the French occupation of the Palatinate, during which he participated in the assassination of Franz Josef Heinz. Expelled by the French authorities, Jung moved to Munich, where, in 1925, he opened a law firm and dampened his political activism slightly.

Jung, like Carl Schmitt, believed the breakdown of liberal parliamentarism to be inevitable as the instability of Weimar Germany was unfolding before his eyes. Jung regarded Weimar Germany as teetering on the brink of revolutionary turmoil with the very real prospect of a Red Revolution sponsored by the Soviet Union or a Brown Revolution by the Nazis.

After the formation of the "government of national concentration" under the leadership of Adolf Hitler on 30 January 1933, Jung became a political consultant and speechwriter for the vice-chancellor of the coalition cabinet, Franz von Papen.

In 1934, Jung wrote the Marburg speech that was delivered on June 17 by Papen at the University of Marburg. The speech articulated the conservative establishment's criticism of the violence of National Socialism.[1] The text sought to reassert the Christian foundation of the state and the need to avoid agitation and propaganda: "It is time", the speech declared "to join together in fraternal friendship and respect for all our fellow countrymen, to avoid disturbing the labours of serious men and to silence fanatics". The speech was banned from being printed in the press, and Hitler personally ordered the arrest of Jung and his transfer to Gestapo headquarters, Berlin.[2]

Jung was murdered by the SS during the Night of the Long Knives - shot in the cellar at Gestapo headquarters.[3] His body was found dumped in a ditch near the town of Oranienburg near Berlin on July 1.[4]

The Rule of the Inferiour: Its Disintegration and Removal Through a New Reich by Edgar Julius Jung is his major political treatise which was originally published in 1930 as Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, ihr Zerfall und ihre Ablösung durch ein neues Reich ("Inferiour" is an obsolete spelling of "Inferior"). The translator, Alexander Jacob, produced the first and only English edition in 1995 with a large introduction and notes, sold in two volumes; the first volume being 428 pages and the second 396 pages.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Kershaw, Ian (1998). Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris. New York: Norton & Company. p. 515.
  2. ↑ John S. Conway; The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945; pp. 90-91
  3. ↑ John S. Conway; The Nazi Persecution of the Churches, 1933-1945; p. 91
  4. ↑ Kershaw, Ian (1998). Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris. New York: Norton & Company. p. 515.

External links

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