Conclusion

Summary

AT THE TIME OF HIS DEATH Jung was a committed politician with a burning ambition for the highest offices in government. A man of tremendous energy and initiative, his prolific activities as a writer and speaker helped him to establish an international reputation. The contradictions in his personality and his tendency to take up extreme positions were fueled by the turbulence of his time. Moderation and compromise were alien concepts for him. His Conservative Revolution in many respects embodied the polar opposites of what he saw and feared around him. Fear of modernity led him to see the Middle Ages as a golden age. Fear of the politicization of the masses led him further in the direction of elitism. This study has revealed that he was a man of action, reckless at times as far as his own safety was concerned. Jung himself valued actions far more than words, but he was a contradictory figure in this respect because he was not only impractical, but spent more of his time writing and speaking than acting on his ideas. His utopian writings on the Conservative Revolution stand as a contrast to his very perceptive commentaries on National Socialism (as, for example, in his later articles for Deutsche Rundschau), and his readiness to resort to firearms to attain political ends. The dichotomy between theory and practice is more easily understandable in light of the fact that Jung never had to convert theory into practice because he never held political office.

Jung's war experience and the Pfalz years under French occupation played a crucial part in the intensification of his political views, as this study has shown. They bred in him a fierce nationalism and a vehement hatred of France's politics. He stressed that his Conservative Revolution was a counterrevolution to the ideas of 1789. His failure to be elected to the Reichstag in both of the 1924 elections may have caused him to turn away from parliament and parties, but it led him to embark on a career as a political writer. In spite of his considerable gifts as a writer, he saw writing mainly as a means of furthering his political career. The successful assassination of Heinz-Orbis, carried out with a small group of trusted men, served to strengthen his belief not only in the power of action and in ends justifying means, but also in elitism.