Introduction

Summary

ON JUNE 30, 1934, EDGAR JULIUS JUNG, aged forty, was assassinated by the Nazi regime during what has come to be known as “the Night of the Long Knives.” His death was reported in several international newspapers such as London's Daily Mail and the Times, indicating that he was a well-known figure on the international scene. Yet few today are familiar with Jung's name. The eleven years of Nazi rule after 1934 and the unsettled conditions in postwar Germany contributed to his slide into obscurity. For the young, newly emerging Federal Republic, Jung would have been an important figure representing early opposition to Hitler. Yet, when the theologian and philosopher Leopold Ziegler, Jung's friend and mentor, tried to bring out a book in 1955 to commemorate the twenty-first anniversary of Jung's death, he struggled to find a publisher in Germany and the book was finally published in Austria.

However, during a short life that spanned only forty years, Jung's prolific activities as a speaker and as a writer for various newspapers and journals had established him as one of the leading figures and theoreticians of the right-wing political movement that described itself as the konservative Revolution or “Conservative Revolution.” It was a movement that claimed to be conservative in the sense of harking back to the organic, corporate structures of the Middle Ages and revolutionary in the sense that it required from the German people a fundamental change of outlook and values. Jung's magnum opus, Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen, first published in 1927, was an attempt to lay the intellectual foundations of the Conservative Revolution, and it brought him considerable fame. Copies of the book were circulated to leading politicians and personalities in Europe and America, including ex-Chancellors Wilhelm Cuno and Hans Luther in Germany, Benito Mussolini in Italy, and Henry Ford in America. Mussolini granted Jung two long interviews in 1930 and professed much interest in his political views. In 1932, Jung became an influential figure, although without any official designation, in the inner circle around Chancellor Franz von Papen. As confidant and chief speechwriter for Papen (who later became vicechancellor under Hitler), Jung was at the center of political events during a turbulent period of Germany's history that saw Papen's brief reign as chancellor overtaken by the even briefer reign of General Kurt von Schleicher, and then Hitler's succession to the post of chancellor in January 1933.