Abstract
Reviewed by: Andrew G. Bonnell, University of Queensland, Australia
Most students of modern German history will only have encountered Edgar Jung as a victim of the ‘Röhm purge’ or ‘Night of the Long Knives’ on 30 June 1934. The United Press agency’s listing of victims of the purge ranked Jung twelfth in order of importance, behind Ernst Röhm, Kurt von Schleicher, and several others (220). Jung’s murder followed his authorship of a speech by Hitler’s Vice-Chancellor Franz von Papen in Marburg on 17 June, not quite two weeks earlier, in which Jung had formulated elements of a conservative critique of the direction in which the Nazi regime was going.
Not many students of the Nazi period are aware of Jung’s intellectual and political trajectory before June 1934. Nor, for that matter, would most people be aware that this victim of political assassination had himself been a political assassin, in January 1924.
Magub traces the life of Edgar Jung, born into the family of a Ludwigshafen Oberlehrer (Gymnasium teacher), through his student days in Lausanne (where, interestingly, this life-long elitist was exposed to the influence of Italian elite theorist Vilfredo Pareto), and his service in the First World War. In 1919, Jung joined the notorious rightist Freikorps Epp. Despite his deep contempt for liberalism, and his later disagreements with Gustav Stresemann’s foreign policy, Jung joined the right-leaning liberal Deutsche Volkspartei, apparently attracted by its connections with industry, and remained a member until 1930.
In 1923–1924, Jung was active in combatting the French-backed separatist movement in the Pfalz, and was instrumental in organizing and leading the assassination of the separatist politician Franz Josef Heinz-Orbis (three other men were also killed in the attack). Being a self-confessed assassin did not disqualify Jung from taking up a career as a lawyer in Munich subsequently, and he was never prosecuted for his part in the death of a man widely regarded as a traitor.
Jung sought to carve out a political career for himself as a spokesman for the ‘Conservative Revolution’, and he was successful in gaining the patronage of the Ruhr industrialist Paul Reusch, whose purchase of Munich’s Münchener Neueste Nachrichten helped to boost Jung’s career as a journalist and writer, while he also contributed to the employers’ federation’s journal Der Arbeitgeber. Jung’s open disdain for the masses was to prove a handicap in electoral politics, however. His major work as a writer was a sub-Spenglerian tome entitled Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen (The Rule of the Inferior), an anti-democratic and anti-liberal polemic.
Magub’s account of Jung’s ideas is a little ambivalent, if not contradictory. He notes the extent to which Jung faithfully represented the ideas of Reusch and Ruhr industry, but insists that he maintained his independence (116). Magub is at pains to differentiate Jung’s views on Jews from Hitler’s anti-Semitism, but notes that Jung both expressed anti-Semitic views about the supposed impossibility of integrating Jews into the German people, and believed in the existence of superior and inferior races, despite his emphasis on the need for a ‘spiritually superior’ elite (not simply biologically superior). Magub stresses that there was ‘no unified view on anti-Semitism within the German Right’ (124–5), but this tends to play down the extent to which there was a basic shared anti-Semitic prejudice on the German right that had become a ‘cultural code’ since the 1890s (see S. Volkov, ‘Readjusting Cultural Codes: Reflections on Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism’ (2006)).
Magub reveals Jung’s extraordinarily far-reaching political ambitions – in September 1930, he seems to have thought he could rival Hitler as a leader of right-wing renewal of the German people. Jung came to view Hitler critically on the unusual grounds that Nazism was too liberal – in so far as it sought mass support. In autumn 1932, Jung – still a protégé of the industrialist Reusch, sought contact with von Papen, the most egregious and most irresponsible of the conservative ‘stirrup-holders’ (Steigbügelhalter) who helped Hitler into the saddle in January 1933. Magub continues to argue that there was nonetheless an unbridgeable gulf between Jung and Hitler, and suggests that Jung even cherished the fantasy that he might sit in the Nazified Reichstag as a member of a radical conservative ‘loyal opposition’.
Magub seeks to provide a narrative that will be accessible to non-specialists. This is not always successful (e.g., it is inaccurate to characterize the 1929 Young Plan as a reaction to the Wall Street Crash (74)). Magub suggests that the consistent thread in the ideas of the ‘Conservative Revolution’ as represented by Jung was anti-French sentiment, although elsewhere he refers to other features of these ideas as well. His argument that Jung’s murder in 1934 proves how irreconcilable his views were with those of the Nazis (230) is not wholly compelling: does the same logic apply in the cases of Ernst Röhm and Gregor Strasser? As far as an analysis of Jung’s ideas is concerned, this book might usefully be read in conjunction with Larry Eugene Jones’s essays on Jung and Papen, rather than instead of the latter. But Magub has done scholars the service of producing a full, well-researched biography of Jung, which sheds light on his role in the anti-separatist campaign in the Pfalz, the links between industry and the intellectual radical right in the Weimar Republic, and much in between.