Edgar Julius Jung

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Edgar Julius Jung (around 1925)

Edgar Julius Jung , pseudonym Tyll, (born March 6, 1894 in Ludwigshafen am Rhein ; † June 30 or July 1, 1934 in Berlin or in a forest near Oranienburg ) was a German lawyer , politician and publicist . He is considered an important representative of the Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic . In 1924, Jung participated in the assassination of the President of the Autonomous Palatinate, Franz Josef Heinz . In 1934 he was murdered by the National Socialists as part of the Röhm affair .

Life

Youth and Education (1894 to 1922)

Jung grew up in a middle-class family in Ludwigshafen, his father Wilhelm Jakob Jung was first a primary school teacher and then a professor at the girls' college in Ludwigshafen. There he first attended elementary school, then the humanistic grammar school and obtained his Abitur in 1913. In 1913 he began studying law at the University of Lausanne . There he attended lectures by Vilfredo Pareto . In 1914 he took part in the First World War as a volunteer front soldier in the 3rd Bavarian Chevaulegers Regiment as an infantryman and patrol leader . a. also in Verdun . In 1917 he was transferred to the field artillery . After his promotion to lieutenant in the reserve, he fell seriously ill and after his recovery was trained as a fighter pilot at Diedenhofen at the end of 1917 , but was no longer deployed before the end of the war.

After the war he became a member of the Epp Freikorps and took part in the suppression of the Munich Soviet Republic in the spring of 1919.

In 1920 Jung continued his law studies in Heidelberg and Würzburg. After the first state examination, he was awarded a Dr. jur. PhD. In 1922 he passed the assessor exam and then joined Albert Zapf's office as a lawyer in Zweibrücken . He married in December of the same year.

Activities in the Palatinate Resistance Movement (1923 to 1924)

The Palatinate, like most of the left bank of the Rhine , had been occupied by French troops since December 1918 as a result of the First World War . Together with Emmerling, the bank director in Kaiserslautern, Jung founded the secret " Rheinisch-Pfälzischer Kampfbund ", which had set itself the goal of forcibly removing the French occupation and from 1923 planned and carried out violent actions against the Palatine separatism supported by France.

On April 12, 1923, he was expelled from the Palatinate by the French authorities, with effect until 1930. First he moved with his family to Mannheim and in the summer of 1923 to Feldafing , whereupon he settled as a lawyer in Munich. Here there were first meetings with Adolf Hitler and several negotiations about joining the NSDAP . In the end, Jung did not enter, as what separated outweighed the common.

In Munich, Jung met Walter Antz from Zweibrücken, who was also expelled from the Palatinate and who was responsible for defending against separatists in the Bavarian State Commissariat for the Palatinate. Antz commissioned him with the preparation, organization and management of an attack on Franz Josef Heinz , the leader of the separatists and president of the autonomous Palatinate . Antz took care of the financing himself. Hermann Ehrhardt provided the men for the campaign .

The attack only succeeded in the second attempt: On the evening of January 9, 1924, around 20 men who had come across the frozen Rhine, under Jung's command, stormed the dining room of the “Wittelsbacher Hof” in Speyer. They murdered Heinz, his two employees Nikolaus Fußhöller and Matthias Sand, and an uninvolved guest. Two assassins from the environment of the NSDAP died in the subsequent exchange of fire with supporters of Heinz. Jung himself was slightly injured by a graze shot in the neck and returned to Munich.

"Conservative Revolution" (1924 to 1932)

In 1924 he tried to be elected to the Reichstag for the German People's Party , but failed. Instead, Jung turned to political writing. With his book The Rule of the Inferior , an intellectual general accounting with democracy, parliamentarism and liberalism, he advanced to one of the most prominent spokesmen of the conservative revolution in 1926 .

On June 2, 1926, he founded the Young Academic Club in Munich with the aim of training the Munich student body in the “young conservative sense”. According to Hans-Joachim Schoeps , two general ideologems can be described among the young conservatives: “In addition to aggressive nationalism, their irreconcilable anti-parliamentarianism”.

Jung was involved in the German-style university ring and, according to Joachim Petzold , became one of its most avid and well-known speakers. As a source of political ideas and a mouthpiece for the political right, Jung was able to find supporters primarily in the student body and in heavy industry in the Rhineland. From 1929 he received 2,000 marks a month from the Ruhrlade for his journalistic and political activities.

In the summer of 1932 Jung proudly referred to his "services" and those of his intellectual companions for the political successes of the National Socialists:

“It is also certain that the ideas of the conservative revolution in the years 1919 to 1927 were shaped by individual circles and creative people, almost to the exclusion of the public, and fought through against the resistance of a sneering environment (...). The intellectual prerequisites for the German revolution were created outside of National Socialism. "

In the interests of a division of tasks, Jung declared the NSDAP to be the “People's Movement Unit” of the national camp. Jung was not a supporter of Adolf Hitler. Like many other representatives of the Conservative Revolution, he oriented himself towards Mussolini's fascism .

1933 to 1934

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After the National Socialists came to power on January 30, 1933, Jung successfully applied to the Conservative Vice-Chancellor of the coalition cabinet, Franz von Papen , as a political advisor and speechwriter.

On June 17, 1934, Papen gave Jung's speech to students in Marburg . In this speech, the Vice Chancellor confessed to Hitler's leadership and also affirmed the alliance between the conservative and the National Socialist revolution, but at the same time expressed massive criticism of the grievances of National Socialist rule: he claimed orderly growth instead of revolutionary conditions and endorsed collectivism in the economy and society as well as National Socialism - with emphasis on the socialist elements of the movement - a rejection. Papen demanded further the corporative reorganization after wilhelminischem model as an alternative model to the second revolution, as requested by the party left, and demanded the abolition of the NSDAP as a remnant of the party system. On the whole, the impression was suggested that National Socialism was only an ephemeral transition stage in the course of a pan-European transformation process.

Jung had intended to use this speech to set a beacon for the young conservative counter-revolution against National Socialism. His ideas, misunderstanding the realities, envisaged the imposition of a state of emergency by Reich President Paul von Hindenburg , on whom Papen exercised considerable influence, the formation of a directory including Hitler and Göring and the elimination of the Nazi radicals. The Reich Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels prevented the Marburg speech from being distributed nationwide by reading it out on the radio .

In view of the foreseeable death of Hindenburg, Jung and several other employees of von Papens (later referred to as Edgar-Jung-Kreis ) intended to implement their plans for the conservative revolution based on the supreme command of the Reich President over the Reichswehr . Hindenburg was supposed to be persuaded by Papen, who would have an audience with the Reich President on June 30, to arrange for the Reichswehr to intervene in the smoldering state crisis of 1934 in the manner of a coup.

Annoyed by the Marburg speech, Hitler gave Heinrich Himmler permission on June 25, 1934 to have Edgar Jung arrested. The Gestapo arrested him on the evening of the same day in Halensee , where Jung had been renting a furnished apartment for several months. A first intervention by Papen with Hitler in favor of his speechwriter on June 28th was unsuccessful: In his diary, the Nazi party ideologist Alfred Rosenberg noted : “The Führer said that he was Dr. Jung, the author of the incredible Papen speech [sic!], Had been arrested. - The vice-chancellor has just made inquiries as to whether the Fuehrer could see him today. Hitler laughs: 'He's coming because of his Dr. Young!' And lets refuse. ”When Papen intervened later, Hitler reassured him that Jung had been taken into protective custody for“ his own safety ” . He also alleged that the search of Jung's apartment uncovered incriminating material about treason Jung's relations with the Austrian government.

In the following days, the remaining employees of Papen tried to push ahead with the implementation of the joint coup plans against the Hitler government and the NSDAP: A visit by Papen to the Reich President's estate in East Prussia planned for June 30, 1934, was to be used to persuade Hindenburg to do so to declare the imperial state of emergency and to give the Reichswehr the order to proceed against the SA, SS and NSDAP. On the same day, Major General of the Reichswehr, Walter von Reichenau , who was close to the Nazis and who had learned of these intentions, informed the leaders of the SS, Himmler and Heydrich , with whom he had been politically allied for a long time, of these plans. Several witnesses to the events later suggested that this twist meant the death sentence for the imprisoned boy.

The exact circumstances of Jung Ende are not completely certain: Fritz Günther von Tschirschky states in his memoir that he met Jung again briefly on June 30 in the basement of Gestapo headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse . According to Seraphim, Jung was shot there on the same day as part of the wave of political cleansing known as the “ Roman coup” . On the other hand, other accounts state that Jung was transferred to the Oranienburg concentration camp and shot there on the night of July 1st. Jung's friend Edmund Forschbach expressly doubts this statement in his biography Jungs.

Afterlife

Edgar Jung's urn was picked up at the beginning of July by his friend Franz-Maria Liedig on behalf of Jung's family from a Gestapo urn delivery point set up in the former Prussian mansion. She was buried in the Munich forest cemetery.

In 1960, on behalf of Jung's son-in-law Berthold Spangenberg, a 2 meter high stone memorial column designed by the artist Hans Wimmer was placed on the grave. The column rests on a flat plinth that ends in a fluted truncated cone on which a bronze dove rests. The grave was finally abandoned in 1996. The memorial column was then taken to the Schleswig-Holstein State Museum at Gottorf Castle, where it is still located today. The original pigeon on the grave pillar was replaced by a cement cast, while the original bronze pigeon came into Jung's daughter's study at Bäumlstrasse 6 in Munich. After her death, the pigeon was placed on the family grave of the Spangenbergs.

Political and social ideas guys

The ideological development guys documented primarily in his main work , the rule of the inferior 1927, the learned in the second edition of 1930 a major overhaul. From now on the nation was no longer in the foreground of his thinking, but the people.

Although it is clearly “right” by today's standards, Jung rejected the idea of ​​the nation state founded by Richelieu . In a strong federalism that was able to assert itself against the central authority , he saw the natural continuation of the small German states , which in turn formed the opposite pole to the purely centralized French state model . In Jung's view, the internal federalism of the German regions among one another had to extend in the long term to an external federalism of the European nations, which should culminate in the establishment of a supranational European empire. Moeller van den Bruck's hatred of the West and “Westernism” - at that time a widespread sentiment of the conservative right - Jung expressly did not share.

At the beginning of the 1930s, Jung, in line with his concept of federalism, pushed for a solution to the problem of the Prussian-Germany dualism, which remained unsolved in 1919, as he saw this as a guarantee of eliminating the danger of harmful internal political conflicts in the future. As a means of resolving the Prussian / Reich antagonism, he had in mind the restoration of federal order in the north and west of the Reich. Jung justified his demand for a federal renewal of the Reich in particular with regard to foreign policy: In his view, the German ethnic groups that had come under the rule of other states after 1919 could only be reconciled with the majority peoples if the host states themselves adopted a federal system, would enable the foreign ethnic groups to maintain their independence. In Jung's opinion, this was only to be expected if the empire set a good example and became a real federal state. In line with the German ministers in the Prague government, Robert Mayr-Harting and Franz Spina, Jung saw the " Swissization " of Czechoslovakia as the only way to solve the Sudeten German problem peacefully.

In social terms, Jung insisted on strengthening the family as the core of society and supporting traditional roles. He sharply criticized phenomena such as the woman's “birth strike” and the refusal of many men to do military service .

Jung - although he is considered one of the intellectual trailblazers of National Socialism - was actually not able to gain much from National Socialist ideas: Hitler's practice, his power in the manner of a tribune, rose from his demand for the "dismantling" of society and its leadership by newly formed elites Supporting the “masses” is diametrically opposed. Jung rejected the racial cult of the National Socialists as an aberration and degeneration of the young conservative idea of ​​Volkstum: “If our ideas of Volkstum are confused with racial doctrine , biological naturalism , then Hitler can falsify everything that we young conservatives have created spiritually in recent years reverse into the opposite of its original meaning. "

Fonts

literature

Biographical sketches:

  • Hermann Graml : Vanguard of conservative resistance. The end of the circle around Edgar Jung. In: Hermann Graml (Hrsg.): Resistance in the Third Reich. Problems, events, shapes. Frankfurt am Main, 1994, ISBN 3596122368 , pp. 172-183.
  • Friedrich Graß : Edgar Julius Jung (1894-1934) . In: Kurt Baumann: Pfälzer Lebensbilder , Vol. 1 (= publications of the Palatinate Society for the Promotion of Science in Speyer, Vol. 48), Speyer 1964, pp. 320–348.
  • Karl-Martin Graß :  Jung, Edgar Julius. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , pp. 669-671 ( digitized version ).
  • Larry Eugene Jones : "Edgar Julius Jung: the Conservative Revolution in Theory and Practice", in: Central European History, 21 (2), 1988, pp. 142-174.
  • Joachim Knoll : Conservative Crisis Awareness at the End of the Weimar Republic. Edgar Julius Jung - a portrait of intellectual history . In: Deutsche Rundschau , 87/1961, pp. 930–940.

Memoir literature:

  • Edmund Forschbach : Edgar J. Jung. A Conservative Revolutionary June 30, 1934. 1984.
  • Jakob Jung: "A martyr of the 20th century". In the struggle for the freedom and greatness of his people. Dr. Edgar J. Jung's life's work. To the lasting memory of my unforgettable son. The father: study professor Jakob Jung , unpublished book manuscript written between 1934 and 1943, kept in the Bavarian main state archive.
  • Leopold Ziegler : Edgar Julius Jung: Monument and Legacy. Salzburg 1955.

Monographs:

  • Karl Martin Graß: Edgar Jung, Papenkreis and Röhmkrise 1933–34. 1966.
  • Helmut Jahnke: Conservative revolutionary between tradition and modernity. 1998.
  • Bernhard Jenschke: On the criticism of the conservative-revolutionary ideology in the Weimar Republic. Weltanschauung and politics with Edgar Julius Jung. Beck Verlag, 1971.
  • Gerhard graves, Matthias Spindler : The Palatinate Liberators. People's anger and state violence in the armed struggle against Palatinate separatism 1923/24. Pro Message, Ludwigshafen / Rhein 2005, ISBN 3-934845-24-X (including about the murder of Franz Josef Heinz and the storming of the Pirmasens district office in 1924).
  • Roshan Magub: Edgar Julius Jung, right-wing enemy of the Nazis: a political biography . Camden House, Rochester 2017, ISBN 978-1-57113-966-5 .
  • Michael Lee Mosley: Metaphysical revenge: The ideas and life of Edgar Julius Jung. Miami 1997.
  • Rainer Orth: “The official seat of the opposition” ?: Politics and state restructuring plans in the office of the Deputy Chancellor in the years 1933–1934 . Böhlau, Cologne 2016, ISBN 978-3-412-50555-4 .

Web links

Wikiquote: Edgar Julius Jung  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Edmund Forschbach: Edgar J. Jung. A Conservative Revolutionary June 30, 1934 , 1984, p. 44.
  2. ^ Friedrich Graß: Edgar Julius Jung (1894-1934) . 1964, p. 320.
  3. ↑ Gerhard Nestler u. a .: From the failure of democracy, The Palatinate at the end of the Weimar Republic . P. 346.
  4. ↑ Bloody attack in the Wittelsbacher Hof covered by government .
  5. ^ Website of the historians / local researchers Gerhard Gräber and Matthias Spindler
  6. ^ Wolfgang Kohlstruck: Edgar Jung - a martyr? ( Memento of the original from September 24, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.pfarrerblatt.de
  7. ↑ Susanne Meinl, National Socialists against Hitler , Siedler 2000, p. 84.
  8. ^ Wilhelm Kreutz, Karl Scherer (Ed.): The Palatinate under French occupation (1918 / 19-1930) . Contributions to the history of the Palatinate, vol. 15. District Association of the Palatinate, Kaiserslautern 1999, ISBN 3-927754-24-2 , p. 72 .
  9. ↑ Manfred Schoeps, The German Men's Club. A contribution to the history of young conservatism in the Weimar Republic , Phil. Diss. Erlangen-Nürnberg 1974, p. 12.
  10. ↑ Barbara Stambolis, The Myth of the Young Generation: A Contribution to the Political Culture of the Weimar Republic , Phil. Diss. Bochum 1982 1982, p. 64f
  11. ↑ Joachim Petzold, Conservative Theorists of German Fascism: Young Conservative Ideologists in the Weimar Republic as the intellectual trailblazers of the fascist dictatorship , Deutscher Verlag der Wissenschaften 1982, p. 152.
  12. ↑ Uwe Backes, Political Extremism in Democratic Constitutional States, Springer-Verlag 2013, p. 229.
  13. ↑ Daniel Morat: From action to serenity. Conservative thinking in Martin Heidegger, Ernst Jünger and Friedrich Georg Jünger, 1920-1960 , Wallstein Verlag 2007, p. 49.
  14. ↑ Martin Langebach, Michael Sturm: Places of Remembrance of the Extreme Right , Springer Verlag 2015, p. 110.
  15. ^ Edmund Forschbach: Edgar Jung . 1984, p. 122. The fact that the arrest was carried out by the Gestapo can be seen from the fact that Jung, before he had to leave his apartment, wrote the word "Gestapo" on the door of the medicine cabinet in the bathroom, as Forschbach claims to inform his friends of his whereabouts.
  16. ^ A b Hans-Günther Seraphim (Ed.): The political diary of Alfred Rosenberg. 1934/35 and 1939/40. Documentation . Munich 1964, p. 42.
  17. ^ Edmund Forschbach: Edgar Jung . P. 123.
  18. ^ Fritz Günther von Tschirschky: Memories of a high traitor . 1973.
  19. ^ Edmund Forschbach : Edgar Jung . 1984, p. 127. With a view to a Brockhaus entry in vol. 9 of the 1970 edition, which states Oranienburg as the place of death on July 1, Forschbach declares that he considers the information there to be incorrect.
  20. ^ Franz Schröther: What was mortal rests here: The Nymphenburger Friedhof in Munich - History and Biographies , 2004, p. 61f.
  21. ^ Kurt Sontheimer : Anti-democratic thinking in the Weimar Republic: the political ideas of German nationalism between 1918 and 1933 . Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1962, p. 190.
  22. ^ Edmund Forschbach: Edgar Jung . P. 17.
personal data
SURNAME Jung, Edgar Julius
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German politician
DATE OF BIRTH March 6, 1894
PLACE OF BIRTH Ludwigshafen am Rhein
DATE OF DEATH June 30, 1934 or July 1, 1934
Place of death uncertain: Berlin or Oranienburg