Edgar Julius Jung

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. 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.

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