Edgar Julius Jung

Edgar Julius Jung (March 6, 1894 – July 1, 1934) was a German lawyer born in Ludwigshafen, in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. He 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. At the onset of World War I, 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. Expelled by the French authorities, Jung move 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 von Papen at the University of Marburg. The speech articulated the conservative establishment's criticism of the violence of National Socialism. Jung was murdered by the SS during the Night of the Long Knives. His body was found dumped in a ditch near the town of Oranienburg near Berlin on July 1.

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