Edgar Julius Jung is most readily recognized as a casualty of Adolf Hitler's “blood purge” of June 30, 1934, and as one of the principal architects of the anti-Hitler conspiracy that eventually cost him his life. Jung was also the author of Die Herrschaft der Minderwertigen (1927), a book widely acclaimed as one of the two or three most important texts of the neoconservative movement in the Weimar Republic. Jung has always been a controversial figure in the history of the German Right, criticized as often for his cupidity and political naiveté as he is applauded for his trenchant diagnosis of National Socialism and for the courage with which he tried to undo an evil for which felt personally responsible. Whatever one may think of him, Jung remains a figure of critical importance on the German Right, one who continues to fascinate historians and political theorists especially intrigued by the relationship between his ideas and his actions.

Roshan Magub does an excellent job of sorting through all the confusion surrounding Jung's political career in this insightful and richly informative political biography of the young conservative activist. Though obviously fascinated by the subject of her study, Magub is careful to avoid the tendency toward hagiography that is typical of Jung's admirers; she is especially sensitive to the flaws of his personality that often undercut his effectiveness as a political activist. Well aware that Jung had a penchant for embellishing his role in the events in which he took part, she is careful to check, wherever possible, his account of those events against the historical record. Magub also reminds us that Jung, before earning a reputation as one of Weimar's most prolific and penetrating neoconservative critics, had been an activist who not only sought to legitimate himself as a member of the so-called front generation, but who also helped create the myth of the “front experience”—though with only limited personal experience of the front. Above all else, Jung was an impassioned nationalist who deeply resented the way French occupation authorities had sown the seeds of separatism in his native Palatinate. It was precisely this that led him to help organize and carry out the February 1924 assassination of Franz Josef Heinz-Orbis, the Palatine separatist who briefly led the government of the “Autonomous Republic of the Palatinate” during the French occupation of the Rhine. This is all described in Magub's book with great color and a real flair for detail.

Jung was, as Magub correctly argues, distrustful of Hitler from the very beginning, and he carefully distanced himself from the Hitler fascination that characterized the less perceptive of his peers on the German Right. Jung's fears of National Socialism and its vision of a “Third Reich” mounted with the movement's sudden emergence as a major force in German politics at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s. Jung nevertheless seems to have deluded himself into thinking that he could offer Germany's younger generation an alternative to Hitler and the empty promises of National Socialism. It was in this regard that he attracted the interest and support of some of Germany's most important and influential industrial leaders, most notably Paul Reusch, chairman of the board of directors of the Gutehoffnungshütte in Oberhausen. But Jung's efforts to develop a broad base of political support for his neoconservative agenda were singularly unsuccessful—first among the self-styled young conservatives who seceded from the Deutschnationale Volkspartei (German National German Workers’ Party) in 1929-1930, and later with the Konservative Kampfgemeinschaft (Conservative Combat Group) of 1931 and early 1932.

At the heart of Jung's frustration lay his unabashed elitism and his undisguised disdain for the institutions and practices of parliamentary democracy. With the formation of Franz von Papen's cabinet in the early summer of 1932, Jung sought to attach his political star to that of the new chancellor, but he was repeatedly blocked by hardline conservatives in the Papen camp suspicious of Jung's brand of revolutionary conservatism. As a result, it was not until February 1933 that Jung was able to develop a working relationship with Papen, by then vice chancellor in the Hitler cabinet. Jung became Papen's speechwriter for the next eighteen months, right up to and including Papen's famous Marburg speech of June 17, 1934, which triggered the series of events that ended in Jung's death.

Magub's research is sound and thorough. Her analysis of Jung's political activities is based on the judicious use of primary sources, including Jung's personal papers, located in the Bavarian state archive in Munich, and his extensive correspondence with Rudolf Pechel, editor of the Deutsche Rundschau. The real strength of her research lies in the period before 1932. Her work on the last three years of Jung's life was severely hampered by his wife's destuction of much of her husband's private correspondence following his arrest by the Gestapo on June 28, 1934. Only forty-three volumes of what must have been a much larger body of material have survived. As a result, Magub was not able to reconstruct the full range of Jung's political activities in the last years of the Weimar Republic and the first eighteen months of the Third Reich. In this respect, it is unfortunate that she was unable to use the private papers of Fritz Klein, Sr., editor of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and a fellow young conservative. Klein's papers include two volumes of correspondence between Jung and Pechel from 1926 to February 1933, including a twelve-page letter on Jung's exclusion from a leadership role in the Bavarian campaign for Paul von Hindenburg's reelection as Reich president in 1932. They also contain considerable material from August to December 1932 that makes it possible to reconstruct Jung's relationship with Papen in a way materially different from the one Magub offers in her book. (Klein's papers were unavailable from the time of his son's death in 2011 until its transfer to the archives of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, where it is now accessible online.) By the same token, Magub was not able to turn up much in the way of new material on Jung's role in the conspiracy that led to his death, in large part for the reasons already mentioned. (A recent study by Rainer Orth, “Der Amtsstiz der Opposition”? Politik und Staatsumbaupläne im Büro des Stellvertreters des Reichskanzlers in den Jahren 1933-1934 [2016], brings to bear new material and information on Jung's role in the events that triggered the Röhm blood purge in the summer of 1934.) This is nevertheless a good book well worth reading. It is a careful and judicious account of Jung's short life that sheds important new light on the career of one of the most enigmatic figures on the German Right during this period. A self-proclaimed “conservative revolutionary,” Jung found it difficult to translate his ideas into political practice, a dilemma he shared with many of his contemporaries.