During the turbulent postwar years Eger's academic work became, for him, a lesser priority than his administrative responsibilities at the university and, equally notable in retrospect, his political activities. Contemporary legal challenges now took precedence over Roman law. That was apparent both from the speeches he delivered as university rector and the way in which his time was taken up with organisation and mediation rather than research work. For the new republican government his position as a resolutely unreformed nationalist placed him firmly beyond the pale. Shortly after the end of the war he set up a in Gießen, recruited from the ranks of disillusioned front-line survivors, now otherwise unemployed. The group planned to participate in the 1920 Kapp Putsch. The government's rapid suppression of the Putsch made this impossible, but it had served to highlight and intensify the political polarisation between traditionalists who saw the new republican government as a foreign imposition, and the large numbers of left wingers from the working and intellectual classes who thought that Germany's best hope now lay with a rerun, on Germany soil, of the still rapidly unfolding October Revolution in the Soviet Union.