During World War I, he was introduced to Marxist ideology and studied in Vienna, Munich, and Heidelberg after the war. He later developed a more and more pragmatic attitude and became a social democrat. He started to work as an editor in Hamburg and until 1930 as a foreign correspondent for the social-democratic newspaper "Forward" in London. In this period, he wrote his first book, "Portrait of the British Labour Party", which became a bestseller and he made first contact with Leopold Kohr, a young journalist and economist from Salzburg, later author of "The Breakdown of Nations".