Having had a number of pieces published while he was a student, he went into journalism and worked for newspapers and magazines for the rest of his life, at first in Budapest and in Vienna as a travel writer of the "Neue Freie Presse" newspaper. In 1877 he married Ottilie Benedikt, a relative of editor Moriz Benedikt. From 1886 he lived in Berlin, capital of the German Empire. Franzos had acclaimed the 1871 German unification under Prussian leadership and advocated a Greater Germany including the Austrian territories. However, the move to the German capital was caused as much by the greater opportunities for publishing there as by his "Germanic" tendencies. Indeed, the increasing virulence of antisemitism in Germany meant that later on he had difficulty placing pieces which were felt to be too pro-Jewish—which was often another way of saying "not sufficiently anti-Jewish".