 He joined the Austrian Social Democratic Party in 1913 and served in the Austrian Army in World War I, where he was badly wounded.After World War I he started to work as a journalist for a German language Social-Democratic newspaper in Czechoslovakia.In 1929 he was elected as a member of the Parliament of Czechoslovakia in Prague representing the German Social Democratic Workers Party in the Czechoslovak Republic, of which he became the chairman in 1938.