For a short period he worked as a legal apprentice, but his family's prosperous circumstance soon afforded him the means to live independently from his inheritance.
He worked for decades on a comprehensive philosophical opus, embracing Immanuel Kant and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s ideas in particular, but never completed it.
In his last will, Schnitzler appointed Kaufmann, in addition to the Austrian author, Richard Beer-Hofmann, as advisor to his son, Heinrich, in all issues regarding his literary legacy.
[6] Impoverished, due to World War I, Kaufmann and his younger sister, Malwine, moved from Vienna to Mariazell in 1918, and then to Altaussee in 1920, because life in the countryside was less expensive.
Beginning in 1923, Kaufmann spent the next ten or so years as a guest of the Viennese industrialist, Wilhelm von Gutmann, in the castle of Würting, near Lambach, in Upper-Austria, before returning to Vienna.
(For a number of years, Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi, the founder of the Paneuropean Union, also enjoyed the hospitality of the Gutmann-family at the castle of Würting.)