It was in Stuttgart that in 1910 he joined both the Social Democratic Party ("Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands" / SPD) and the Metal Workers' Union ("Deutscher Metallarbeiter-Verband" / DMV).
[1] In 1921 he was taken to Berlin by Jacob Walcher who appointed him as trades union editor team for Die Rote Fahne ("The Red Flag"), the leading party newspaper at the time.
During 1922/23 his work for Die Rote Fahne was interrupted when he represented the German party on the Moscow based executive of the Red International of Labor Unions ("Красный интернационал профсоюзов" / RILU).
The most prominent of the doubters was Leon Trotsky, and the most damning (and, as the years progressed, dangerous) condemnation that a comrade could receive from the Stalinist faction was to be described as a Trotskyite.
It was only after he had threatened the congress organiser, Osip Piatnitsky, that he would personally visit the German ambassador in order to obtain/recover his passport that he was permitted to return home to Germany.
[4] Largely as a result of the sustained surge in support for right-wing populism, there was a growing belief among thoughtful left-wing politicians that the Nazis would only be kept out of power if the left could present a united front.
Following his expulsion he lived, between November 1933 and March 1934, in Brussels where he was a member of the de facto SAPD leadership team in exile.
[5] During the closing years of the war Enderle and Brandt took a lead in the SAPD members' decision to join or rejoin the Social Democrats at the end of 1944.
August Enderle's first work was as "trades union editor" with the Weser-Kurier (daily newspaper), a new publication of which his wife was a co-founder.
[6] Less than two years later, in April 1947, he became editor in chief of "Bund", the Cologne based Trade Union Confederation newspaper for the British zone.
During the second half of 1945 Wilhelm Pieck, a senior German politician recently "parachuted" by Moscow into the Soviet occupation zone as part of what turned out to be a well planned "nation building" project, thought it worth his while personally to try and persuade August and Luise Enderle to rejoin the Communist Party: the Enderle's rejected that idea, however.
During the immediate postwar period August Enderle also participated in the activities of the Bremen-based Struggle against Fascism Association (Kampfgemeinschaft gegen den Faschismus / KGF), founded on 3 May 1945 and widely seen, at least in retrospect, as a front organisation of the Communist Party.
[2] The mourners at his funeral included Willy Brandt, his close comrade during their Stockholm exile and by this time a leading figure in the SPD and the Mayor of West Berlin.