[4] He came into contact with socialist groups and in 1918 himself joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party (Sozialdemokratische Arbeiterpartei Deutschösterreichs / SDAP)[4]—as it was known till 1933.
In the revolutionary ferment that followed national military defeat he drew close, politically, to the group around Josef Frey (who later became a Communist Party official).
[2] In Berlin, he was a frequent visitor to the Romanisches Café where he got to know politically like-minded left-wing writers including Egon Kisch and Anton Kuh.
Another member of the circle was Stefan Großmann, who was editor of a weekly cross-party political journal called Das Tage-Buch (literally: "The Diary") for which Frei contributed material.
In the winter of 1923/24, with widespread destitution in Germany threatening to erupt into street violence, the German Communist Party was banned, and the left-wing "ABC Press Agency" came under close police scrutiny.
Although not a mass-market publication, within the German speaking world, Weltbühne enjoyed a far higher profile with the politically aware than the newspapers and magazines for which Frei had been writing up till now.
[4] In 1928, he undertook a reporting visit to the Soviet Union, which formed the basis for a volume entitled "In the Country of the Red Power" ("Im Lande der roten Macht"), published in 1929.
Münzenberg was setting up "Berlin am Morgen" a new daily newspaper, providing a Communist perspective and targeting a mass readership, and he offered Frei the job of managing editor.
His work was published in various antifascist newspapers and journals such as "Neue Deutsche Blätter" (literally: "New German pages") and "Nouvelle d‘Autriche" ("News of Austria").
It was also in 1936 that he became a co-editor for the "News of Germany" press agency, also serving as secretary for the Paris-based Protection League for German Authors abroad ("Schutzverband deutscher Schriftsteller im Ausland").
[9] In June, the French authorities (like the British) responded to events by arresting large numbers of political refugees who had fled to Paris a few years earlier in order to escape the Nazis.
[2] It was only when he was taken to a huge room in a nearby police station that was filled with fellow German exiles from Nazism that Frei appreciated the colossal scale of the mass arrest in progress.
Supported by contacts in the international writers' associations, and with help from Gilberto Bosques, the heroic Mexican consul in Marseilles,[11] Bruno Frei succeeded in obtaining release and a passage to Mexico,[4] travelling there via Trinidad and the USA.
In 1943, he joined the exiled Austrian Communist Party and co-founded with Leo Katz (writer) [de] another publication, "Austria Libre".
Together with Ernst Fischer und Viktor Matejka he launched the Communist oriented journal Wiener Tagebuch, serving as its editor in chief from 1960 till 1964.
He subsequently earned a doctorate in physics from North Carolina, acquired US citizenship in 1944, and appeared all set for a distinguished career as a nuclear physicist.
He then fell foul of McCarthyism, however, and after robustly refusing to recant his socialist beliefs, was stripped of his university fellowship following a (briefly) high-profile hearing before the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy.