After moving to Berlin, he and his brother became involved with the nationalist magazine Widerstand and the people around it such as Friedrich Hielscher and Ernst Niekisch.

[1] In 1926, he published a national revolutionary manifesto, Der Aufmarsch des Nationalismus, where he praised the virility of an envisioned revolutionary state in the following terms: "Let thousands, nay millions, die; what meaning have these rivers of blood in comparison with a state, into which flow all the disquiet and longing of the German being!

"[2] His stance against National Socialism is explicit in the poem "Der Mohn", published in the collection Gedichte (1934), and he was interrogated by the Gestapo because of it.

Important early influences on his thinking and writing had included Jean Paul, Christian Dietrich Grabbe, Georg Trakl, David Hume and Oswald Spengler.

Other influences included the poetry of ancient Greece, Icelandic sagas, the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, Eduard Mörike, Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff and Charles Baudelaire, his brother Ernst, Martin Heidegger, Paul Yorck von Wartenburg and Rudolf Kassner.