In 1908 he took a job teaching theology at the Queen Carola Secondary School in Leipzig, also working at the university from where, in 1917, he received his professorship.

The institution's objective was not to be maximize profits, but rather to use any revenue surpluses to protect favourable terms for LKG members in the front-line of business activity in the region.

He nevertheless held on to a position as a canon at Meißen and as a committee chairman with the German Bible Society, and these posts afforded him opportunities to continue with his public criticisms of the Nazi regime.

Hickmann was politically engaged from 1919, when he joined the German People's Party (DVP / Deutsche Volkspartei), for which in September 1922 he was elected to the Regional Assembly in Dresden.

The future for Germany looked very uncertain and very bleak, but there was a general assumption that at some stage the foreign armies would go home and what remained would become a single country.

The one-party state of the Nazis would be replaced by some for of multi-party democracy not totally dissimilar from the pre-Nazi system that Hitler, at a party conference back in 1929 in had disparagingly dismissed as the "Weimar Republic".

[3] In December 1945 he joined the CDU leadership team for the entire Soviet occupation zone, between 1947 and 1948 serving as acting chairman.

[2] From 1948 till January 1950 he held office as the Vice-Chairman of the CDU (East) in what was by now increasingly seen as a separate Germany, the German Democratic Republic.

[2] At a meeting of the People's Council held in East Berlin on 3 August 1948 with the single agenda item, "Guidelines for the constitution of the German Democratic Republic", Hickmann's was the only voice raised against the consensual mood of the meeting: Members of the People's council were uneasily startled by an unprecedented statement of dissent, but Hickmann persisted, implicitly pointing out that (apart from a couple of representative Communist party members from West Germany) the assembled delegates were in no position to mandate any constitutional arrangements except in that part of Germany where they were backed by the Soviet army: Hickmann also held political office during this period on a regional level, elected to a newly recreated Regional assembly for Saxony in 1946.

He questioned the leading role of the SED, defended the private sector economy and warned strongly against the separation of the German Democratic Republic from West Germany.

[14] On 23 January 1950 the SED faction in the Dresden regional assembly where Hickmann had delivered his trenchant speech earlier in the month ranted at the CDU members with the words "Hängt sie auf, die Sau!"

The Regional assembly of Saxony, along with other similar institutions in other parts of East Germany, was dissolved in July 1952 (but effectively restored in 1992).