manner but lacked both rhetorical skill and the ability to excite his listeners with a rousing speech. Although he was often described to the outside world as a "Prussian iceberg", his political pragmatism was always guided by a deep humanist conviction of people's right to freedom and political equality. In the SPD In 1888, at the age of 16, Braun became involved with the SPD, which had been banned under the Anti-Socialist Laws of German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Influenced by anarcho-syndicalism – a view that revolutionary industrial unionism or syndicalism was a way for workers to gain control of a capitalist economy – he initially belonged to the party's left wing. He was chairman of the Königsberg Workers' Election Association, the local party's legal front, and later producer, editor and printer of various Social Democratic periodicals. In a region where several attempts by the SPD to establish a party newspaper had failed, Braun successfully founded the , later the , with no start-up capital, minimal support from party leadership and under difficult sales conditions in a rural area dominated by large-scale agriculture. During the period he was particularly involved with the agricultural workers of East Prussia, and as a result he became an expert on agricultural policy within the SPD as well as a lifelong opponent of the landed Junkers of East Elbia, the area of Germany to the east of the Elbe river. In a later work, ('The East Elbian Rural Proletariat'), he wrote in his unwieldy prose:The exploited, disenfranchised East Elbian rural population is the pedestal on which the preponderant share of the power of the East Elbian Junkers rests and, propped on it, drives the policies of robbery that starve and disenfranchise the people. But the more the pedestal succeeds in spreading Social Democratic principles among the population groups that form it, the more rotten it must become.Braun was also co-founder of the German Agricultural Workers' Union, chairman of the local health insurance fund and a member of the Königsberg City Council. In 1892 Braun received a two month prison sentence for lèse-majesté. In November 1903 prosecutors accused him of exporting anarchist writings to Russia that called for the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II. He was arrested, and in 1904 proceedings were instituted against him and eight other Social Democrats for high treason. Braun spent over five months in pretrial detention awaiting what came to be