immediately after both the First and Second World Wars. With them he founded the association ('Future') as a school for Viennese workers that was the nucleus for Austromarxism. He attracted attention when in 1907, at only 26 years old, he submitted the 600-page work ('The Nationality Question and Social Democracy'). In it he attempted to apply the principles of cultural autonomy to find a constructive solution to the problem of nationality, which was particularly important to the Austro-Hungarian Empire because of its many nationalities. Political career Empire and World War I (1907–1918) Member of Parliament In the 1907 legislative election, the House of Deputies () of the Imperial Council () was elected for the first time under universal and equal male suffrage. The SDAP, which had been represented in Parliament for the first time in 1897 with 14 deputies, won 87 seats, the second strongest showing behind the conservative Christian Social Party. Otto Bauer entered the House of Deputies in the 1907 election and at the request of party leader Victor Adler became secretary of the Club of Social Democratic Deputies in the Reichsrat. In the years before World War I, Adler and the Social Democrats generally supported the existing state order. In 1907 Bauer co-founded and until 1914 was editor of the Social Democratic monthly Der Kampf ('The Struggle'), of which he remained co-editor until 1934. From 1912 to 1914 he was also a member of the editorial board of the daily Arbeiter-Zeitung ('Workers' Newspaper'), the party's central journalistic voice. During his career as a journalist, Bauer wrote some 4,000 newspaper articles, and among the Social Democrats he proved himself to be an impressive speaker and convincing debater. The historian Friedrich Heer spoke of Bauer's "marriage of German and Jewish pathos". In 1914 Bauer met and fell in love with Helene Landau, a married academic and journalist who was ten years his senior. After she divorced her husband in 1920, the two were married in the Stadttempel, Vienna's main synagogue; a civil marriage was not legally possible at the time. War service and captivity In August 1914, at the beginning of World War I, Bauer was drafted as a reserve lieutenant of infantry. He took part as a platoon commander in the heavy fighting at Grodek (now Horodok, Ukraine), saved his company from being wiped out at the battle of Szysaki, for which he was awarded the Military Cross