Early Life
Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer was born as the son of the Catholic land owner and member of the Upper Austrian parliament Julius Wertheimer in Ranshofen near Braunau. His family had Jewish roots and so they fled Austria in 1938 because of the growing threat of the Nazi government.
During the first World War he got introduced to Marxist ideology and studied in Vienna, Munich and Heidelberg after the war. He later developed a more and more pragmatic mental attitude and changed into a social democrat. He started to work as an editor in Hamburg and until 1930 as a foreign correspondent for the social-democratic news paper Forward in London. In this period he wrote his first book Portrait of the British Labour Party that became a bestseller, and he made first contact with Leopold Kohr, a young journalist and economist from Salzburg, later author of The Breakdown of Nations.
His book raised the awareness of the British government, who had a big influence on the League of Nations. Because of that he got the chance to work as diplomat and supervisor of the League of Nations for 10 years in Geneva, beginning in 1930.
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