After a rapid ascent as one of the leading thinkers of the party, Lukács became more involved in day-to-day politics: after the revolution in 1919, he first served as a deputy commissar and then as commissar of public education in Béla Kun’s government. Later, when war broke out, he served as a political commissar in the Hungarian Red Army (in this position, he also ordered the execution of several soldiers, see Kadarkay 1991: 223). After the communist government was defeated, Lukács fled to Vienna at the end of 1919 where he married his second wife, Gertrud Bortstieber. Being in charge of coordinating the clandestine activities of the exiled communist party, he remained under constant threat of expulsion to Hungary. For this reason, after Lukács was arrested, in November 1919 an appeal (“Save Georg Lukács”) appeared in a Berlin newspaper signed by many intellectuals—among them Heinrich and Thomas Mann.