Any student could take any lecture course, and Popper sampled lectures in history, literature, psychology, and philosophy before concentrating on physics and mathematics. In these fields he had excellent, if remote and autocratic, teachers: Hans Thirring, Wilhelm Wirtinger, Philipp Furtwängler, and Hans Hahn.
Popper's father lost much of his savings in the inflation brought on by World War I. For a time Popper was employed as a laborer but found the work too hard; he then tried his hand at cabinetmaking but was distracted by the intellectual problems with which he was wrestling. In 1919 he was a volunteer in the clinic of the psychologist Alfred Adler; he was also a social worker dealing with neglected children.
In the winter of 1919-1920 Popper moved out of his parents' home and into an abandoned military hospital that had been converted into a primitive students' home and joined socialist groups seeking political change. For a time he thought of himself as a communist, but an event that he later described as one of the most important in his life caused him to become critical of Marxism and led years later to the writing of The Open Society and Its Enemies: the communists organized a demonstration to free some of their comrades who were being held in a police station in Vienna; the police opened fire, and some of the demonstrators were killed.
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