"Hope lives in the branches of the Caiba" ("Hoffnung lebt in den Zweigen der Caiba"), his first full volume of poetry, was published in 1954. After completing his formal studies in 1956 he became a freelance author and scriptwriter. In Autumn 1956 he was participating in the so-called "Thursday circle" ("Donnerstag-Kreis") of young artists and intellectuals that came together following the violent suppression of the Hungarian uprising. In 1957 the authorities determined that verse written by Kahlau had been critical of the fraternal invasion of Hungary. He had already stirred serious controversy a couple of months before the Soviet tanks rolled into Budapest with a speech delivered in June 1956 to a Congress of Young Artists at Karl-Marx-Stadt (as Chemnitz was then known). He condemned "what he called the fascist methods used by the supposedly anti-fascist authorities". He decried "what he saw as the petty bourgeois attitudes of many functionaries and workers and proclaimed that it was young writers ... answerable only to their own conscience, who [should] shape the future of socialism in Germany". He advocated "thoroughgoing deStalinization and complete transparency" at the level of the national leadership. It was not the only speech delivered at that congress that was, by the standards of an older generation that had learned not to speak out of turn, critical of the authorities, but it seems to have been the most outspoken.