At age 29, Rausch was still working to find his musical voice. His early works show the eclectic variety of German influences one might expect of a music student living in Munich. Works, such as the Bläser Sextett (1929), the Tragische Ouvertüre, (1935) and the Sinfonie in Drei Satzen (1936), show formative signs of his distinctive language to come but lack the economy and technical proficiency that define his mature compositional style. Those traits came fully formed in his 1937 Klavierstück. Sadly, he was conscripted into the war effort that same year and eventually landed in a P.O.W. camp in Wooler, Northumberland, England. His newly found voice was silenced until his release nine years later in 1946.