[1] Asinger grew up with an older brother and two sisters in Lower Austria, as son of the head of a paper and cardboard factory.

During the eight years of his deportation, he observed that the reaction of ketones or aldehydes, Sulfur or hydrogen sulphide together with ammonia or amines led to various nitrogen- and sulfur-containing heterocycles.

In his spare time Asinger began to write on the monographs Chemie und Technologie der Paraffine (Chemistry and Technology of paraffins) and Chemie und Technologie der Monoolefine (Chemistry and Technology of monoolefins), which were published later in 1956 and 1957 in the Akademie-Verlag, East Berlin.

Asinger encouraged H. G. O. Becker and other senior assistants to write the Organikum, a workbook for the basic training in organic chemistry which is popular to this day (total circulation: nearly 400 000).

In 1959 he left East Germany as a citizen of Austria and took a position at the RWTH Aachen, where he became head of the Institute for Technical Chemistry and Petrochemistry.

Well-known students of Asinger are in example Heribert Offermanns, a longtime board member of the Degussa AG, Egon Fanghänel, professor of organic chemistry at the Technical University Merseburg and then at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, and Karl Gewald, who is best known for the development of the Gewald reaction and his work in the field of thiophenes and heterocycles.