He passed his school leaving exams in 1924 and embarked on an extended period of university-level study at Tübingen, Heidelberg, Berlin and Breslau.
[2] In Czechoslovakia he supported himself as a languages teacher and worked for the magazine "Maß und Wert", which was being produced from Zürich by Thomas Mann who had also been exiled by the Nazis.
As a result of frontier changes agreed between the Soviet Union and her wartime allies, and following two years of intensive ethnic cleansing, Lower Silesia where he had been born and grown up was no longer German.
Between 1947 and 1949 he worked as a Referendary in the Berlin based German Organisation for Peoples' Education, before being appointed to the directorship of the Goethe-Schiller Archive in 1949 and of the Weimar Classics Foundation in 1950.
[2] During the early 1950s he combined these administrative roles with part-time teaching posts at Weimar and nearby Jena, also undertaking lecturing in German Studies elsewhere on a more ad hoc basis.
[1] He resigned from the Weimar job in 1953 and devoted himself to private research on classical German literature, also being employed as a visiting professor by Leipzig University.
[1] Gerhard Scholz, along with György Lukács (1885–1971) and the novelist Werner Krauss (1900–1976), was one of a handful of scholars who can be identified as a founders of a new German Marxist literary tradition.
He also had a considerable influence on members of a successor generation of literature scholars such as Hans-Günther Thalheim, Hedwig Voegt and Ursula Wertheim.