He successfully undertook his school final exams in 1943 and in 1943/44 performed substitute national service by working as a teacher in Carinthia.
He also undertook a period of study involving German literature, history pedagogy and philosophy at Freiburg university[1] in the south-west of the country, where his teachers included Walter Rehm and Martin Heidegger.
In 1948 he relocated the short distance to Leipzig where till 1951 he resumed his university level education, at the same time working as a teacher at one of the Workers' and Farmers' Colleges [de] that the authorities had set up in what had been, since May 1945, administered as the Soviet occupation zone in what had been Germany.
Work on the project, which dealt with German writers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would last till 1979, although the volumes of the Encyclopaedia started to appear in 1973.
Although Thalheim's career embraced a wide spectrum of literary research, his speciality remained the eighteenth century, and in particular the Sturm und Drang phase of the German classicist movement.
His literary approach was enriched by insights into historical context: his linguistic and stylistic analyses included reflections on the political and social contradictions of the periods in which works were created.