He earned his doctorate in 1914 with a thesis entitled Studien zur Geschichte der Gotras and directed by Heinrich Lüders.

[1] In 1938, he was dismissed by the Nazis based on the fact that his Christian wife was the great-great-granddaughter of a Jewish Austrian, and he emigrated to England, where between 1939 and 1940 he taught at Balliol College, Oxford.

In 1940 he moved to New Rochelle, New York, where he eventually accepted a visiting lecturer position in philosophy at Columbia University.

But with the cult of the Great Goddess in late Hinduism, the archaic heritage of sensual earth-bound rites rises once again overwhelmingly to the zenith.

Zimmer strove to understand both Eastern and Western ideas from Universal conceptions lying at the root of spiritual and psychological developments everywhere.

Her younger brother, Raimund von Hofmannsthal, was twice married, first to American heiress Ava Alice Muriel Astor (whose daughter from a later marriage eventually married Zimmer's son) and Lady Elizabeth Paget (a daughter Charles Paget, 6th Marquess of Anglesey).

In 1932, his wife's widowed mother, Gerty von Hofmannsthal bought Schloss Prielau in Zell am See and began restoring the castle.

The Heinrich Zimmer Chair for Indian Philosophy and Intellectual History is awarded by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR) in New Delhi and is based both at the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" and at the South Asia Institute at Heidelberg University.