He held the chair of Modern Political and Social History at the University of Münster.
After being severely wounded in World War II he took up his studies (history and German literature) at the University of Munich, earning his Ph.D. in 1944.
He earned his qualification to teach as a professor in 1950 with a thesis called “The Image of Europe and the European Thought – Contributions to the German History of Ideas”.
Due to the preponderance of structural history in the German scientific community during the post war age, his impact on colleagues and students was rather small.
This outsider position was to change from the beginning of the early Nineties, when historians became more and more sensible to universal history as well as to the relevance of personality in history, such in the case of the German nobility from the end of the ancien régime to the end of middle European monarchies in 1918, which was one of Gollwitzer's basic scientific aims.