1974–1975, he received a Ph.D. grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) for the University of Munich; 1984–1986, a scholarship from the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation at the Max-Planck-Institute for History in Göttingen.
From 2009 he was an associate fellow at and a regular visitor to the International Research Centre “Work and Human Lifecycle in Global History” at Humboldt-University Berlin.
His basic interests were in the long-term change of these phenomena from early modern times until the present in a European comparative perspective.
As many of these interests were closely related to social sciences and cultural studies, Josef Ehmer was strongly committed to interdisciplinary cooperation.
His parents, Maria (1910–1992) and Josef (1905–1975), were in the Communist resistance movement against Austro-Fascism and National Socialism, and experienced severe persecution.
[2] In the late 1980s, he belonged to a group of reformers within the KPÖ who tried “to overcome Stalinist structures and traditions” and to replace the party with a “new leftist formation”.