He became a disciple of von Wartburg and one of his principal collaborators on his Französisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch (French Etymological Dictionary), which reached twenty-five volumes.
Thus, he could be employed as a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin in the German Democratic Republic, following von Wartburg as Head of Romance Linguistics and Philology, where he remained until 1957.
(He retained his post as director of the Romance Languages Institute of the Academy of Sciences in East Berlin until 1962.)
Baldinger's productivity was enormous: a tribute collection, published to mark his seventieth birthday, included 70 monographs, 261 articles and 1,890 reviews.
The amazing number of reviews is partly explained by the fact that Baldinger had headed the Zeischrift für romanische Philologie, one of the most prestigious journals in Romance studies, since 1958.