After an interlude of 10 months in an Eastern German jail for the possession of Western intellectual magazines, Bierwisch was able to join in 1956 the new doctoral college on linguistic structuralism to Humboldt University in East Berlin under the leadership of Wolfgang Steinitz, completing his PhD dissertation in 1961.
This would cause issues during Bierwisch's later PhD writing phase, which were resolved by Wolfgang Steinitz as secondary reader taking over primary supervisory responsibilities., as a more traditional structuralist, failed to see the relevance of cognitive processes in linguistic analysis, which would, for a while, become the forté of the budding field of generative linguistics.
This would cause issues during Bierwisch's later PhD writing phase, which were resolved by Wolfgang Steinitz as secondary reader taking over primary supervisory responsibilities.
In the early 1960s he may have been one of the first on the continent to develop structuralist grammar into a mentalistic approach, influenced by Chomsky's Syntactic Structures.
[2] It is worth noting that Bierwisch's considered his research groups, which he led in GDR times at the (East) Berlin Academy of Sciences, in the 1960s/early 1970s for Structural Grammar (disbanded by the GDR regime in 1973), and in the 1980s/1990s for Cognitive Linguistics, as continuation of structural linguistics, combined with a mentalistic perspective.