[7] Between September 1921 and April 1922, Höfler was a guest student at Lund University in Sweden, where he studied modern Scandinavian languages and Nordic philology.

[8] He also studied at Kiel (under Andreas Heusler), Marburg, Basel, and completed his PhD at the University of Vienna in 1926 with the dissertation Altnordische Lehnwortstudien, which examined loanwords in Old Norse.

[3] Höfler's scholarly interests encompassed a wide array of intellectual disciplines that included history, philology, religion, cultural morphology, folklore studies, and historical linguistics.

[3] At Uppsala, Höfler befriended the fellow philologists Stig Wikander and Georges Dumézil, who all remained lifelong friends and intellectual collaborators.

[10] He completed his habilitation at the University of Vienna in 1931 with the dissertation Kultische Geheimbünde der Germanen, which examined secret societies of the early Germanic peoples.

[3] Much like his appointment at Kiel, Wüst and Himmler made the necessary political maneuvers on Höfler's behalf to ensure he obtained his prestigious post at Munich.

A talented and highly popular teacher, Höfler taught and supervised a generation of very influential scholars at Vienna, including Helmut Birkhan, Hermann Reichert, Peter Wiesinger, Erika Kartschoke, Edith Marold, Klaus Düwel, Waltraud Hunke and Wolfgang Lange.

Highly sociable, Höfler played an important role at the university as a host of seminaries and parties at his vineyard, and arranged memorable excursions to Ravenna and other places, which were attended by his students and fellow professors and friends, such as Richard Wolfram and Eberhard Kranzmayer.

[3] After his retirement, Höfler worked on refining his earlier theories, and authored extensive studies on Dietrich von Bern and Siegfried, the two most important characters in Medieval German literature.

He argued that Siegfried was derived from the Germanic chieftain Arminius, who defeated the Roman army in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

[19] On the other hand, Julia Zernack [de] argues that Höfler’s work is "an example of the self-subjugation of Germanic scholarship to völkisch-nationalistic and National Socialistic ideologies.