During the years of the German republic he embarked on a parallel career in politics, serving as a member of the Reichstag (parliament) between 1920 and 1928, and representing the centre-left DDP (party).
[10][11] While at Munich he followed his father's example in joining the "Turnerschaft Munichia", a venerable student fraternity, tracing its roots back to the university gymnastics clubs of former decades.
[2][14] In 1895 he received his Habilitation degree in "General History", based on a study of the first ten years of the rule of Duke Albrecht V in Bavaria, supervised this time by Karl Lamprecht.
He was known to be unsympathetic to the precepts of National Socialism, and during the summer 1933 he resigned from the university and retired to the village of Gräfelfing, on the western side of Munich, where he had had a house built.
It never gained significant traction with voters, but dis attract support a number of formidable intellectuals keen to reconcile its conflicting aspirations.
In the process he formed deep political and personal friendships with fellow contributors including, most significantly, Theodor Heuss and the archaeologist Ludwig Curtius.
[2] In 1920 Goetz was elected to the newly formed Reichstag (national parliament), representing the centre-left DDP in electoral district 32 (Leipzig).
[21][22] He became a member of a number of committees and was frequently on the road delivering political speeches: he made little impact as a parliamentarian, however, and through the 1920s the major focus of his career remained on his teaching duties at the University of Leipzig.
A more hands-on role came with his presidency, between 1946 and 1951, of the Historical Commission of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (HiKo), with which he had been associated intermittently since the early years of the century.
He played a decisive role in the reconfiguration of the long-running Monumenta Germaniae Historica publishing project which was transferred to Munich from Berlin during his incumbency.
One admiring obituarist would write that "he was chiefly responsible for the creation of the series, and it is certainly the case that during his presidency of the HiKo Goetz and his fellow scholar, Otto zu Stolberg-Wernigerode stood out as the project's most persistent and influential backers.
[28] In 1930 he became a member of the Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities which afforded him significant supplementary opportunities for study of the Italian Renaissance and publications of his findings where appropriate.
He resigned his ordinary (i.e. full) membership in 1933 when undergoing his first "retirement" from university work, but continued to be listed at a corresponding member of the Saxon academy till his death in 1958.
Also worth mentioning in this context are his attempts during 1917 to persuade State Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Richard von Kühlmann, to campaign in parliament for a negotiated end to the war.
[2][30] Goetz's most important research contributions concerned the early modern period and, more specifically, the history of the Counter-Reformation and the Italian Renaissance.
After Walter Goetz retired, during the 1950s, the close institutional connections between Leipzig University and Italian Renaissance humanism that had started with Georg Voigt and, in socio-economic terms, with Alfred Doren came to an end.