In 1929 he passed his Abitur in Arnau an der Elbe and began studying biology, medicine and philosophy at the University of Vienna in the same year.
In Vienna he became a member of the Communist Party of Austria in the same year and became friends with prominent intellectuals such as Ernst Fischer and Elias Canetti.
[1] In 1933 he received his doctorate from the University of Vienna with a thesis "On the reasons and causes of the dispute over the causal principle in the present", which was reviewed by Moritz Schlick and Robert Reininger.
[1] October 1945, Hollitscher returned to Austria and worked at Vienna's public education and the Institute for Science and Art .
In 1949 he accepted a position in the GDR at Berlin's Humboldt University, where he worked as full professor of logic and epistemology and first director of the philosophical institute until 1953.