Walter Hollitscher
Walter Hollitscher was an Austrian philosopher, educator, psychoanalyst and journalist.
Biography
Walter Hollitscher was born as the youngest son into an upper-middle-class Viennese family in 1911 and was soon baptized as a Protestant. After his parents separated, his father moved with him to Prague. In 1925, Hollitscher joined the communist movement as a middle school student in Prague. 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. 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. Hollitscher also passed the state examination for psychology and psychoanalysis. After the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany, Hollitscher had to emigrate, first to Zurich, then to London.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. Hollitscher was friends with Paul Feyerabend. He attributed his philosophical “conversion” from positivism to realism to Hollitscher.
After his return to Vienna, Hollitscher became a science consultant for the KPÖ. From the 19th party congress in May 1965 to the 23rd party congress in December 1977, Hollitscher was a member of the Central Committee of the KPÖ. During the years of the party crisis and the political-ideological confrontation with revisionism by Ernst Fischer and Franz Marek, he and Ernst Wimmer were among the editors of the polemic New Politics. From 1965 to around 1984, Hollitscher spent several months every year as a visiting professor for philosophical problems in modern natural sciences at the University of Leipzig. There he was awarded an honorary doctorate in 1971. Hollitscher was also Chancellor of the International Institute for Peace, which was based in Vienna until it was dissolved.
Walter Hollitscher died on July 6, 1986, in Vienna. His grave can be found in the urn grove of the Vienna Central Cemetery.