Geistgeschichte was most fully developed through the Vienna-school art historian Max Dvořák, whom Hocke seems to have used in his conception of the Italian Mannerists as a decline in form reflecting a decline in their spirit(uality). This was the belief that an art object reflects an artist's personal expression, not a struggle between, for example, abstraction and naturalism. Throughout his writing, Hocke employs a Geistgeschichte approach to his art history. The book was highly influential for subsequent art historians such as Jacques Bousquet. In 1957 he published his Die Welt als Labyrinth his theory of the continual resurfacing of Manneristic tendenices in European art. His interest in primary source documentation resulting in the following year's publication of artist's letters, Europäische Künstlerbriefe. He published a novel, Der tanzende Gott (The Dancing God), in 1948. After the Second World War, he again worked again as a journalist in Italy. As a journalist for the Cologne newspaper, he observed of the rise of national socialism, and, as their correspondent in Italy, observed fascism there as well as the Roman underground.

Hocke studied in Bonn under the literary historian Ernst Robert Curtius (1886-1956) (whose grandfather was the archaeologist/art historian Ernst Curtius), under whom he wrote his dissertation in 1934. Mit dem Werkverzeichnis der Druckgraphik 1967-1976 von Helmut Weis und 1977-1980 von Ernst Fuchs. varian fry american schindler matt fuchs. franz reinhold frommel gs frontaufklaerungstrupp no. hans friedrich aka hans ernest larsen hans rudolf friedrich gs konrad friedrich. Journalist and art historian employed Geistgeschichte mode in his philological and art-historical studies of Mannerism. ernst otto heinrich friederich gs ernst otto friedrich gs john friedle.

Ernst Fuchs by Helmut Weis