ZIMMER, HEINRICH ROBERT (1890–1943), German Indologist and comparative mythologist. Son of the Sanskritist and Celticist Heinrich Friedrich Zimmer (1850–1910), Heinrich (Henry) Robert Zimmer was born in Greifswald, in present-day Germany, on December 6, 1890. Beginning his studies in Berlin in Hebrew literature, Germanics, and art history, he received his doctorate in 1913 with a thesis on India's traditional system of gotras. After service in World War I, he qualified as professor at Greifswald and then moved to Heidelberg in 1922. Zimmer's marriage to Christiane von Hofmannsthal, daughter of the Jewish poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and his consistent outspokenness as an anti-Nazi were causes for his eventual dismissal from the university in 1938. After lecturing at Oxford and Johns Hopkins universities, Zimmer was appointed visiting lecturer at Columbia University in 1941. He died of pneumonia two years later, on March 20, 1943.

Although the son of one of Germany's pioneering Indologists, whose Altindische Leben: Die...