Robert Reimer

Biography

Dr. Reimer is Director of the Film Studies Program, a former Chair of the Department of Languages and Culture Studies and currently teaches full time in the Department.  In 2013-2015, he served as an exchange professor to the Université de Limoges in Limoges, France.

Education

• Ph.D., University of Kansas (1971)
• M.A., University of Kansas (1968)
• B.A., University of Wisconsin-Madison (1965)
• University of Stuttgart, 1968-1969 (Exchange student)

Appointments

University of North Carolina at Charlotte

Chair of Languages and Culture Studies 2006-2013
Full Professor 1995-
Interim Chair of Foreign Languages 1991-1993
Associate Professor 1976-1995
Assistant Professor, 1971-1976

Pädagogische Hochschule (College of Education), Ludwigsburg, Federal Republic of Germany:

Fulbright Senior Lecturer, 1984-85
Exchange Professor Fall 1997
Exchange Professor Fall 2005

Director: UNC Charlotte Kingston Program 2002-2003 (Kingston, England)

Publications and Research 

Books

Historical Dictionary of Holocaust Cinema. Lanham, Maryland and Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press, 2012, 245 pages (co-authored with Carol J. Reimer).

Historical Dictionary of German Cinema. Lanham, Maryland and Plymouth, UK: The Scarecrow Press, 2008, 467 pages (Co-authored with Carol J. Reimer.)

Arbeitsbuch zu German Culture through Film. Newburyport, M.A.: Focus Publishing 2006, 276 pages (Co-authored with Reinhard Zachau).

German Culture through Film. Newburyport, M.A.: Focus Publishing, 2005, 255 pages (Co-authored with Reinhard Zachau and Margit Sinka).

Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens: Essays on the Cinema of the Third Reich, (editor).  Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000.

Nazi-Retro Film: How German Narrative Cinema Remembers the Past.  New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992, 256 pages (Co-authored with Carol J. Reimer).

Environmental Debate in the USA: Cleaning Up Tomorrow?  Munich: Bayerischer Schulbuch-Verlag, 1988, 88 pages.  (An English Language Reader co-authored and edited with Peter Dörfel.)

Lehrerband zu Environmental Debate in the USA.  Munich: Bayerischer Schulbuch Verlag, 2nd. edition, 1993, 77 pages.  (Teachers’ Manual to reader cited above, co-authored with Peter Dörfel)

Articles, Essays, Encyclopedia Entries, and Book Reviews (last ten years)

“Does Laughter Make the Crime Disappear?: A Survey of Cinematic Images of Hitler and the Nazis, 1940-2007.” (7700 words). Senses of Cinema (2009), an electronic film journal found at http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/.

“Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens.” In Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, 3 vols., ed. Ian Aitken. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. pages 1341-1344.

Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia.” In Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, 3 vols., ed. Ian Aitken. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. pages 1012-1015.

“Erwin Leiser’s Mein Kampf.” In Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, 3 vols., ed. Ian Aitken. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. pages 884-886.

“Katrin Seybold.” In Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, 3 vols., ed. Ian Aitken. New York and London: Routledge, 2006. pages 1211-1212.

“Looking for a Moral.  Why America Didn’t Laugh: Analysis of Comedic Structure in Doris Dörrie’s Me and Him.” 95-105. In Straight through the Heart: Doris Dörrie, German Filmmaker and Author.  Edited by Franz A. Birgel and Klaus Phillips.  Scarecrow Press, 2004.

“Removing the Mask: Doris Dörrie’s Erleuchtung Garantiert.” 160-169. In Straight through the Heart: Doris Dörrie, German Filmmaker and Author.  Edited by Franz A. Birgel and Klaus Phillips.  Scarecrow Press, 2004.

“Self-Inflicted Wounds? Why German Enrollments Are Dropping.” 135-148. In Globalization and the Future of German. Edited by Andreas Gardt and Bernd Hüppauf.  (Mouton de Gruyter, 2004).

“Picture-Perfect War: An Analysis of Joseph Vilsmaier’s Stalingrad (1993).” In Light Motives: German Popular Film in Perspective, edited by Maggie MacCarthy and Randall Halle, Wayne State University Press, 2003.

“Abschied von Sidonie: A Farewell Twice Visited: Analysis of Erich Hackl’s Novella and Karin Brandauer’s Film.” 138-155.  In AfterPostmodernism: Austrian Literature and Film in Transition (Studies in Austrian Literature, Culture, and Thought) edited by Willy Riemer, Ariadne, 2000.

“Turning Inward: An Analysis of Helmut Käutner’s Auf Wiedersehen Franziska, Romanze in Moll, and Unter den Brücken,”  214-239.  In Cultural History through a National Socialist Lens.  edited by Robert C. Reimer, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2000.

“The Wasteland of the Free: How German Film Views America.” In The image of America in literature, media, and society; selected papers from the 1999 conference of the Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery. Edited by Will Wright and Steven Kaplan.  Imprint Pueblo, Co: The Society, 1999.

“Language Immersion: Learning from Past Mistakes. 32-40.  Fremdsprachenunterricht in der Grundschule, ed. Hartmut Melenk and Hanspeter Dörfel (Schneider Verlag: Hohengehren, 1997).

“A Comparison of Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows and R. W. Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul: or How Hollywood’s New England Dropouts Became Germany’s Marginalized Other.”  Literature/Film Quarterly.  (Vol. 24, No. 3, 1996), pp. 282-287.

Papers Presented (last 10 years)

“From Fairy Tale to Horror: Strategies for Helping Viewers Remember the Past” at the symposium Witness through Fiction: Holocaust, Conflict and Genocide in Cinema and Literatures, April 9-11, 2015.

“Subtitling and Dubbing as Film Adaptation.” Cultures of Translation: Adaptation in Film & Performance Conference, Cardiff School of Creative & Cultural Industries, Wales, UK, June 26-28, 2008.

“Going, Going, Gone: The Cinematic Image of Adolf Hitler from The Great Dictator to Mein Führer.” Foreign Language Film Conference, University of Southern Illinois, October 11-13, 2007.

“Sonnenallee:  Life as an East German Cabaret or Divided Humor?” Sixteenth  Hollins Film Colloquium, 2004. (co-presenter, Andrea Rinke)

“Ula Stöckl’s Das alte Lied: Same Old Song or Different Tune,” Twenty-Fifth Colloquium of Literature and Film, Morgantown West Virginia, October 12-14, 2000.

“Food Causes Ulcers, Gas and Even Death: A Cataloguing of Dining Situations in the Films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder,” Conference on Food Representation in Literature, Film and the Other Arts, San Antonio, February 17-19, 2000.

‘The Wasteland of the Free: How German Film Views America.”  Conference on Social Imagery in Literature and Film, Colorado Springs, March 11-13, 1999.

“Echoes of Heimat on Post Unification German Television.”  German Studies Association, Salt Lake City, October 8-11, 1998.

“Helmut Käutner’s Postwar Films and Their Reception.”  Eleventh Hollins Film Colloquium, April 2-4, 1998.

“Subverting Tunes: Helmut Käutner’s Use of Music in His National Socialist Films.”  Tenth Hollins Film Colloquium, 3-6 April 1997. 

“Abschied von Sidonie, A Farewell Twice-Visited: Analysis of Erich Hackl’s Novella and Karin Brandauer’s Film.”  Symposium: Crossing Cultural Bounds in Contemporary Austrian Literature and Film.  University of Delaware, September 26-28, 1996.

“Language Immersion: Learning from Past Mistakes.”  Second Annual Ludwigsburg/UNC Charlotte Symposium, May 28-29, 1996.

Book Reviews

Review of Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature 1933-1945. Neil H. Donahue and Doris Kirchner, eds. New York: Berghahn Books, 2003. In German Quarterly, Volume 78 # 4 (Fall 2005), pages 551-552.

Review of Volker Schlöndorff’s Cinema: Adaptation, Politics, and the “Movie Appropriate.” Hans-bernhard Moeller and George Lellis. Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2002. In Monatshefte, Volume 97 # 2 (Summer 2005), pages 374-375.

Review of Constructing Heimat in Postwar Germany: Longing and Belonging. Christopher J. Wickham. Edwin Mellen Press, 1998. In German Studies Review, XXIII, 3, (1999) 654.

Invited Lectures (most recent)

“Fatih Akin’s Edge of Heaven (Dis/Connections),” for Film Series at Buffalo State University, March 24, 2011.

“Olfactory Depravity in Tykwer’s Perfume,” Introduction to Tom Tykwer’s Perfume: The Story of a Murderer for Film series of German Cinema, Buffalo State University, April 23, 2009.

“Dysfunctional Dining Table in the Films of R. W. Fassbinder,” University of Calgary, October 5, 2006.

“And in His Arms the Child was Dead,” Introduction to Volker Schlöndorff’s Der Unhold, “ for Film series on German Cinema, Buffalo State University, April 20, 2006.

“Das Boot: Identifying the Enemy,” University of the South, April 6, 2004.

“Mephisto: Heinrich’s Clown” for Film series on German Cinema, Buffalo State University, April 27, 2004.

Fellowships

NEH Summer Seminar Fellowship, “German Literary Existentialism,” National
Endowment for the Humanities, U. Of Minnesota, Summer 1977.

Senior Lecturer Grant, U.S. and German Fulbright Commission, 1984-1985.

NEH Summer Seminar Fellowship, “Cinema in Nazi Germany,” National Endowment for the  Humanities, Cornell University, Summer, 1996.

Courses Taught (in addition to German language courses)

European Cinema
German Cinema
World of the German Speaker (interactive television course)
Fassbinder (a Hauptseminar [graduate level course] in Germany)
Film im Dritten Reich (Cinema in the Third Reich,  a Proseminar, In Germany)
European Cinema/Hollywood Film Comparison
Film and Society (undergraduate course for general education)
Film and Identity (graduate course in Liberal Studies)
Amerikas Selbstbild in den Filmen Hollywoods (America’s self image in Hollywood film, a seminar in Germany)
Film Subtitling (For Certificate in Translation Program)