Reinhold Grimm, founding member of the International Brecht Society and co-editor of the first ten volumes of the Brecht Yearbook, died on March 5, 2009, in Riverside, California, from complications after a stroke.

Born on May 5, 1931, in Nuremberg, Germany, Grimm studied German literature at the University of Erlangen, during which time he was also a Fulbright fellow a

Born on May 5, 1931, in Nuremberg, Germany, Grimm studied German literature at the University of Erlangen, during which time he was also a Fulbright fellow at the University of Boulder. At the youthful age of twenty-five, he earned his Dr. phil. summa cum laude from the University of Erlangen with a dissertation on Gottfried Benn. After teaching for a decade at the universities of Erlangen and Frankfurt, he emigrated to the United States, first as a visiting professor at Columbia University (New York City), and in 1967 he as the Alexander Hohlfeld Professor of German at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. In 1980 he was awarded the prestigious Vilas Research Professorship of German and Comparative Literature at the UW-Madison. Reinhold Grimm received various prizes and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1969/70), an honorary doctorate from Georgetown University (1988), and the Hilldale Career Award of the University of Wisconsin (1988). He was a member of the International P.E.N. Club, he also served as the national president of the American Association of Teachers of German (1974/75), and as president of the International Brecht Society (1980). In 1990 he accepted a Distinguished Professorship at the University of California in Riverside, where he taught until his retirement in 2003. He was also visiting professor at New York University and the University of Virginia, and he traveled on lecture tours worldwide (Turkey, Nigeria, South Africa, Australia, and throughout Europe).

His fields of research, teaching, publishing, and editing were German and comparative literature from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries and translations into German and English.  He published fifteen monographs, edited ten volumes, co-edited thirty-five more, and published over 200 articles and essays. His books and articles were translated into many languages, and his essays appeared in prominent journals and newspapers, among them his regular contribution to Marcel Reich-Ranicki’s “Frankfurter Anthologie,” a series of interpretations of modern poetry in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. His talent for languages and his love of poetry led him over the years to translate and interpret modern poetry, and he published widely on Gottfried Benn, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Günter Kunert, Felix Pollak, and others.

Reinhold Grimm made his name as one of the early Brecht scholars in West Germany with books like Bertolt Brecht: Die Struktur seines Werkes (1959, 6th edition 1971, Spanish edition 2008), Bertolt Brecht und die Weltliteratur (1961), and Bertolt Brecht (Metzler 1961, 3rd edition 1971). He published monographs on authors such as Benn (1958/62), Büchner (1985), Nietzsche (1979), Rilke (1981), Enzensberger (1984), and Felix Pollak (2002). He was interested in genre theory and edited handbooks on Episches Theater (1966, 3ed edition 1972), Zur Lyrik-Diskussion (1966/74), Deutsche Romantheorie (1968/74), and Deutsche Dramentheorie (1972/1980). He contributed substantially to the theory discussions of the 1970s (Methodenfragen der deutschen Literaturwissenschaft, with Jost Hermand, 1973), and there is hardly a topic in modern literature on which he did not publish.
With Jost Hermand he established the annual Wisconsin Workshop in 1969, and together they published 25 volumes of its proceedings on topics such as Die Klassik-Legende (1971), Exil und innere Emigration (1972) Popularität und Trivialität (1974), Realismustheorien (1975), Blacks in German Culture (1986), Our Faust (1987), and many more, which noticeably influenced the direction of German Studies in the United States. Between 1970 and 1980 they also published Basis, a journal for contemporary German literature, and the Brecht-Jahrbuch.

As a colleague he was reliable and cooperative, as a teacher he was superb (as many of his students can confirm), and as a friend he was compassionate and supportive. He will be missed by his former colleagues, students, and friends. Reinhold Grimm is survived by his wife, Anneliese, his daughter, Sabine Goldberg, his son-in-law Gary Goldberg, and his two grandsons, Daniel and Matthew, all of Riverside, California.