Robert Moritz Friedrich Anhegger was born of German/Swiss parents in Vienna in 1911. He spent part of his childhood in the Netherlands. As a student of southern Slavonic philology and the history of economy at the University of Zürich, Switzerland, he developed an interest in the history of the Turkish domination of the Balkans, which encouraged him to learn Turkish. In 1932 he moved to Vienna, where he met the Turcologist Andreas Tietze, like Anhegger a member of the German Communist Party (KPD). Together they travelled through Anatolia in 1936-1937. While studying in Vienna he met a Jewish girl from Upper Silesia, Suria Gitla Lisie ('Chupi'). In the winter semester of 1932-33 they went to Berlin, where they witnessed – and escaped – the Nazi takeover. He fled to Zurich, where he obtained his doctoral degree in 1939 with a dissertation on the history of mining in the Ottoman Empire, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bergbaus im Osmanischen Reich: Europäische Türkei = Osmanlı imperatorluğunda madenler ve madencilik, published Istanbul 1943-1945.

In 1940 the couple moved to Istanbul, where Robert joined the German Archaeological Institute. Refusing to enlist in the German army in 1942, he lost both his German citizenship and his position at the institute. In the following years he held various teaching positions in Istanbul. After Wold War II, in 1951, he regained his German citizenship. In 1952 he married his girlfriend; but they obtained a divorce the following year. In 1958 he married the architect and restorer Muallâ Eyüpoğlu (1919-2009), sister of the writer Sabahattin and the painter Bedri Rahmi Eyüpoğlu. It was she who made him intimately familiar with the language and (popular) culture of Turkey. In 1957 he privately founded a Turkish-German cultural centre in Istanbul, which served as a popular salon for Turkish and German (left-wing) intellectuals. In 1961 it was taken over by the Goethe Institut, the semi-official worldwide network of German cultural institutes.

In 1968 Anhegger became director of the Goethe Institut at Amsterdam. With his impeccable anti-Nazi credentials he played an important role in re-establishing German culture in a country that had suffered heavily under the German occupation in World War II. In addition, he was active in his support of Turkish culture in a time when the Turkish immigrant population in the Netherlands was growing at a rapid pace. Though returning to Istanbul on his retirement in 1973, he maintained a pied-à-terre in Amsterdam. In 1985 he was awarded the Bundesverdienstkreuz (Cross of Merit) of the German Federal Republic. He died on 27 March 2001. His Festschrift of 1987, Türkische Miszellen, contains his portrait.

Apart from his doctoral dissertation, his publications include Das islamische Iznik (together with Katharina Otto-Dorn, Istanbul 1941), Kannunname-i Sultani ber muceb-i Örf-i Osmani (Ankara 1956), the bibliography and catalogue raisonné Kinder- und Jugendbücher der Türkei (with Meral Alpay, Istanbul 1977), and an edition of Evangelinos Misailidis’ novel in Karamanli script Seyreyle dünyayı: Temaşa-ı dünya ve cefakâr u cefakeş (with Vedat Günyol, [Istanbul] 1986).