Prof. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher

Director and Chairholder

Sybille Steinbacher has been Director of the Fritz Bauer Institute since 2017 and holds the Chair for Research on the History and Impact of the Holocaust at Goethe University Frankfurt am Main. From 2010 to 2017, she served as University Professor of Contemporary History / Comparative Dictatorship, Violence and Genocide Studies at the University of Vienna. She studied history and political science in Munich and was a Research Fellow at the Institute for Contemporary History in Munich and at the German Historical Institute in Warsaw. She was a Research Associate at the Ruhr University Bochum, where she earned her doctorate, and at the Friedrich Schiller University in Jena, where she obtained her habilitation. With a Feodor Lynen Research Fellowship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, she carried out research at Harvard University in 2004/2005. In 2010, Steinbacher held the Fritz Bauer Institute Visiting Professorship for Interdisciplinary Holocaust Research. In 2012/2013, she was the Ina Levine Invitational Scholar at the Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. In December 2021 she was appointed chairman of the Scientific Board of Trustees of the Stiftung Gedenkstätten Buchenwald und Mittelbau-Dora (Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation).

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Research focal areas

• National Socialism, Fascism, Holocaust
• History of dictatorships and mass violence in the 20th century
• Nazi era and German society
• Contemporary) history of sexuality

Selected Publications

• Wie der Sex nach Deutschland kam. Der Kampf um Sittlichkeit und Anstand in der frühen Bundesrepublik, Munich 2011.
• Auschwitz. Geschichte und Nachgeschichte, 5th, cont. edition, Munich 2020 (first: 2004).
• »Musterstadt« Auschwitz. Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien, Munich 2000.
• Dachau. Die Stadt und das Konzentrationslager in der NS-Zeit. Die Untersuchung einer Nachbarschaft, 2nd edition, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1994 (first: 1993).