Prof. Dr. Sybille Steinbacher

Sybille Steinbacher has been director of the Fritz Bauer Institute and has held the newly established Chair for Research on the History and Impact of the Holocaust since May 2017. From 2010 to 2017, she was a university professor of contemporary history and dictatorship, violence and genocide comparative 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 Ruhr University Bochum, where she earned her doctorate, and at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, where she obtained her Habilitation in the department of history at both universities. As a Feodor Lynen research fellow sponsored by 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.

Research focal areas

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

Selected Publications

• Dachau. Die Stadt und das Konzentrationslager in der NS-Zeit. Die Untersuchung einer Nachbarschaft, second edition, Frankfurt am Main et al. 1994 (first published: 1993).
• »Musterstadt« Auschwitz. Germanisierungspolitik und Judenmord in Ostoberschlesien, Munich 2000
• Auschwitz. Geschichte und Nachgeschichte, fourth edition, Munich 2017 (first published: 2004).
• Wie der Sex nach Deutschland kam. Der Kampf um Sittlichkeit und Anstand in der frühen Bundesrepublik, Munich 2011.