State of Hesse grants funds of about € 525,000 for research against forgetting.
Boris Rhein, Minister for Science and the Arts, today introduced the holder of Germany’s first chair for research on the history and impact of the Holocaust, Professor Sybille Steinbacher, and welcomed her to her new post. Sybille Steinbacher took up office on 1 May as Director of the Fritz Bauer Institute. The position is linked to the new “Chair for Research on the History and Impact of the Holocaust” at Goethe University Frankfurt. The State of Hesse is sponsoring the Fritz Bauer Institute with € 375,100 this year and financing the Holocaust professorship with a further € 150,000, so that a total of € 525,100 of state funds is available for the two entities in 2017.
Professor Steinbacher is a renowned expert in the field of Holocaust research as documented by many pertinent research papers. She already dealt with persecution and extermination policies in the National Socialist state and societal reactions to it in her Master’s thesis at LMU Munich. Her dissertation entitled “‘Model Town’ Auschwitz. Germanisation Policy and Murder of Jews in East Upper Silesia”, which she submitted at Ruhr University Bochum, later formed the basis for an internationally much acclaimed standard reference work on the subject, which was translated into numerous languages.
Sybille Steinbacher was already visiting professor at Goethe University Frankfurt for the history and impact of the Holocaust in 2010 in conjunction with the Fritz Bauer Institute, following which she was professor for Comparative Dictatorship, Violence and Genocide Studies at the University of Vienna. She has been Project Manager of the Dachau Symposium on Contemporary History since 2012. She is a member of several scientific bodies, including the international advisory board of the Richard Koebner Minerva Centre for German History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
“The Fritz Bauer Institute is an education and research facility of highest international standing and its outreach goes far beyond the borders of Hesse. Above all the confrontation with the ethical and moral justification structures of the Holocaust up to the present day makes the research so unique and important. Especially in the land of the perpetrators there must be no forgetting. The linking of the new Holocaust professorship with the directorship of the Fritz Bauer Institute is thus a unique opportunity that we are using to give as great a boost as possible to the subject’s scientific reappraisal”, explained Boris Rhein, Minister for Science and the Arts.