Welcome to the website of the Chair of Contemporary History!

Research and teaching focus on German, European and US-American history in the 20th century.

The "long 20th century" - from high industrialization to globalization - is regarded as a time of dramatic social and normative change, but also of unprecedented violence. It was characterized by enormous contradictions, by wars, dictatorships, genocides and expulsions, but also by processes of democratization, the development of the welfare state and mass consumption as well as the implementation of women's and human rights. Added to this are nuclear confrontations, the communications revolution and the global climate crisis. The events and processes of that era shape our present in many ways. Contemporary history is therefore always the prehistory of current problems and directly relevant to our lives - this is where its particular appeal lies.

The staff of the Chair of Contemporary History conduct research and teaching in the sense of a transnationally oriented contemporary history as social history. To this end, we focus on questions of gender and the history of knowledge, but also examine political caesuras and processes of social and normative change. Firstly, we focus on the history of National Socialism, the Holocaust and National Socialist occupation policy in Europe, supplemented by studies on racism, eugenics and human genetics. Secondly, we examine the transformation of family values and gender orders in Western democracies and research the history of women's movements and transnational (anti-)feminism.