Irmtrud Wojak

Irmtrud Wojak is the managing director if the nonprofit BUXUS STIFTUNG GmbH. She is a historian, author and curator. Her research focuses on contemporary legal history, exile and political “memory cultures” as well as on a historiography that understands and explores resistance as a struggle for human rights.

As the Frieda L. Miller Fellow@The Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University ’14/15 Irmtrud Wojak studied the resiliance of individuals who, against against widespread bias and politically enforced discrimination, maintain a principled stand based on legal norms and their own humanity. In 2014, she began with the historical research and educational project of the interactive FRITZ BAUER LIBRARY, named after the lawyer and human rights campaigner Dr. Fritz Bauer (1903-1968). Irmtrud Wojak initiated tge Fritz Bauer Forum (Center for Human Rights) in Bochum.

In 2004 Irmtrud Wojak curated a major exhibition about the Auschwitz Trial and in 2009, after a decade of research, she published the authoritative biography of state attorney Dr. Fritz Bauer (1903-1968), the prosecutor who found Eichamn and put Auschwitz on trial. In 2008, Dr. Wojak completed her professorial Habilitation and obtained her venia legendi at Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz University of Hanover, one of Germany’s largest and oldest science and technology universities. She served as deputy director of the Fritz Bauer Institute in Frankfurt am Main up to 2005, as a director of the Department of History of the International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen 2007/08 and served as Founding Director of the „NS-Documentationcenter” Munich 2009-2011. Wojak serves as Lecturer at the Universität der Bundeswehr München.

Among her publications are numerous scholarly articles, the “Fritz Bauer Archive” website (www.fritz-bauer-archiv.de) and books:

– Fritz Bauer 1903-1968. Eine Biographie. New edition, Munich (BUXUS EDITION) 2016.

– Fritz Bauer 1903-1968: The prosecutor who found Eichmann and put Auschwitz on trial. Munich (BUXUS EDITION) 2018.

– Eichmanns Memoiren. Ein kritischer Essay. Frankfurt am Main (Campus) 2001, New edition 2014.

– Auschwitz-Prozeß. 4 Ks 2/63. Frankfurt am Main. Edited by I. Wojak. Köln (Snoeck) 2004.

– Fritz Bauer. Die Humanität der Rechtsordnung. Ausgewählte Schriften. Edited by Joachim Perels and I. Wojak. Frankfurt (Campus) 1998.

– „Geliebte Kinder…“ Briefe aus dem Amsterdamer Exil in die neue Welt. Edited by I. Wojak and Lore Hepner. Essen (Klartext) 1995.

– Exil in Chile. Die deutsch-jüdische und politische Emigration während des Nationalsozialismus 1933-1945. Berlin (Metropol) 1994.