Florian Wenninger

Florian Wenninger (born 5 July 1978, in Oberndorf bei Salzburg) is an Austrian historian, dedicating himself mainly to the history of totalitarian regimes in the 20th century.

After graduating from high school in 1998, Wenninger performed fourteen months of alternative civilian service at the Israeli Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem. He then studied political science and history and continued to volunteer with the Austrian Holocaust Memorial Service called '''', of which he was chairman from 2006 to 2010. After completing his diploma thesis under the supervision of Emmerich Tálos, for whom he also worked as a student assistant at the Institute of Political Science, Wenninger joined the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna in 2008. There, he subsequently worked as a University assistant (prae-doc) with Oliver Rathkolb until 2013. From 2013 to 2015, Wenninger coordinated a research project on political repression under Austrofascism and also taught at a Viennese secondary school. From 2015, he worked as a University assistant (post-doc) at the Institute of Contemporary History before becoming head of the ''Institut für Historische Sozialforschung'' (Institute for Historical Social Research), a non-university research institution in Vienna, in 2019. This was followed by research stays at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and UC Berkeley in 2015 and 2016, and he was a Botstiber Visiting Professor at UC Berkeley in 2025. Wenninger is still associated with the Institute of Contemporary History at the University of Vienna as a Senior Research Fellow and also teaches there. In addition to contemporary Austrian history, his academic work focuses in particular on historical identities, the history of the labor movement as well as police and violence research. From 2011 to 2013, Wenninger was a member of a historical commission dealing with Viennese street names. He is the editor of several books, has published numerous essays and acts as a reviewer on various occasions. He is a member of the editorial board of the journal ''zeitgeschichte''. In 2021, together with the historian Oliver Kühschelm, he founded the history education project ''wasbishergeschah''. He regularly takes a stand in public debates on the subject of contemporary history. As a “staunch republican”, Wenninger advocated, among other things, a more critical approach to Austrofascism and a more rigid interpretation of the ''Adelsaufhebungsgesetzes'' (Law on the Abolition of Nobility). As part of a World Café on the referendum on compulsory military service in Austria in 2013, he advocated the retention of compulsory military service. Provided by Wikipedia