In 1898, Leo Frobenius (1873-1938) founded the "Afrika Archiv" in Berlin as a private foundation. After the First World War, the archive was transferred to Munich, where the "Forschungsinstitut für Kulturmorphologie" was formed in 1920. In 1925 this institute moved to Frankfurt am Main. There it was annexed to the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University, where Frobenius received a lectureship for culture and ethnology. In 1934 he also became Director of the Städtischen Museum für Völkerkunde. Since 1946 the Institute bears the name of its founder. After Leo Frobenius's death, the following have been directors of the Institute:

   1946-1965: Prof. Dr Adolf Ellegard Jensen;

   1965-1966: Prof. Dr Carl A. Schmitz;

   1968-1992: Prof. Dr Eike Haberland;

   since 1996: Prof. Dr Karl-Heinz Kohl

Traditionally, the main focus of the Fobenius-Institut's work has been the research of African cultures and history. Though Africa was always in the centre of Frobenius's own research work - between 1904 and 1935 he had undertaken a total of twelve expeditions to the interior of the continent, collecting ethnographical and historical data, oral records, material culture objects and rockscape copies - his regional and theoretical interest were considerably wider. Furthermore, from the very beginning he also supported the investigations of the Institute's members who photographed rockscapes in Spain, Italy, France and Scandinavia and carried out research in the Arab Peninsula, in India, Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Australia. Consideration of the cultures of all so-called "nature people" was in keeping with  the universal approaches of  Frobenius's culture theory - the so-called  ‘Kulturmorphologie'. Under the direction of A. E, Jensen (1946-1965) this tendency was further strengthened:  of the ten research trips undertaken under the patronage of the Institute between 1950 and 1964, three were to South and Middle America, one to India and three to Oceania, but only three more to Africa. Renewed concentration on African cultures and history arose in 1967, when Eike Haberland assumed the direction of the Institute. Among other things, this led to the decisive participation of the Frobenius-Institut in the establishment of the special research field  ‘Kulturentwicklung und Sprachgeschichte im Naturraum Westafrikanischee Savanne' (‘Cultural development and language history in the West African savannah region'), supported by the German research community, in which more than 50 ethnologists, linguists, geographers, pre-historians, archaeologists and botanists were involved until 2002. At present, the Institute is striving once more towards an extension of the geographic radius of its research activity, particularly in East Indonesia and Oceania, regions where research had been initiated especially under the direction of A. E. Jensen and C. A. Schmitz.