Jan Assmann (1938-2024)

From https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org:

The field of memory studies has lost a charismatic founding figure. Jan Assmann died on Monday 19 February 2024. He was 85.

Jan Assmann’s landmark study of cultural memory, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis, was published in 1992 and immediately welcomed across German academia as a new ‘paradigm’ of studying culture. The book has been translated into many languages including Italian (1997); Hungarian (2000), Turkish (2001), Arabic (2003), Russian (2004), Polish (2008), and French (2010) and helped establish memory studies as an interdisciplinary and transnational field of study. It took almost twenty years for the book to be translated into English (2011, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization). Until then, anglophone readers relied on Assmann’s short essay “Cultural Memory and Collective Identity” (1995, New German Critique) for an introduction to a pathbreaking theory of cultural memory, which he had developed together with his wife Aleida Assmann and a group of Heidelberg-based scholars during the 1980s.

Read the full article appreciating Jan Assmann at https://www.memorystudiesassociation.org/in-memoriam-jan-assmann-1938-2024/

Cultural Memory, Biblical Studies, and Jan Assmann (1938-2024)

by Werner Kelber

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Cultural memory has not been adequately appreciated in Anglo-American biblical scholarship, including Biblical Performance Criticism. The death of Jan Assman on February 19, 2024 offers an opportunity to focus renewed attention to his work on cultural memoryand to the usefulness of the conceptfor the interpretation of biblical texts.