He researched Egypt and Moses, the Exodus and the “Magic Flute”: The great cultural and religious scientist Jan Assmann died in Konstanz at the age of 85.
Jan Assmann, the great German cultural scientist who was as ardent as he was patient, as conciliatory as he was combative, has died. Immediately after the initial shock of this news, the “very simple formula” that Assmann wrote at the beginning of his masterpiece “Death and the Afterlife in Ancient Egypt” (2001) comes to mind, as if as a consolation: “Death it is the origin and center of culture.”
This is of course particularly true of ancient Egyptian culture, which he investigated deeply, beginning with archaeological fieldwork at Thebes in 1967. He analyzed funerary rites and sacred formulas for the judgment of the dead down to etymological detail. He devoted an entire book to the concept of Ma'at, the world order that manifests itself in the sky in the orbits of the stars and in the human realm as justice, which, despite all scientific reservation, showed the enthusiasm for this long-lasting culture.
He was also fascinated from an early age by the figure of the heretical king Akhenaten, the first monotheist, who Sigmund Freud declared in his last work to be the teacher of Moses. That is true? Or just a cultural construct? Assmann found a middle ground, so to speak: the story of Moses as an Egyptian, which is also conveyed in the Torah and hidden in the story of the foundling, is a cultural memory, true in a higher sense, so to speak, even if it is not factually true. He developed this concept of cultural memory, the history of memory, which is “not about the past as such”, “but only about the past as it is remembered”, together with his wife Aleida Assmann, who approached the topic from a perspective different. Page's perspective approached. For example, she researched how to deal with the memory of the Holocaust.