The Egyptologist and religious scholar Jan Assmann died after a long illness at the age of 85. He has repeatedly caused a sensation with his religious studies work.
The German Egyptologist, cultural and religious scientist Jan Assmann died on Monday night in Konstanz at the age of 85 after a long illness. A spokeswoman for Heidelberg University confirmed a report from “Südkurier” on Tuesday. The university is in contact with the family and has received the message from Assmann’s family, said the spokeswoman. Assmann was one of the best-known German humanities scholars internationally and repeatedly caused a sensation with his religious studies works and books.
»I’m not a believer, but I’m religious. Because I see religion as something deeply human.«
Jan Assmann
“I am not a believer, but I am religious. Because I see religion as something deeply human,” he once told the “Presse.” His theses on monotheism were debated: He sees its beginnings in the exodus of the Israelites under Moses from Egypt. This brought the distinction between “true” and “false” into the world in religion – with fatal consequences, especially later in Christianity and Islam.
From 1976 to 2003, when he retired, he taught as a professor of Egyptology in Heidelberg. Assmann was primarily concerned with religious history and ideas of death in Ancient Egypt, but also with basic questions of mentality and cultural history.
Discovery of a burial site in the Valley of the Kings
Assmann later was an honorary professor at the University of Konstanz, where his wife Aleida Assmann was professor of English literature and general literature. The couple was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade in 2018. Jan Assmann was the father of five adult children. Assmann also devoted himself to classical music. His love for music shaped his younger years. As a student he composed his own pieces. However, his career as a musician was thwarted by the sometimes traumatic circumstances he experienced during and after the war.
But the ancient languages, especially cuneiform writing and hieroglyphs, also had a magical appeal for the “precocious young man” – as Assmann saw himself. Against his parents’ wishes that he should prefer classical archeology to the “profitless art” of Egyptology, the architect’s son decided to study the “orchid subject” in Heidelberg. With great success: one of the highlights of his Egyptological career was the discovery of a burial site in the Valley of the Kings.
Concept of cultural memory
The love of drawing had once brought Assmann and his wife together: they started talking at the wedding party of Jan Assmann’s mentor. He admired her pictures for the celebration and impressed her with a ballad complete with pictures. At the age of 21, Aleida married Jan, who was nine years older than her, in 1968 at the height of the student movement – an unusual civic act in intellectual circles.
The Assmanns analyzed that it was only 40 years after the Second World War that the memory of the repressed Holocaust began to emerge in Germany. The confrontation with the darkest chapter of German history was triggered by Richard von Weizsäcker’s speech on May 8, 1985. Von Weizsäcker was the first German Federal President to describe the day of the Wehrmacht’s unconditional surrender as the day of liberation from the inhumane system of Nazi tyranny – not as a day of defeat. That was the starting signal for monuments and days of remembrance – the extermination of the Jews by the Nazis became a formative part of the Germans’ collective memory.
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