Jan Assmann did not pass away: rather, he passed into our cultural memory. Better put, our memory of cultural memory— insofar as he reminded us that culture is always founded on collective memory, and that collective memory is what forms our collective being. We are little more than a story we tell ourselves.

When the idea of the nation found currency once again after the Cold War, Assmann’s concept of cultural memory provided a non-essentialist model of human collectivity. Peoples, nations, civilizations, do not have to be understood as essences, as fixed substances that preserve themselves across history. Instead they can be understood as collective self-representations, as cultures that continually re-shape themselves, recollect, remember – and that also continually forget.

Cultural memory afforded a new way to understand collectives. No longer interested in the material existence of peoples across time, it took as its object in the history of memory: in the narratives that, through their transmission, constitute intergenerational consciousness. «Rather than asking how it actually happened, it asks how and why it was remembered,» wrote Assman about the history of memory. We can think of it as a «Jewish science,» after Yosef Chayim Yerushalmi, who noted that Jewish tradition never produced historiography, only memory: Zakhor. «In order that you remember, every day of your life, the day of your exodus from Egypt.»

The history of memory investigates memory as fiction, which does not contradict reality so much as motivate it. To make sense of the collective existence of a specific culture – what is German, Jewish, European – is to analyze a story or a phantasy: it is like dream-interpretation.

Assmann’s analyses of collective psyches are deeply inspired by Freudian science. Like Freud, Assmann looked for the significance of memory in what it forgets or represses: in the unconscious behind consciousness and in the trauma behind the dream. The collective, like the individual, is born from a wound.

The study of collective trauma had clear provenance in a newly reunited Germany. Assmann’s history of memory is the psychoanalysis of a nation that built its identity on the commemoration of a catastrophe. To remember Assmann’s work is to study contemporary German consciousness. The figures that he dug up from our deep cultural memory feature prominently in our current collective disorder: Israel, Egypt, anti-Semitism.