Aleida Assmann

B. 1947. Assmann’s research is chiefly concerned with the questions of cultural memory, remembering, and forgetting. Notably, she has examined the tensions between personal experience and official remembrance in the history of memory in Germany after the Second World War. In a recent work, Der lange Schatten der Vergangenheit – Erinnerungskultur und Geschichtspolitik (2006), Assmann points out a number of possible paths from an individual to a collective construction of the past.

Assmann has been a visiting scholar at a number of universities and institutes, including the Getty Center in Santa Monica, California (1995), Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin (1998-99), and Princeton University (2001).