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Bid to solve riddle of Schiller’s two skulls

Kate Connolly

Two skulls, one poet. It is a riddle that has been vexing experts for years. But now scientists hope to finally determine which skull belonged to Germany’s most famous playwright, Friedrich Schiller.

Archaeologists in the former West German capital, Bonn, are hoping to end a long-running battle between academics by carrying out DNA tests on two skulls both said to belong to the dramatist, poet, and philosopher, who wrote the Ode to J oy, set to music in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

The remains of Schiller’s wife, Charlotte von Lengefeld, who died in 1826, and those of the second of the couple’s four children, Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm, have been exhumed at Bonn’s Old Cemetery where the families of other musical luminaries are also buried. Crucial to the project are the DNA samples from their teeth and thigh bones, which will be compared with the two “Schiller” skulls as well as with other parts of the writer’s skeleton and locks of his hair.

Scientists from Innsbruck University — who have also worked on identifying the skull of Mozart as well as the iceman “Otzi” and the remains of thousands of victims of the 2004 tsunami — hope to crack the “Schiller code” by November. German Schiller fans are waiting anxiously for the results.

The riddle began in 1826 — 21 years after Schiller’s death at the age of 45 from tuberculosis — when Weimar’s Mayor Carl Leberecht Schwabe went to search for the writer’s skull at the Jacobs cemetery in Weimar, where the coffin had been placed in a mass grave. But the search produced no fewer than 23 skulls, the largest of which the Mayor somewhat randomly decided belonged to Schiller.

The skull, known as the Furstengruft skull, was subsequently stored in the local grand duke’s library along with a skeleton also said to belong to Schiller. The writer Goethe, Schiller’s confidant, further confused matters by secretly removing the skull and storing it in his house for safe-keeping. It inspired him to write the poem On Observing Schiller’s Skull.

In 1827 the “Schiller” remains were transferred to a new crypt in Weimar, where an anatomist declared them to be fake. In 1911 a Schiller researcher called August von Froriep muddied the waters still further by producing yet another “Schiller” skull.

Since then it has been left to literary critics, art historians, forensic scientists, and anthropologists to argue over which is the real skull. But forensic scientist Walther Parson said he was confident the latest experiment would yield positive results. “The tests of the Bonn samples will prove conclusively which is genuine,” he said.

Ursula Wittwer-Backofen, professor of anthropology at the University of Freiburg who is helping extract the samples from the Schiller family grave, said: “I have examined a range of personalities over the years, but this marks a particular highlight of my scientific life. The material we have to work on is of a particularly high standard.”

No one has dared to discuss what will happen if neither skull can be attributed to Schiller, although some researchers have suggested carrying out a search under Goethe’s Weimar house, after claims that he buried his friend’s skull there. —

Guardian Newspapers Limited 2007

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