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Neither of two skulls is Schiller’s

— Photo: AP

A copy of Friedrich Schiller bust in Jena, eastern Germany.

Berlin: It is a plot befitting Germany’s most famous playwright, a tale of exhumed remains, perturbed priests, and two skulls. For more than a century, a question mark hung over Friedrich Schiller’s remains: which of the two skulls found over the years was actually his? Investigators have now added a new twist to the tale by discovering that neither skull belongs to the dramatist.

“DNA analysis shows beyond doubt this is not the poet’s skull,” said Julia Glesner of the Foundation of Weimar Classics, which oversees the graveyard where Schiller lies next to his friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. “We found no match with the DNA in the male or female lines of the family.” The second skull, which had been buried alongside Schiller in an unmarked coffin, belongs to someone else. The study was conducted by a team of researchers from the universities of Jena and Innsbruck. Researchers took samples from the two Schiller skulls and compared them with other parts of the writer’s skeleton and locks of his hair. They also examined the exhumed remains of his sister, oldest son, and grandson.

In the town of Gerlingen, Catholic priest Wilfried Braun prevented investigators from digging up the remains of Schiller’s youngest sister and father, saying that leaving the dead in peace was more important than scientific research.

The dispute dates from Schiller’s death in 1805, when he was buried in a mass grave. Two decades later, Weimar’s mayor selected one of 23 skulls from the grave and, on account of its large size, deemed it to belong to the writer. It was then stored with the skeleton and in 1827 transferred to a new crypt in Weimar.

The plot thickened in 1911, when a Schiller expert, August von Froriep, said another skull was the genuine one. Anthropologist Ursula Wittwer-Backofen asked how the skull in Schiller’s crypt had fooled experts for more than a century. “Such an exact doppelganger cannot have been put into the coffin by chance,” she told Spiegel magazine. Ralf Jahn, a historian on the team of investigators, said Schiller’s remains were likely looted by thieves in the 19th century. — ©Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2008

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