Schiller Skull Mystery

German historian, poet and dramatist, Johann Schiller

Hulton Archive / Getty

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The bells had struck midnight when a cheaply made coffin was carried through the deserted streets of the German town of Weimar on May 12, 1805. Its cargo: the rapidly decomposing body of Friedrich Schiller — poet, philosopher, historian, dramatist and rebel, who had died three days earlier. Its destination: the local Jacob's Cemetery, where his corpse was unceremoniously lowered into a common grave with, as Thomas Mann wrote in 1955, "no mild sound of music, no word from the mouth of priest or friend."

It was a rush job, and an end hardly befitting one of Germany's greatest poets. In 1826, in an effort to give Schiller his due, the mass burial site was reopened, but by then the body had decomposed beyond recognition. Determining which among 23 recovered skulls was Schiller's became an act of divination: the mayor of Weimar simply deemed the biggest one to be that of the cerebral poet. Schiller's friend Johann Wolfgang von Goethe later took the memento mori home to muse upon; he even wrote a reverential poem entitled Lines on Seeing Schiller's Skull. Since 1827, this cranium has had a place of honor in Weimar's ducal vault, later joined by Goethe's remains in what has become a shrine to German literature's Golden Age.

But was the good mayor's ad hoc phrenology correct? Or was Schiller's fertile brain actually housed in another skull dug up almost a century later? Scientists from the Friedrich Schiller Code research project are now determined to find out. They will compare dna taken from the two skulls with dna from the skeleton of Schiller's second son, Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm, who was exhumed in Bonn on July 19. "Ultimately, this will show us whether one of the skulls is Schiller's — or whether neither of them is," says Freiburg anthropologist Ursula Wittwer-Backofen, one of the chief Code researchers.

Romantics might prefer that the great man be left alone, but the scientists aren't about to bow before convention or literary legend. "Sapere aude — that which one can know, one should dare to know," argues Hellmut Seemann, president of the Weimar Classics Foundation, a cultural institution that oversees a memorial to Schiller and that helped initiate the project. "We believe it's our duty to resolve whether the remains thought to belong to Friedrich Schiller are authentic."

There are ample grounds to wonder. The genuineness of the skull so cherished by Goethe was first questioned in 1883, when an anatomist named Hermann Welcker claimed it didn't jibe with Schiller's death mask. Some 30 years later, in 1911, the mass gravesite was searched again, turning up 63 additional skulls. Another anatomist, August von Froriep, declared one of them to be Schiller's, and in 1914, it too was placed in the ducal vault.

Besides trying to prove which skull is genuine, the Friedrich Schiller Code team will run a series of tests to corroborate the genetic analysis, search for traces of opiates or harmful heavy metals, and perhaps confirm contemporary reports that Schiller died of tuberculosis — thereby disappointing conspiracy theorists who claim he may have been poisoned by Freemasons. The poet himself probably wouldn't have cared what fate befell his remains. "The Weavers of the Web — the Fates — but sway/ The matter and the things of clay," he wrote in his philosophical lyric The Ideal and Life. "Safe from each change that Time to Matter gives/ ... The form, the archetype, serenely lives." And so it will, whichever skull takes the crown.