Friedrich Schiller's skull

Friedrich Schiller's skull has been the source of much controversy. Schiller was one of the most famous poets in German history. Long believed to be entombed in the Fürstengruft in Weimar, Germany, the location of the writer's skull is now unknown.

Three days after Friedrich Schiller died on May 9, 1805, he was hastily buried in a mausoleum for distinguished citizens whose families did not have a family grave, the Kassengewölbe, in Weimar’s Jacobs cemetery. The burial was quick and unceremonious. There was, as the writer and Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann put it in 1955, "no mild sound of music, no word from the mouth of priest or friend." Schiller’s widow Charlotte von Lengefeld had planned to move him to an individual grave later.

However, the cheaply made coffin burst and his remains ended up mixed with those of other people in a mass grave. Twenty-one years later, in 1826, the town's mayor, Karl Leberecht Schwabe, an enthusiast of Schiller's writings, decided to dig up the poet's remains. He hired three day laborers and the cemetery's gravedigger to help. By that time, Schiller’s body was decomposed beyond recognition. Schwabe reported that only smoking prevented him and his men from getting sick, as the stench of decay was so strong. He described the Kassengewölbe as a "chaos of decay and rot". Though not entirely legally, he unearthed a total of 23 or 27 skulls. Schwabe took them home, placed them all on a table and decided the largest must be Schiller's. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, another famous writer and Schiller’s friend, later secretly took the skull home, where he kept it on a blue velvet cushion underneath a bell jar and even wrote a poem about it entitled "Lines on Seeing Schiller's Skull" ("Bei Betrachtung von Schillers Schädel"). In the poem, he described the skull as a "mysterious vessel". The skull, along with the body believed to correspond to it, were then moved to the Weimarer Fürstengruft, Weimar's ducal vault, in 1827, to be joined by Goethe's remains in 1832 as a shrine to German Classicism.

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