Museum Wiesbaden Returns 10 Colonial-Era Skulls to Indonesia

The Museum Wiesbaden will return 10 human skulls to Indonesia in a formal ceremony on November 10. The Hessian Ministry of Science and Culture says this makes it the first German museum to return human remains from the Dutch colonial era to the country, Monopol reports. Out of respect for the deceased, the remains will be covered with a cloth during the ceremony.

Ten skulls. One ceremony. It has taken nearly two centuries.

How did the skulls reach Germany?

The answer runs through the Dutch colonial apparatus. According to research by Andy Reymann, the museum's curator of cultural anthropology, Ernst Albert Fritze — a military physician who worked for the Dutch East India Company from 1817 — took the skulls from Indonesia in the 19th century.

Fritze was a donor, not just a taker. Beginning in 1833, he gave several natural history objects to the Nassau Society for Natural History, the Museum Wiesbaden's predecessor institution.

Reymann has spent several years tracing the origins of Fritze's skull collection. In 2023, the museum secured funding from the German Lost Art Foundation to push the research forward, partnering with the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospital in Frankfurt am Main and researchers from the Department of Dutch Studies at the University of Cologne.

The record is thinner than one might expect. "Although Fritze was well-known in his time and is frequently mentioned in the writings of his student Junghuhn, very little has been compiled about him personally. The provenance of the human remains also remains unclear," the research project's description reads.

Where do the museum's collections come from?

The Museum Wiesbaden's founding collection dates to the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Father-and-son collectors Johann Christian Gerning and Johann Isaac Freiherr von Gerning assembled it: paintings, drawings, books, maps, insects and coins.

The chain of custody has a literary wrinkle. At the suggestion of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the younger Gerning donated the holdings to the Duchy of Nassau. They were later split into three museums and transferred to the city of Wiesbaden in 1900. Since 1973, the state of Hesse has managed the three institutions as the Museum Wiesbaden, located roughly an hour west of Frankfurt.

What does the restitution signal?

The Hessian Ministry of Culture framed the handover as policy, not gesture. The restitution "is part of the efforts of the Hessian state institutions to systematically examine their collections for unlawful acquisitions during the colonial period and to assume responsibility for the history of their holdings," the ministry said in a statement.

That wording matters. A systematic review means more collections face scrutiny. November 10 may prove a first, not a last.