Culture / Other
Museum Wiesbaden to return 10 colonial-era skulls to Indonesia
The German museum will hand 10 human skulls to Indonesian government representatives in a ceremony Nov. 10.
Source-checked story: attributed primary-source and published reporting; no on-location reporting.
The Museum Wiesbaden will return 10 human skulls to Indonesia in a formal ceremony on November 10, according to Artforum and ARTnews. Artforum reported that it marks the first instance of a German institution returning items taken during the country's Dutch colonial era.
The skulls will be presented to representatives of the Indonesian government and will be covered with black cloth to preserve the dignity of the dead, Artforum reported.
The remains were removed from Indonesia by Ernst Albert Fritze, a Hessian military physician who worked for the Dutch East India Company, according to research by Andy Reymann, the museum’s curator of cultural anthropology. Fritze donated natural history objects to the Nassau Society for Natural History, the museum's predecessor, beginning in 1833.
In 2023, the museum received funding from the German Lost Art Foundation, along with the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospital in Frankfurt am Main and researchers at the University of Cologne, to continue provenance research, ARTnews reported.
Timon Gremmels, the Hessian Minister of Culture, said in a statement that 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.”
What we know / what we don't
What we know
- The German museum will hand 10 human skulls to Indonesian government representatives in a ceremony Nov. 10.
What we don't know
- The identities and origins of the individuals whose remains are being returned.
The source record