Ten human skulls, draped in black cloth, will be returned to Indonesia on November 10. The Museum Wiesbaden’s decision marks a precedent: it is the first time a German institution has repatriated items taken during the country’s Dutch colonial era, according to the Hessian Ministry of Culture.
The remains were taken from Indonesia by Ernst Albert Fritze, a Hessian military physician who worked for the Dutch East India Company in the early 19th century. While the repatriation is set for November, a discrepancy in the museum’s own bookkeeping has emerged. Art in Context noted that while the museum reported eleven Indonesian ancestral remains in its possession in 2023, this current announcement accounts for only ten skulls.
A Hessian Mandate for Accountability
This transfer is not an isolated gesture but forms part of the Hessian state institutions’ broader initiative to methodically review their collections for acquisitions that may have been unlawful during the colonial period and to take ownership of the history of their collections, a statement from Timon Gremmels, the Hessian Minister of Culture, explains.
Andy Reymann, the museum’s curator of cultural anthropology, has spent years researching Fritze’s collection with minimal success. “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,” his research project description reads.
Fritze began donating natural history objects to the Nassau Society for Natural History—the museum’s precursor—in 1833. Because Fritze’s written papers are missing, the exact circumstances of how these skulls were acquired remain difficult to establish.
Piecing Together Fragmentary Identities
In the absence of written records, science has attempted to fill the void. In 2023, forensic research funded by the German Lost Art Foundation and conducted by the Institute of Forensic Medicine at the University Hospital in Frankfurt am Main established probable regional links for the skulls, including Java and Ambon. Art in Context reported, however, that these findings were broad; they could not identify specific individuals or provide a complete history of how the remains were obtained.
Shifting the Museum Paradigm
For decades, the Museum Wiesbaden treated the skulls as scientific objects within its natural-history collections. That perspective is shifting. In 2023, the institution returned a Toi Moko—a tattooed Māori ancestral head—to a delegation of Māori and Moriori representatives through New Zealand’s Karanga Aotearoa repatriation program.
Deep Roots in the Nassau Collection
The museum’s holdings are tied to a lineage dating back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries, when Johann Christian Gerning and Johann Isaac Freiherr von Gerning assembled the founding collection. Acting on a suggestion from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the younger Gerning donated his holdings to the Duchy of Nassau; they were subsequently divided among three museums and then moved to the city of Wiesbaden in 1900.
Since 1973, the three institutions have been managed by the state of Hesse as the Museum Wiesbaden, a legacy of colonial acquisition that the institution is now confronting directly.
