Friedrich Schiller's skull

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".

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.

This led a group of scientists headed by August von Froriep to reopen the original mass grave and unearth another sixty-three skulls and pick one as Schiller's.

[6][4] During World War II, both Schiller's and Goethe's remains were moved to an underground bunker to protect them from Allied air raids.

Dubbed "The Friedrich Schiller Code", the study was sponsored by the foundation and the television station MDR.

It was undertaken by an international team of scientists from the Universities of Freiburg, Jena, Innsbruck and others, led by Ursula Wittwer-Backofen.

Among them were the scientists who had identified Mozart's skull, Ötzi the Iceman's skeleton and victims of the 2004 tsunami in Asia.

The skull from 1911, on the other hand, was exposed as a fake and later identified as belonging to Luise von Göchhausen, Duchess Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel's first Court Lady, whom Schiller knew and disliked.

They were compared to samples from the teeth and thigh bones of Schiller's relatives, both of his second son, Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm and the poet's wife, Charlotte von Lengefeld, who were exhumed from Bonn's Old Cemetery, since there are no direct descendants still alive.

[10] Another possibility raised by Ralf Jahn, a historian on the team of investigators and others is that Schiller's remains were stolen by grave-robbers in the 19th century.