Wiesbaden museum to return 10 skulls to Indonesia on 10 November

Museum Wiesbaden, in the German city of Wiesbaden, will return 10 human skulls to Indonesia at a formal ceremony on 10 November. The culture ministry of Hesse, the German state that includes Wiesbaden, said the museum will be the first in Germany to return human remains from the Dutch colonial era to Indonesia.

The skulls were taken from Indonesia by Ernst Albert Fritze, a military physician. ArtNews reports that Fritze worked for the Dutch East India Company, the trading firm that ran colonial operations in Asia, from 1817. Starting in 1833, he donated natural history objects, such as collected plants, animals and specimens, to the Nassau Society for Natural History. That society was the predecessor of today's museum.

Getting the skulls home has taken years of detective work. In 2023, the museum received funding from the German Lost Art Foundation, a German body that pays for research into looted and colonial-era objects. The money paid for a study of the Fritze skull collection. The museum worked on it with the Institute of Forensic Medicine at University Hospital Frankfurt am Main and with researchers from the Department of Dutch Studies at the University of Cologne.

Andy Reymann, the museum's curator of cultural anthropology, led the research into where the collection came from. His work traced how the remains reached Germany in the first place.

The ceremony will treat the remains with care. Each skull will be covered with a cloth as a sign of respect for the dead. Human remains are often handled as objects in museum collections, so the cloth marks a shift in how they are treated. It also marks a moment of return for the people and places they came from.

The handover will be the latest in a growing number of cases in which European museums give back human remains taken during colonial rule. For Indonesia, it means ten people who were removed from their homeland will finally go home.