Coming to terms with the colonial era: Museum Wiesbaden hands over skulls to Indonesia

epd | Ten human skulls from the Wiesbaden Museum's holdings are to be returned to their country of origin, Indonesia. As the Hessian Ministry of Science and Culture announced on Wednesday, they are to be handed over to representatives of the Indonesian government on November 10th. The skulls came to Hesse in the 19th century and came from an ethnographic collection of the military doctor Ernst Albert Fritze.

According to the ministry, this is the first case in Germany in which human remains that were sent to Europe return to Indonesia. Hessian museums have been systematically searching their collections for illegal acquisitions from the colonial period for several years. The Wiesbaden Museum had already returned a so-called Toi Moko – a tattooed Maori ancestor skull – to New Zealand in 2023.

Fritze also once sent the Maori skull to the museum in Wiesbaden. Born in Herborn, he had been in the Dutch service since 1817 and had repeatedly sent taxidermy to his homeland from the former colony of the Dutch East Indies. The museum's natural history collection owes him numerous exhibits, including a specimen of the now extinct Java tiger.