Word: friedrich
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...bells had struck midnight when a cheaply made coffin was carried through the deserted streets of the German town of Weimar on May 12, 1805. Its cargo: the rapidly decomposing body of Friedrich Schiller - poet, philosopher, historian, dramatist and rebel, who had died three days earlier. Its destination: the local Jacob's Cemetery, where his corpse was unceremoniously lowered into a common grave with, as Thomas Mann wrote in 1955, "no mild sound of music, no word from the mouth of priest or friend...
...good mayor's ad hoc phrenology correct? Or was Schiller's fertile brain actually housed in another skull dug up almost a century later? Scientists from the Friedrich Schiller Code research project are now determined to find out. They will compare dna taken from the two skulls with dna from the skeleton of Schiller's second son, Ernst Friedrich Wilhelm, who was exhumed in Bonn on July 19. "Ultimately, this will show us whether one of the skulls is Schiller's - or whether neither of them is," says Freiburg anthropologist Ursula Wittwer-Backofen, one of the chief Code researchers...
...that which one can know, one should dare to know," argues Hellmut Seemann, president of the Weimar Classics Foundation, a cultural institution that oversees a memorial to Schiller and that helped initiate the project. "We believe it's our duty to resolve whether the remains thought to belong to Friedrich Schiller are authentic...
Besides trying to prove which skull is genuine, the Friedrich Schiller Code team will run a series of tests to corroborate the genetic analysis, search for traces of opiates or harmful heavy metals, and perhaps confirm contemporary reports that Schiller died of tuberculosis - thereby disappointing conspiracy theorists who claim he may have been poisoned by Freemasons. The poet himself probably wouldn't have cared what fate befell his remains. "The Weavers of the Web - the Fates - but sway/ The matter and the things of clay," he wrote in his philosophical lyric The Ideal and Life. "Safe from each change that...
...moral point. Bryan reminded the court that two Chicago teenagers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, had murdered a younger boy the year before to prove that they were Nietzschean supermen, capable of committing the perfect crime. Their attorney, Darrow, had saved them from the death penalty by arguing that Friedrich Nietzsche, and the universities that put him in their curriculums, bore the responsibility for the defendants' actions. If the philosophy of the superman could lead to murder, Bryan argued, then the state had good reason to control what was taught in schools. The curriculum debate continues to boil...