50 years after the death of the great poet, hundreds of notes and manuscripts signed “Schiller” have turned up. You will find rapid sales
By Teja Fiedler
It was no commonplace swindle that was tried in February 1856 before the district court in Weimar. It was an attack on the German soul. “This fraud has turned into a sacrilege against the public honor of Weimar and a sacrilege against the memory of the noblest and most beloved poet of the German nation, since the perpetrator did not shame himself into passing off the most slovenly kind of concoctions as Schiller’s original products.”
Even through the trial report of the otherwise sober lawyer Dr. Anton Vollert swings outrage. Just a year earlier, the Germans had celebrated the 50th anniversary of the death of the “poet prince” Friedrich Schiller. Well-known antique houses even offered his manuscripts as “relics” of German literature. And now there was a man standing before the court who, out of nothing but despicable greed, had soiled their idol Schiller a hundredfold with his forgeries. Vollert judged with disgust the appearance of the 41-year-old defendant Heinrich Carl Jacob von Gerstenbergk: “The confident boldness, the usual garrulousness of his protective speeches suggest that it is not at all unexpected that he is accused of being a forger and fraudster.”