When: 9 May 1805

The death of Schiller, 9 May 1805

He died in the study on the top floor of his own house, three years after buying it, and was buried in the night of 11–12 May in a vault the court kept for people of rank who had no grave of their own.

The event that ends the partnership on which Weimar's reputation rests. Schiller died on 9 May 1805, in the top-floor study of the house on what is now the Schillerstraße, which he had bought in 1802 — the steward's page puts it flatly: before the poet died in 1805 in his study.

Buried at night, in a vault that was not his

In the night of 11 to 12 May he was laid in the Kassengewölbe on the Jakobskirchhof — a vault the court's burial office kept for people of rank who had no grave of their own.^[1] Weimar's second name, at the end of the six years in which he and Goethe had run the theatre together, was buried in the dark in a borrowed grave, because that was the provision the court's burial office had for someone in his position.

The afterlife of the body

In 1827 the town retrieved him and installed him in the Fürstengruft beside Goethe, and told itself that story for two centuries. Genetic testing has since shown that the remains moved were somebody else's.^[1] So of the three places tied to his death, the house is where he died, the small vault is where the burial certainly happened, and the famous mausoleum holds a gesture.

What happened to the house

His widow Charlotte went on living in it until her death in 1826, and the children sold it afterwards; the town acquired it in 1847.^[2] The study at the top is shown with his writing desk and his bed still in it.