Archaeological topics have been popularized with the public for years like hardly any other science, apart from the current special case of virology.

But when it comes to archaeologists, most people will quickly come up with a single name and then not a second one for a long time.

It goes so far that Heinrich Schliemann sometimes becomes a synonym for the entire guild, for example in the title of the history documentary series “Schliemann's Heirs”.

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the features section.

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It is certain that not every archaeologist feels meant by this term, and Schliemann was controversial from his first public appearance as an excavator. At the same time, he was not lacking in passionate defense lawyers. "The mistrust of the 'experts' against the successful 'outsider' is the mistrust of the citizen against the genius", wrote CW Ceram in 1949 in his enormously influential volume "Götter, Gräber und Schehre" (Gods, Graves and Scholars), referring to Schliemann's critics. The genius from Ankershagen in Mecklenburg, thinks Ceram alias Kurt Marek, does not stay in the dusty office like the suspicious citizens, but risks his existence in the field: “He was restless and nothing stopped him; not the fever that oozed out of the swamps on mosquito bodies, treacherous and dangerous,not the lack of good water, neither the insubordination of the workers, nor the slowness of the authorities and the incomprehension of the scientists from all over the world, who are making a fool of him and worse. "

The then Rowohlt lecturer Marek, however, did not have access to the extensive biographical material on Schliemann, which had only been made accessible since then and which considerably relativized Schliemann's publications. The more clearly the research could work out these contradictions, the more the pendulum swung in the other direction, until Schliemann finally stood there as a “pathological liar”.

The verdict relates both to the portrayal of his living conditions and to aspects of his scientific work, to dramatic events such as the rescue from distress off the coast of Holland in 1841 - did the nineteen-year-old now cling to an empty barrel or, less theatrically, landed in a lifeboat ?

- as well as the discovery of the “Treasure of Priam” in May 1873, to which Schliemann had to admit in a private letter that, contrary to what he had publicly claimed, his wife was not present and therefore the treasure was not even in a cloth could secretly carry away.

Can you trust Schliemann?

In the run-up to his 200th birthday on January 6th, three books have been published which, against this background, approach Schliemann's person in different ways or provide additional material for a biographical presentation. While the television journalist Frank Vorpahl in “Schliemann und das Gold von Troja” deals primarily with the period in which the wealthy merchant searches for a new meaning in life and finds it in archeology, the studied archaeologist Leonie Hellmayr puts “The Man who invented Troy “presents a biography of Schliemann, which leads from his birth to his death on December 26th, 1890 and briefly illuminates his fame. "Research now has a very differentiated picture of his life," writes Hellmayr:"Nevertheless, most of our information is still based on statements from his personal testimonies - and since Schliemann liked to stage himself and his career, in some cases it is still difficult to separate reality from fantasy."

For Hellmayr's biography this actually means a clear orientation towards the self-testimonies mentioned.

This inventory alone is enormous: Schliemann published travel books, excavation reports in the form of books and articles as well as several autobiographical texts.

His correspondence includes around sixty thousand letters, he also kept diaries and left informative exercise texts as he learned foreign languages.

Above all, this promoted his economic rise from shop assistant to multimillionaire, suggests Schliemann himself, who then also loved to describe the circumstances of his phenomenally quick language learning.