Around Town: Digging up a murder

Peter Andersen is a man obsessed. Convinced that he knows the truth about the death of Tycho Brahe, the Danish astronomer who died unexpectedly in Prague in 1601, Andersen was in town this past weekend to lay claim to a piece of the action when Brahe's body is exhumed later this year.

"You're going to think me mad," the historian said more than once over coffee at Café Slavia. Personable, intelligent and articulate, Andersen doesn't seem mad - until you get into his conspiracy theories. Then Brahe becomes not the unlucky victim of a blocked bladder but the object of a revenge killing by Danish royalty, the real father of King Christian IV and Claudius in Shakespeare's Hamlet, which it turns out is an intricate metaphor for the whole ugly business.

Since Andersen's claims make Danish kings not only murderers but bastards for the past 300 years, it's not surprising he had great difficulty publishing Kunstvaerket, a 452-page tome detailing his theories. "You could be put in jail for this," he claims one publisher told him.

Unlikely, but it certainly won't win him a place on the team of Danish scientists planning a fall visit to Prague to open Brahe's grave. "I will not be invited," Andersen acknowledged, but he hopes to influence what happens once the tomb is open. The Danes have several interests, including testing Brahe's remains for mercury poisoning, which is how Andersen and other conspiracy theorists believe he died.

Establishing that will be almost impossible at this remove, especially since Brahe was also an alchemist who regularly handled mercury. But the ace card for Andersen is Brahe's DNA, which he wants compared with that of Kings Frederic II and Christian IV, and Queen Sophie, their wife and mother, respectively. A positive match would validate Andersen's illegitimate lineage theory and establish a motive for murder.

That's a lot of graves to dig up, and Andersen believes there's only one way it will happen.

"The Danes have no interest in investigating this, so it has to be an international team that comes to Prague," Andersen insisted. "If they don't do the DNA testing, it's not fair. I'll tell the whole world, and I hope the world will put pressure on Denmark."

So far, the campaign hasn't gotten much further than this newspaper and Radio Prague. Andersen also has the ear of Igor Janovský, a scientist at the National Technical Museum who has studied and written about the Brahe murder theories - skeptically.

"I would start with the bloody mercury," Janovský advised Andersen, pointing out that, without an actual murder established, theories about who killed Brahe are pure speculation.

That stopped Andersen, but only for a moment. "At the end of Hamlet, as he's dying, Hamlet tells Horatio to tell the world what really happened," he said. "I know it sounds mad, but that's what I intend to do."

Frank Kuznik can be reached at
fkuznik@praguepost.com