Message in bottle arrives after 101 years

German museum traces postcard inside beer
bottle to baker's son Richard Platz and tracks
down 62-year-old granddaughter
German fisherman Konrad Fischer holds the
message in a bottle from 1913. Photograph: Uwe
Paesler/AFP-Getty
Agence France-Presse in Berlin
Tuesday 8 April 2014 04.29 BST
A message in a bottle tossed in the sea in
Germany 101 years ago and believed to be the
world's oldest has been presented to the
sender's granddaughter, a museum said on
Monday.
A fisherman pulled the beer bottle with the
scribbled message out of the Baltic off the
northern city of Kiel last month, said Holger
von Neuhoff of the International Maritime
Museum in the northern port city of Hamburg.
"This is certainly the first time such an old
message in a bottle was found, particularly
with the bottle intact," he said.
Researchers then set to work identifying the
author and managed to track down his 62-year-
old granddaughter Angela Erdmann, who lives
in Berlin. "It was almost unbelievable,"
Erdmann told the German news agency DPA.
She was first able to hold the brown bottle last
week at the Hamburg museum. Inside was a
message on a postcard requesting the finder
return it to the writer's home address in Berlin.
"That was a pretty moving moment," Erdmann
said. "Tears rolled down my cheeks."
A postcard dated 17 May 1913 and the old
beer bottle sit on top of a map in Kiel, Germany.
Photograph: Uwe Paesler/EPA
Von Neuhoff said researchers were able to
determine based on the address that it was 20-
year-old baker's son Richard Platz who threw
the bottle in the Baltic while on a hike with a
nature appreciation group in 1913.
A Berlin-based genealogical researcher then
located Erdmann, who never knew Platz, her
mother's father who died in 1946 at the age of
54.
Von Neuhoff said a handwriting comparison
with letters penned by Platz later in life
confirmed that he was "without a doubt" the
author.
Erdmann told local newspapers that the
surprise discovery had inspired her to look
through family scrapbooks to learn more about
her grandfather, a Social Democrat who liked
to read.
Much of the ink on the postcard had been
rendered illegible with time and dampness, Von
Neuhoff said.
The discovery will be on display at the museum
until 1 May, after which experts will set to
work trying to decipher the rest of the
message.
Guinness World Records previously identified
the oldest message in a bottle as dating from
1914. It spent nearly 98 years at sea before
being fished from the water.