Touching the corpse
The unmaking of memory in the body museum
Uli Linke has conducted
ethnographic field research
in urban Germany, Turkey,
Norway and the United States.
She is currently associate
professor of anthropology
at the Rochester Institute
of Technology in New York.
Her interests include visual
culture and violence, the
political anthropology of the
body, and the cultural politics
of memory. She is currently
working on a new project
in which she explores the
political technology of the
senses in modern states. Her
email is uhlgss@ad.rit.edu.
Fig. 1. Longitudinally
exploded body. In this exhibit,
posed in a sitting position,
with a penis dangling down
to his knees, a man’s torso
and head have been vertically
stretched to create fissures
and interstices that render the
interior of the body visible.
1. A comparative analysis of the
many German anthropological
exhibitions containing living
and embalmed bodies from
the late 19th and early 20th
centuries exceeds the scope
of this paper. For exemplary
references, see Hilke ThodeArora: Für fünfzig Pfennig um
die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen
Völkerschauen (Frankfurt/M.:
Campus, 1989), and Angela
Matyssek and Rudolf Virchow:
Das Pathologische Museum
(Darmstadt: Steinkopff, 2002).
The museum is a memory site, a location of commemorative record and practice, where society anchors the past
(Halbwachs 1980, Nora 1976, Le Goff 1992). Unlike other
institutions of preservation, the museum collects and
displays the material artefacts of a people’s cultural
heritage: it exhibits history through objects and stages
tangible encounters with the past by recourse to the
sensually concrete. In the late 20th century, this materiality or ‘thingness’ of museum exhibits has taken
on special significance (Korff 2002). For under the
impact of global capitalism, in an era marked by the
transient, the fugitive and the contingent, the proximity of objects in the museum tends to promote a
heightened sense of anchorage and truth (Baudrillard
1991). Moreover, the logic of time and the meaning of
memory have been radically transposed. The production of historical consciousness has become
increasingly entangled with the commodity
form. Encoded by temporal longings, the
museum furnishes the common stock for
a global memory market. As Huyssen
(2003) suggests, by transforming
historical pasts into cargo-type
products, the museum participates
in the ‘marketing of memory’ on a
transnational scale; in operating as a
‘cultural memory industry’, it bears the
deep imprint of those globalizing forces
whereby people’s ethno-national remembrances
(among others) are commodified, circulated and
consumed. The modern museum is in this sense
more than a mere repository of historical artefacts.
It is, as de Certeau (1988) asserts, a site for the ‘colonization of time by a discourse of power’. Museums
not only manufacture new historical archives of peoples, places and identities, but also participate in a
global exchange of memory.
Anthropologists have clearly identified this ‘traffic
in memory’ as a key issue during periods of transnational crisis and restructuring (Linke 2001). But
under globalization, with its destabilizing tendencies,
we also encounter a new kind of memory market: historical memory as consumer product is increasingly
centred on violence and on the body (Linke
2003). Global media rapidly appropriate and
circulate images of people’s suffering: the
memories of victimhood are commodified,
the remembrance of pain is commercialized (Kleinman 1997). At the same time,
the public interest in and market value of
bodies has moved the body to the forefront of many museum exhibits. This new
prominence of the body museum attests
to the formation of a ‘physiomanic era’,
as Robert Schenda (1998) has phrased it,
which emerged ‘on the threshold of epochal
transformations’ (Clewing 1998a). Under
the impact of deterritorialization, simulation and cyberspace, the very proximity
of bodies in the museum satisfies an
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 5, OCTOBER 2005
intense desire for realism and authenticity among a consumer public haunted by the contemporary struggles with
memory, history and temporality.
With a focus on this corporal turn in the museum
in mind, here I examine the dramatic staging of
‘Body Worlds’ (Körperwelten), a German exhibition on human anatomy sponsored by the Museum
for Technology and Labour in Mannheim in 1997.
The installation was launched in 1995 in Tokyo and
Osaka, under the auspices of the Japanese Society
for Anatomy, where it was endorsed as a scientific
exhibition on the art of preserving human remains.
Following its German debut in Mannheim, the
exhibition has toured through Germany and travelled to a number of major cities internationally,
including Vienna, Berlin, London, Seoul,
Singapore and Taipei. Most recently
it was shown in Los Angeles and
Chicago. According to media reports
from Germany, the exhibition’s ‘dead
body specimens’ have become ‘a
peak attraction for the general public’
(Roth 1998: 50). In this article I
examine this contemporary fascination with corpses. In contrast to
previous studies (van Dijck 2001,
Walter 2004a, 2004b, Csordas 2000),
I focus here on the issue of exhibiting
human corpses in Germany, a country in
which public culture, despite its affinities with a global modernity, is also
framed by issues of nation-state,
genocide and history.
corpses in the museum
The objects on display in this exhibition,
unlike most specimens in a conventional
science museum, are real human corpses:
cadavers. The bodies are arranged in various
stages of dissection, though without showing
any signs of decomposition. The corporeal
remains have undergone a preservation
procedure known as plastination: the plasticized corpses ‘do not rot or smell, and
they maintain the structure, colour and
texture of the original tissue and organs
down to the microscopic level’
(Herscovitch 2003). Rescued from
decay with an ‘unprecedented measure
of realism’, the dead are forever preserved
in bodily forms that bear the mark of deep
anatomical intrusions (Clewing 1998a).
The bodies have been flayed, cut open,
dismembered and sectioned to expose the
interior world of human physiology.
In this late modern era, dominated by
the perpetual simulation of the sensual, the materiality of dead bodies
has taken on new meanings. For
under the impact of global capitalism,
13
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
Uli linKe
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
Figs 2-5. Corpses as action figures. The runner has been stripped of his skin
and his muscles, which are partially detached from the bones, have been
folded back or stretched laterally to simulate movement. The body of the
female swimmer has been sliced into two lateral halves to show anatomy in
motion: through the play of her muscles, through the curve of her spine, and
through the location of her abdominal organs, specifically, as the exhibitors
point out, her uterus with ovaries and Fallopian tubes. The rearing horse
holds a male rider, whose body has been dissected into three adjoining parts
to reveal the deportment of his muscles, organs and skeletal system. The
basketball player, the corpse of a man whose skull has been cut open and
whose intestines have been removed, provides a snapshot of the muscular
apparatus in action.
14
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 5, OCTOBER 2005
the non-virtual presence of corpses in the museum seems to
accommodate a yearning for the thingness of things – the
permanent, the tangible, the concrete. This sensory access
to corpses might thus nourish a late modern longing for an
authentic reality, a perceptual realism without simulation
or copies. From this perspective, it is easy to understand
why the ‘Body Worlds’ exhibition ‘implores the cult of the
“authentic” [ … ] with a perfidious turn to the genuine and
real’ (Roth 1998). As curator Gunther von Hagens (1997)
asserts:
The realism of the specimens contributes enormously to the
fascination and power of the exhibit. Particularly in today’s
media-dominated world […] the exhibition satiates the
tremendous desire for unadulterated realism.
German exhibition reviews likewise emphasize that the
displays are created from ‘genuine human specimens’
(Becker 1999), ‘actual corpses’ (Nissen 1998), whose
‘naked reality’ (Vorpahl 1997) and ‘authenticity is fascinating’ (Becker 1999), for the exhibits are ‘not artificial
anatomy models, but real dead people’ (Budde 1997: 11),
‘not instructional models, but genuine corpses, presented
to the museum visitors openly, in public, and in closest
proximity, without the protective glass of the showcase’
(Schmitz 1997). But the titillating charge that emanates
from dead bodies, this fascinating allure of the authentic,
needs to be understood in terms of a more general social
dynamic. For, as Gottfried Korff (1999) points out, ‘the
gaze’, or seeing eye, ‘is also always an expression of a
societal self-understanding’. Today the quest for anchorage
and authenticity is intimately connected to the contemporary turn to the body – a reading which is in some way
confirmed by the exhibition’s visitor statistics. Altogether
16 million people have viewed the exhibition worldwide,
including 8 million in Europe, with 6 million of these in
Germany. Journalists have hailed a ‘German record for a
museum exhibit’ (Nissen 1998) with ‘up to 20,000 people
per day’ (‘Körperwelten’ 1998). The body museum deploys
the semiotics of the corpse to appeal to a global consumer
public, while at the same time presenting, explaining and
representing the dead in a culturally specific manner.
The ‘living’ corpse
The public display of the corpse, which inspires both
morbid curiosity and scientific interest, is part of a more
general history of exhibitions of the human body, displays
in which the themes of death, violence and medicine are
closely intertwined. As Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett
notes:
This history includes the exhibition of dead bodies […], the
public dissection of cadavers in anatomy lessons, the vivisection
of torture victims using such anatomical techniques as flaying,
public executions by guillotine or gibbet, heads of criminals
impaled on stakes, public extractions of teeth, and displays
of body parts and fetuses in anatomical and other museums,
whether in flesh, in wax, or in plaster cast (1998: 35).
Earlier ethnographic or anatomical displays, built
around articulated skeletons, taxidermy, wax models
and live specimens, forged a ‘conceptual link between
anatomy and death’ in the ‘museums of mortality’ (ibid:
36).1 In these museums, human suffering and the horror of
death would become interrelated motifs. ‘Body Worlds’,
however, presents something quite different: it explicitly
distances itself from this tradition through its emphasis
on unemotional and dispassionate anatomical displays. Its
galleries of plastinated corpses are not intended to inspire
fear or revulsion by dramatizing death. On the contrary,
this collection of dead bodies, which comprises more than
200 specimens, creates the illusion of life after death.
According to Gunther von Hagens, the preservation of
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 5, OCTOBER 2005
the corpse with silicon and plastic makes possible ‘a new
form of posthumous existence’ (von Hagens 1997: 214),
namely, ‘the “resurrection” of the enfleshed body’ (in Roth
1998: 52). What are we to make of such statements? And
what sorts of images do they invoke?
In this exhibition, human anatomy and physiology are
staged through a dramatic tableau of the normal, ordinary
and everyday body. The exhibitors strive for ‘an aesthetic
that strips the dead of their estranging rigidity and instead
emphasizes their affinity with the living’ (Anon. 1997b:
214). Many of these life-sized figures are posed to simulate familiar activities: running, standing, walking and
sitting.
[We see] a basketball player caught mid-dribble with
filleted muscles trailing behind […] a human rider
mounted nobly on a plastinated horse […] a seated chess
player concentrating intently on his game […] A pregnant woman reclining (Herscovitch 2003).
The ‘Runner’ is frozen in the loping gait of a marathoner
(Andrews 1998: 1).
The bodies on display are staged to perform activities
from the mundane world of sports, play and recreation. In
this menagerie of corpses, human remains are presented
as ‘ballerina’, ‘runner’, ‘horse rider’, ‘chess player’,
‘swimmer’ and ‘cyclist’. Posed in typified representations
with a ‘proximate realism’ to ‘give the impression that they
are forever alive’ (Zoschke 1994), these dissected bodies
are portrayed as skilfully crafted installations – ‘“living
corpses”’ (Roth 1998: 52). The exhibitors describe their
galleries of dead bodies as works of ‘living anatomy’ – not
‘stiff corpses lying prostrate on the dissecting table’, but
‘entire bodies positioned upright […] standing in life-like
poses’ that replicate ‘a living being’ (von Hagens 1997:
203-204).
But these presumed works of authenticity, of ‘living
realism in death’ (Schmitz 1997) are in fact synthetically
produced artefacts, mimetic objects. They are designed
to simulate the anatomy of live human beings. And this
presentation of vital anatomy is the end product of a series
of manipulations, for the bodies are reconstructed, fabricated, aestheticized and mimetically staged. Nonetheless
the exhibitors emphatically insist on the realism of their
displays. By circumventing the use of conventional media
such as stone, plaster or wax, they claim to have fashioned human figures directly from organic substances
– tissue, muscle and bone. As such, the exhibited objects
are ‘authentic anatomical specimens’ (von Hagens 2004:
260). But in the process of manufacture, human corpses
are clearly instrumentalized as mere raw material. For
the dead flesh is treated, transfigured and sculpted: ‘the
corpses are worked on without restraint and set in poses’
(Becker 1999). It is an assembly of ‘human-flesh sculptures’ (Anon. 1998b: 184).
Sexing the corpse
The installations embody an ideology of non-alienated
flesh, a mythopoeia of corporal authenticity which inevitably seeks to preserve the figures’ sexual characteristics.
‘Body Worlds’, however, not only articulates the naked
sexuality of the corpse: it renders sex iconographically
hyper-visible.
The exhibited corpses, with a few exceptions, are male.
Every male figure, regardless of its anatomical disarray,
has been equipped with an intact penis, emphasizing
its sex – its manhood. Even the ‘deep’ body specimens
which have been pared down to their muscular or skeletal
system show an accentuated display of unharmed male
genitalia: enlarged, engorged and oversized. The exhibits
of the female corpse likewise include sexualized poses:
‘The pregnant figure shields the genital area with her arm,
15
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
Figs 6-9. Living anatomy and
resurrected corpses. The reclining
pregnant woman casually stretches
backwards to permit a look into the
interior of her cut open abdomen,
which contains the corpse of her
eight-month-old baby. The standing
man, an exhibit called ‘autopsy
corpse’, has been plastinated in a
lively gesticulating pose. The upright
pregnant woman has been posed with
arm and hand gestures that seem
to beckon us to gaze into her open
abdomen where we see her placenta
with a five-month-old foetus. The
sitting man, whose body has been
flayed and partially dissected, appears
to be contentedly gazing at his hands
resting on a table.
16
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 5, OCTOBER 2005
Andrews, E.L. 1998. Anatomy
on display. New York Times 7
January: 1, 4.
Anon 1997a. Über das Sterben.
Frankfurter Rundschau 272
(22 November): 22.
— 1997b. Stachel im Fleisch.
Der Spiegel 41: 212-214.
— 1998a. ‘Körperwelten’ waren
Magnet fürs Publikum.
Frankfurter Rundschau 52 (3
March): 33.
— 1998b. Mut zur Todesnähe.
Der Spiegel 36: 182-85.
Arendt, H. 1994. Eichmann
in Jerusalem. New York:
Penguin Books.
Assheuer, T. 2003. Die
Olympiade der Leichen. Die
Zeit 35 (Feuilleton): http://
zeus.zeit.de/text/2003/35/
Körperwelten.
Baudrillard, J. 1991. Die fatalen
Strategien. Berlin: Matthes
& Seitz.
Bauer, A.W. 1997. Anatomie
und Öffentlichkeit – ein
bioethischer Problemfall? In:
Landesmuseum für Technik
und Arbeit Mannheim and
Institut für Plastination (eds)
Körperwelten, pp. 195-200.
Heidelberg: Institut für
Plastination.
Becker, J. 1999. Zugriff auf die
Biomasse. tageszeitung 5961
(11 October): 15.
Budde, K. 1997. Der sezierte
Tote. In: Landesmuseum
für Technik und Arbeit
Mannheim and Institut
für Plastination (eds)
Körperwelten, pp. 11-28.
Heidelberg: Institut für
Plastination.
Clewing, U. 1998a. Schneller
Altern im Ideenkorsett.
tageszeitung 5628 (7
September): 16.
— 1998b. Hohe Kunst oder
‘Ärgernis’. tageszeitung 5654
(8 October): 3.
— 1998c. Vier gegen Keinen.
tageszeitung 5656 (10
October): 30.
Csordas, T.J. 2000.
Computerized cadavers.
In: Paul Brodwin (ed.)
Biotechnology, culture,
and the body, pp. 173-192.
Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
da Fonseca, L.H. 1999.
Wachsfigur – Mensch
– Plastinat. Deutsche
Vierteljahresschrift für
Literaturwissenschaft und
Geistesgeschichte 73(1):
43-68.
de Certeau, M. 1988. The
writing of history. New York:
Columbia University Press.
Eberhardt, J. 1997. Leichen
im Sinne des Gesetzes?
Frankfurter Rundschau 293
(17 December): 18.
Eggebrecht, H. 1998. Mehr
als nur Haut und Knochen.
Süddeutsche Zeitung 17
January: 1.
Emmrich, M. 1998. Sich selbst
begreifen. Frankfurter
Rundschau 50 (28 February):
6.
Halbwachs, M. 1980. The
collective memory. New
York: Harper & Row.
Herscovitch, P. 2003. Rest in
plastic. Science 299: 828.
while at the same time framing the foetus in her womb’
(von Hagens 1997: 214). This woman’s curved breasts
are prominently accentuated: although her body has been
stripped of all its skin, her nipples are placed erect on
prosthetic tissue-plates. Indeed, following the exhibition
in Mannheim in 1997, this figure was replaced by another
female specimen: although displayed in an identical pose,
her breasts are conspicuously enlarged. The exhibition of
corpses or anatomical ‘object-bodies’, as Horkheimer and
Adorno (1981: 277) phrased it, requires sexualization,
a libidinal charge, in order ‘to be at once desired as that
which is forbidden’. The display of corpses operates with
an eroticization of vision, a sexualized optical regime.
For at the centre of these visual productions stands the
voyeuristic exposure of naked corpses, ‘the body’s anatomical nudity’ (Whalley 1997: 161). But this nakedness
is accentuated by an ideographic sexualization, for the
flayed bodies are endowed with either an enormous penis
or voluptuous breasts. Even in death, the body is shown to
be visually seductive.
The transformation of human corpses into sexual objects
received nationwide attention in Germany when the exhibition moved to Hamburg’s Erotic Art Museum in 2003. The
choice of this site not only points to an enhanced appetite
for libidinal signs, but also reveals the installation’s pornographic appeal. German media headlines celebrated the
‘striptease of corpses’, the ‘well-endowed bodies’ shown
‘ultra-nude and uncensored’ (Assheuer 2003). Not surprisingly, the Erotic Art Museum exhibition coincided with
the curator’s decision to expand the installation’s section
on sex and reproduction, and to place pertinent specimens,
including ‘the erect penis of one of the dead, a clitoris, and
a foetus in the mother’s womb’ (ibid.), into the centre of
the exhibition. In Germany, death and sex – corpses with
sex appeal – have market value.
Misogynist corporeality
The exhibition’s collection of body parts contains
numerous healthy organs, including nearly a dozen sets
of male genitalia. These plastinated and often elongated
or erect penises, complete with scrota, are displayed in
separate showcases. By contrast women’s reproductive
organs, that is, vagina and uterus with ovaries, are exhibited with malignancies, tumors, deformities and cysts. The
Mannheim exhibit in 1997 contained only two female figures: both were pregnant women. In one woman’s corpse,
the uterus had been cut open to reveal a five-month-old
foetus. In the exhibition catalogue this female body is
mapped by textual markers which, much in the vein of
pornographic techniques of accentuating erogenous zones,
highlight specific regions of the body. Here, however, the
voyeuristic gaze is directed to the female interior – the
intestines, the organs of elimination, the uterus and the
foetus, a presentation that is suggestive of a preoccupation with female secretions and body products: excrement,
urine, placental tissue and foetal substances.
In the exhibition, as in the catalogue, the pregnant women
are grouped with an assortment of pathologies – malformed embryos, miscarriages and aborted foetuses: ‘In a
glass case at the center of [this] room, visitors encounter a
row of plasticized infant corpses, including a pair of conjoined twins’ (Andrews 1998: 4). The subsequent exhibition in Basel, Switzerland, likewise ‘shows Siamese twins
or brain-damaged [infants] together with embryos, foetuses and a pregnant woman’s body that has been cut open’
(Becker 1999). In London, the visitors’ gaze was similarly
directed towards ‘a pregnant woman reclining demurely in
a room lined with deformed foetuses’ and other ‘pregnancy
complications’ (Herscovitch 2003). Such an iconographic
emphasis on female reproduction gone awry – the female
body as pathology – is symptomatic of a misogynist con-
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 5, OCTOBER 2005
ception of womanhood. In this German exhibition about
human anatomy, a national body politic is commemorated
by museum preservation, and inscribed and implanted into
corpses by a medical gaze preoccupied with reproduction
and sex. By way of these biological phantasms, culturally specific notions of sexuality are reified as natural or
authentic anatomy. This fabrication of biomedical truth is
furthermore obfuscated by the aestheticized presentation
of the exhibited objects, which circumvents the possibility
of critical reflection.
corpse art
This exhibition of human bodies is driven by an aesthetic that seeks to commodify corpses as ‘sculptures’ –
artistic figures. What visitors supposedly see is the ‘art of
anatomy: the aesthetically instructive presentation of the
body’s interior’ (von Hagens 1997: 214, 217). According
to media reports, the ‘remarkable success of the current
“Body Worlds” exhibition’ is linked to the fact that ‘dissected human cadavers are […] presented as works of art’
(Smith 2003). Artistic intervention is a critical aspect of
the presentations: ‘The corpse must be displayed artistically, otherwise it becomes an object of revulsion and
obstructs the unemotional gaze’ (da Fonseca 1999: 50):
‘the aesthetic pose helps to dispel disgust’ (von Hagens
1997: 205).
The installations are supposed to instruct without eliciting any emotions. The dead, which are ‘here shown in
a highly artistic form of preservation’, are ‘beautiful and
educational’ (Kriz 1997). ‘No offensive odours disturb
the viewing’, because plastination prevents the onset of
decompositon in the lifeless bodies (von Hagens 1997:
205). The corpses on display are ‘dry, hard and scent-free’
(Vorpahl 1997), ‘odourless’ (Scheytt 1997), ‘clean’, ‘noninfectious’, and ‘one can touch them […] with one’s own
hands […] as often as one likes’ (Roth 1998: 50, Clewing
1998b, Zoschke 1994), ‘even without gloves’ (Rothschild
1998). Indeed, the exhibition explicitly extends ‘an invitation to touch and to look into the interior of the body’
(Schmitz 1997). Since the individual exhibits are strategically ‘placed in the very centre of the walkway, the tactile
contact with the artful dead is in fact palpably provoked’
(Roth 1998: 51).
Such a contrived proximity to the corpse is suggestive
of a ‘democratization of anatomy’ (Anon. 1998a), for the
exhibited objects – being ‘resilient, enduring and realistic’
(Zoschke 1994) – are supposed to offer the visiting public
‘seemingly direct access’ to the corpses (Becker 1999).
The museum display is designed to facilitate ‘a sensory
awareness of the world of the body through the immediacy
of visual contact with the eye and the comprehending
touch of the hand’ (Bauer 1997: 199). Such a sensualized
exhibition undoubtedly reinforces the feeling of a material presence of real and authentic corpses – a presumed
intimacy with death.
Of course, this contact with and proximity to death is
a staged illusion, a museum effect, because the displayed
objects are not stinking corpses but synthetically sanitized
bodies: ‘dry and odourless’, ‘graspable’, lacking ‘decomposition and desiccation so completely that the interior of
the body ceases to be an object of revulsion’ (von Hagens
1997: 204). ‘The show wants to […] diminish the horror of
death’ (Kriz 1997: 9). But the installations retreat precisely
from this reality of death by exhibiting ‘living’ corpses,
normalized and eroticized. The prominent characteristics
through which death might be experienced, the sensually apprehensible signs of decay, have been intentionally
eliminated from the exhibits. These staged encounters
with dead bodies simultaneously supply the necessary
emotional distance.
Central to this exhibition is ‘the aestheticization of
1
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG
Figs. 10-11. The exhibition
attempts to show corpses
as functioning anatomical
systems. In this display of
a vascular head, the bones
and tissues have been
completely removed to show
the lacy system of blood
vessels: the head’s vascular
physiognomy. The threedimensional head has been
dissected longitudinally
to permit a simultaneous
view of the expressive facial
exterior, the skull anchored
to the spine and the nervous
system connected to the
brain. The humanity of the
corpse appears solely as a
mimetic surface.
Horkheimer, M. and Adorno,
T.W. 1981. Interesse am
Körper. In: Dialektik der
Aufklärung, pp. 276-281.
Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
Huyssen, A. 2003. Present
pasts. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, B.
1998. Destination culture.
Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Kleinman, A. and Kleinman,
J. 1997. The appeal of
experience, the dismay of
images. In: Kleinman, A.,
Das, V. and Lock, M. (eds)
Social suffering, pp. 1-24.
Berkeley: University of
California Press.
Korff, G. 1999. Reflections
on the museum. Journal of
Folklore Research 36(2/3):
267-270.
— 2002. Museums-Dinge.
Cologne: Böhlau.
Kriz, W. 1997. Einführung.
In: Landesmuseum für
Technik und Arbeit
Mannheim and Institut
für Plastination (eds)
Körperwelten, pp. 9-10.
Heidelberg: Institut für
Plastination.
Le Goff, J. 1992. History
and memory. New York:
Columbia University
Press.
Lethen, H. 1994.
Verhaltenslehren der Kälte.
Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp.
18
corpses. By means of the plastination technique, the
exhibits become in large part unrecognizable as real
bodies; this art form promotes a forgetting of the fact that
these are indeed dead human beings’ (Emmrich 1998).
One ‘has to repeatedly remind oneself that this is not an
artificial panopticon, but true anatomy […] The dissected
bodies look […] so deceptively lifelike that they indeed
appear to be works of art’ (Schmitz 1997). These observations are important, for they are suggestive of the fact
that the installation effect intentionally negates the proclaimed proximity to death. By means of the ‘aesthetic
dimension of showing’ (Clewing 1998c), the corpses are
presented in such a way that they appear to be un-dead.
The figure of the ‘muscle man’, for instance, ‘skilfully
performs weightlifting experiments’ (Roth 1998: 51).
The anatomical exhibition of corpses is ‘lively, active and
posed’ (von Hagens 1997: 204). The ‘beauty [of these corporal forms] displaces our revulsion’ (Eggebrecht 1998);
‘aesthetics becomes a means for pushing away disgust’
(Reimer 1998). Out of the raw material of human remains
new bodies have been fashioned – aestheticized, durable
and sensually accessible.
Plastination remakes the corpse into an aesthetic object:
with his flesh restored and rendered immortal, the ‘man
with skin’ stands transfixed, focused only on himself. A
set of motifs that mark the transfiguration of this corpse
– white skin, ‘classical’ Caucasian facial features, a
muscular body and heroic pose – suggest a return to a
disturbing fascination with fascist masculinity. And presented without reference to the deceased subjects’ personal
biography, life history or cause of death, the plastinated
specimens perform an inverse symbolic function. For the
corpses are aestheticized in such a way as to suppress any
evocations of violence, victimhood or history: the performative success of the specimens is derived from the amputation of feelings and the erasure of memory. Plastination
renders the dead bodies ‘timeless and thereby removes the
potential of forgetting or remembering’ (da Fonseca 1999:
58). The displayed objects, which are repeatedly described
as ‘anatomical art works’, successfully evade the memory
work of history: they possess neither an autobiographical
memory nor a historical remembrance. The installation
suppresses the commemoration both of the dead subjects’
own life histories and of Germany’s problematic history
of medical experiments, eugenics and racial hygiene under
National Socialism. Indeed, the refurbished corpses are
crafted in the tradition of the classic white German body:
‘eternal human monuments’ in a ‘museum without forgetting, therefore without remembrance, which means without
loss, without mourning and, as such, without empathy’ (da
Fonseca 1999: 56, 60).
Negations of humanity
The practice of corpse art is grounded in a series of negations, a negative dialectic which facilitates the public
showing of corpses. The bodies are estranged, depersonalized and reified. Dead bodies are morphologically transformed into ‘living’ corpses. Lifeless matter is sculpted
into life-like poses. Mortality is denied by an emphasis on
the ‘resurrection’ of the dead body. Temporality is negated
by means of synthetic preservatives. The inevitable deterioration of the body is pre-empted: the corpses remain
forever ‘frozen’ somewhere ‘between death and decay’
(von Hagens 1997: 201), and hence come into view as an
eternally enduring monumental body-architecture.
The processed corpses have been rendered anonymous. The dead subject, the very identity of this formerly
living human being, has been erased from the displays:
‘the historical-biographical construct of the person of the
deceased [is] excised from the plastinated objects’ (Bauer
1997: 197); moreover, the ‘age and cause of death are
generally withheld in order to avoid a “personification”
of the specimens’ (von Hagens 1997: 201). Every remnant
of subjectivity is destroyed, for the dead bodies are transfigured beyond recognition: even their facial features have
been changed. The exhibition shows ‘peeled, perforated,
opened and halved […] dissected bodies, a “corpse inside
the corpse”, as it were’ (Roth 1998: 51-52), which stand
there frozen in time, without personal identity or life history, robbed of its humanity.
But these dead bodies, through the negative labour of
technological intervention, are not merely estranged and
transfigured, but also objectified. The ‘cut up, dismembered and recombined three-dimensional “living corpses”’
(Roth 1998: 52) are no longer recognizable as human
individuals. This process of dehumanization has manifest
legal implications. For these subjectivity-deprived bodies
can be stripped of their civil rights. The insistence on
anonymity, the elimination of identity, scientific objectification and aesthetic figuration collude to neutralize any
potential judicial concerns. In most German states ‘burial
regulations generally prohibit the public display of corpses
[…] But the Mannheim judiciary [in the state of BadenWurttemberg] determined that plastinated bodies are not
“corpses in the eyes of the law”’ (Eberhardt 1997). The
exhibited specimens are not human bodies but lifeless
matter, material objects. Thus legally defined as a ‘thing’,
the plastinated corpse loses its humanity. The exhibition
also removes all signs of personhood: the dead bodies are
dehistoricized, stripped of any social markers or biographical indicators, and therefore also devoid of remembrance.
The corpse ‘ceases to be the object of reverence and human
compassion’ (Vorpahl 1997). ‘[T]he work of mourning is
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 5, OCTOBER 2005
recycling death
The dead are redesigned to become lifeless matter: they are
described as medical plastinates, anatomical specimens,
museum exhibits and juridical objects – as thing-like figures. Legally dispossessed of the rights of personhood,
they are not human subjects, and thus not even corpses. By
means of this negation of human subjectivity, the exhibition creates ‘phantasms of disposition about the biomass’,
which ‘reduces the human subject […] to a functioning
apparatus’ (Becker 1999): the human being ‘becomes a
body […] a device for study’ (Budde 1997: 11). The anatomically bared bodies are variously dissected to reveal
specific biological functions – the nervous system, the
digestive tract, the circulatory system or the respiratory
apparatus. What is shown is the ‘human being as a construct’ (ibid.). Instrumentalized and objectified, these
‘nameless figures’ (da Fonseca 1999: 44) are presented
with ‘a decisive purpose’ as ‘objects of knowledge’ (Hagens
1997: 214). Within this operational scheme, in which the
body is only recognizable as an apparatus, a system or a
tract, the dead are posed as task-oriented action figures:
as ‘swordsman’, ‘spear thrower’, ‘swimmer’, ‘runner’,
‘dancer’, ‘chess player’, ‘rider’ and ‘organ presenter’. The
installations attempt to create a functional death.
Von Hagens ‘wants to extract as much “didactic profit”
from the dead as possible’ (Anon. 1997a), to make the
dead ‘serve an instrumental purpose’ (Eberhardt 1997).
In this anatomical museum, the dead can be ‘disposed of’
in ‘a meaningful way’ (Vorpahl 1997), because they are
‘used for educational ends’ (von Hagens 1997: 207). But
this ‘post-mortem exhibitionism’, as the media termed it
(Rothschild 1998), operates rather more like a posthumous
recycling procedure, a commercial enterprise based on
principles that we should recognize from the Nazi era: the
attempts to profit from corpses, the recycling of the dead
and their body parts, the medical exploits with racialized
human material. According to von Hagens, ‘the plastinated
specimens […] are no longer objects of mourning, but
instructional objects – with the intended purpose to educate
[…] “to serve a useful purpose after death”’ (in Eberhardt
1997). Through medical intervention, he asserts, the dead
body undergoes ‘a shift in value from a useless corpse to a
useful, aesthetically instructive […] plastinated specimen’
(von Hagens 1997: 215). This rational economy, which
simultaneously devalues and reclaims value by recycling,
and which wants to extract surplus value from the bodies
of the dead, is rarely acknowledged in public discussions.
And yet it is part of a cultural logic, a capitalist mode of
thinking, whereby historical consciousness is repressed in
favour of an operational instrumentality: not only the living
but also the dead must be usefully productive. According
to von Hagens (1997), emotions are an ‘intrusive’ factor, a
‘digressive' obstacle, in this enterprise: ‘mourning would
interfere with learning’. The exhibition stages a dehistoricized morphological landscape, where dead bodies are
shown without commemoration and without compassion.
Unlike the mummy, the embalmed body or the venerated relic, the plastinated corpses are supposed to be selfreferential or auto-iconic: emptied of meaning, emptied of
symbolic content and devoid of any emotional investment.
The presentation of the corpse in this German museum
exhibition constitutes the antithesis of the performative
efficacy of ‘the political life of dead bodies’, as Kathrine
ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 5, OCTOBER 2005
Verdery (1999) has phrased it: it is relieved of any representational, evocative power with regard to memory
and history – death without emotional significance and
without political cosmology. Indeed, by legally annulling
the humanity of the corpses, the German state dissociates
itself from the exhibition and thus denies moral accountability. In this human museum, contrary to Verdery’s (1999)
argument, dead bodies are not ‘a site of political profit’.
The displays of bodies, as I have shown here, have been
invested with different meanings.
The limits of empathy
Inhumanity, techno-rational regimes of death, and the
‘banality of evil’ (Arendt 1994) succinctly describe the
governing principles of the modus operandi of modernity
in the 20th century and, moreover, reveal the formation
of a new kind of subjectivity – the increasing atrophy of
empathy. Emotional anaesthesia, as I have suggested, is
integral to a cultural apparatus that feeds on the labour
of the negative. The ‘Body Worlds’ exhibition offers a
particularly characteristic example of this form of productivity. Although processes of affect negation may be
symptomatic of global capitalism, they are simultaneously
embedded within specific histories, discourses and meanings. In Germany, emotional regimes are inevitably part
of post-Holocaust culture, shaped by conflicted memories
of catastrophic nationalism. The contact with mutilated
corpses, previously evocative of war and genocide, has
been rendered safe in the cocooned space of the museum.
What do we make of this ‘dead body politics’ in unified
Germany? The parade of corpses, exhibited in a museum,
which brings them ‘into the realm of the timeless or
sacred, like an icon’ (Verdery 1999: 5), links a transformed
nation to a seemingly frozen corporeal landscape. In this
context death may be a metaphor for the end of an era,
but plastinated corpses – as symbolic vehicles devoid of
historical memory – also point to a renewed resistance to
re-evaluating the past. ‘What is it about a corpse’, asks
Verdery, ‘that seems to invite its use in politics, especially in
moments of major transformation?’ (ibid: 27). The body’s
materiality, confirmed by sight and touch, is critical to its
symbolic efficacy. Strategically located in the conventional
memory site of the museum, the plastinated bodies speak
to cultural practices of unmaking remembrance. In this
museum of immortality, German visitors see death without
mourning. It is a corporeal landscape, staged without historical reflexivity, and thus also without the engagement of
feelings. The dead, robbed of their humanity, display their
seemingly un-dead bodies with a scientific objectivity that
undoes and negates the museum’s task of memory production. In Germany, the public intimacy with corpses is
indicative of a psychic economy that, with the return of the
repressed, simultaneously moves in an eroticized void of
remembering and forgetting. l
Ethnographic
photographic images
for research and
reproduction
024
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extinguished […] the sense of emotional attachment to
the deceased [has] come to an end’ (von Hagens 1997:
207). On display are dehumanized ‘subjectless bodies’
(da Fonseca 1999: 66), stripped of any affective attention.
Thus rendered emotionless, the German body museum
‘takes its leave from the culture of conscience’, from the
‘drama of the culture of shame’ (Lethen 1994: 6-7).
Contact:
RAI
2
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Arkadiusz Bentkowski
photo@therai.org.uk
www.therai.org.uk/photo/photo.html
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