It’s still dark in Stuttgart, but already a line is forming outside the Hanns-Martin Shleyer convention hall for the 6 a.m. opening of Body Worlds, the startling and controversial exhibit created by German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. One promotional brochure describes Body Worlds as “a medical dictionary in three dimensions,” and no doubt a few visitors have come to see precisely that. It is a fair guess, however, that most viewers by far are here to behold the spectacle of authenticity promised in the touring exhibition’s tagline: “The Anatomical Exhibition of Real Human Bodies.”

All photographs courtesy of Gunther von Hagens,

Institute for Plastination, Heidelberg, Germany (www.bodyworlds.com)


Plasticized exhibits, made from human remains, are dry, odorless, and color correct. Technicians opened this man’s body on the left side and then forced it apart so that the internal and external organs could be seen simultaneously.

Real human bodies. Von Hagens has invented a chemical process that effectively transforms the tissues and organs of cadavers into a lifelike, pliable plastic, which he then painstakingly dissects and places on display. His works are not pallid husks laid out on slabs. They are fleshy pink, peeled, pulled apart, and displayed in dynamic, even outrageous poses. A figure labeled Muscle Man stands upright, flayed bare and proudly dangling his full cloak of skin from one hand. “Reclining Woman in the Eighth Month of Pregnancy” is as advertised: a Venus-like figure lying on her side, gazing at the viewer and casually displaying her opened midsection to reveal a fully developed fetus.

This is not your grandmother’s funeral parlor. Von Hagens has exploded the human form, and with it, virtually every accepted convention about the proper relationship between the living and the dead. To his detractors, the result is a violation, an abomination even: Human remains deserve a great deal more respect than Body Worlds seems to confer with its pole-vaulting, goal-leaping, basketball-dribbling poses. Von Hagens has fended off Catholic picketers and accusations of grave robbing. In London, where the exhibit ran for 11 months in 2002 and 2003, tabloid headlines ranged from the hesitantly charitable (“Gratuitous gore—or the most amazing art exhibition ever?”) to the openly dismissive (“Dr. Death and his traveling freak show”). Many of his professional colleagues are especially skeptical. “It’s hotdog anatomy,” says Gretchen Worden, curator of the Mütter Museum, the Philadelphia College of Physicians’ 19th-century museum of pathology. “He’s playing with dead bodies.”

Von Hagens counters that the exhibit is not only educational but beautiful: It reclaims the human cadaver from the lurid probing of forensic dramas like Silence of the Lambs and CSI, returning it to its pre-Victorian status as a source of humility and wonder. “The movie industry has made a fortune criminalizing anatomy,” he says. “I’m trying to create another aesthetic.”

The more von Hagens talks, the clearer it becomes that the agenda driving Body Worlds is neither strictly scientific nor artistic but rather—or in addition—political. A resident of totalitarian East Germany for 25 years, von Hagens spent two years in jail for attempting to defect. Now he has a bone to pick with authority—politicians who claim that certain educational exhibits are unfit for public eyes, scientists who claim exclusive viewing rights to the human anatomy—anyone, in short, who insists that it is better not to see, ask, or judge for oneself. Body Worlds is a stick in the eye of the willfully blind. “It’s a redemocratization,” von Hagens says. “The layperson should have the same right to see.” That philosophy was central to his decision, in November 2002, to conduct an autopsy before a live London audience—an act considered illegal in Britain for the past 170 years. He’s still waiting to hear if Scotland Yard will file charges.

Perhaps intentionally, the controversy around Body Worlds has only added to its magnetic appeal. Since the touring exhibition was unveiled in 1996, more than 13 million people in Europe and Asia have paid to see it. To accommodate the crowd in Stuttgart, where the show would run for only nine days, the doors stayed open from 6 a.m. until midnight. For von Hagens, the crowds offer his most emphatic retort to his various critics: If what he has to show is so unseemly, why is the whole world lining up to see it?