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.”

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?

“Nothing should be hidden,” von Hagens says. It’s shortly after 9 a.m., and already the Stuttgart exhibition hall is crowded to its 1,000-person capacity—a throng of animate bodies craning their necks to inspect their bared, inanimate brethren. Von Hagens himself is tall and slender, affable but pale—a jovial mortician in white socks and Birkenstocks. He would be anonymous in a crowd but for a homburg hat he wears at all times—in all photographs, during interviews, on overnight flights from one side of the world to the other. To avoid the crowd, he leads us to the far end of a large room cordoned off from the public. Within minutes, however, a cluster of autograph seekers has gathered at the cordon, awaiting the man in the hat.

Von Hagens invented plastination to counter anatomy’s timeworn nemesis: time itself. Bodies decay with alarming speed; it is all an anatomist can do to study their finer structures before they fade and to preserve them soundly. As an anatomy assistant in Heidelberg in the 1970s, von Hagens became obsessed with specimens embedded in Plexiglas. Nice, he thought, but wouldn’t it be better—wouldn’t the viewing experience be more transparent—if the plastic was inside the specimen? He began experimenting with a method that, under vacuum pressure, removes the original fluids from a specimen and effectively replaces them with plastic polymers. His first success, a kidney shrunken to a black lump, spurred him on. He called his technique “polymer impregnation of perishable, biological specimens,” thought twice, and settled on “plastination.”

After refining and patenting his technique, von Hagens took plastination on the road to showcase its wonders to fellow anatomists. Janitors, he quickly found, were as captivated as his colleagues. He expanded his range, preserving whole bodies, cutting them with a ham slicer and peeling them open. He created a road show for the general public; Body Worlds was born. To supply the exhibits, von Hagens now employs more than 200 skilled anatomists in two workshops in China and Kyrgyzstan. Von Hagens emphasizes that the bodies and body parts that appear in Body Worlds are provided entirely by unpaid volunteers, everyday folks who donate their remains to him specifically for this purpose. One exhibit in the show is devoted expressly to explaining the donation process and even permits new donors to sign up—which they do, in droves. Hundreds of donors commit their postmortem parts to von Hagens every year, some out of pure educational altruism, others to give their lives lasting meaning, still others to secure their 15 minutes of fame, if only for their disembodied liver.

Von Hagens hopes to bring Body Worlds to the United States before too long—just as soon as he finds a museum, gallery space, or abandoned warehouse brave enough to host him. “I know it would be a big hit,” he says. “Americans are very body-minded. But it’s also a country of zealots. I’ll bring it to the people at the proper time and at the proper place.”

As an exhibition, Body Worlds is laid out something like an automotive show. It begins with that most basic element, the skeleton—the iconic white frame that deep down, allegedly, is us. Two dozen full-body figures follow, each one more inside out than the last: a striding skeleton—the Runner—with all its muscles and tendons streaming backward off its bones like windblown ribbons; the skin-flaunting Muscle Man; the Goalkeeper, a muscular (and skinless) figure suspended horizontally in the air, one hand reaching out for a soccer ball, the other holding its full consignment of internal organs.

Between these stations, laid out in glass cases, are the parts: hearts, brains, livers, bowels, genitalia. Ever wonder what a real womb looks like? Or how 23 feet of intestine actually fits inside a human abdomen? See this exhibit and you’ll know. Body Worlds offers no portrait of perfection. The viewer is treated to enlarged spleens, nicotine-charred lungs, a cerebral cortex ravaged by Alzheimer’s. No kidney stone is left unturned. The overall effect is a picture of health through subtraction, the robustness of the human body still apparent through a multitude of its failures. The visitor quickly comes to understand that there is no generic human form but rather infinite variations on the human theme.