Controversial Bodies: Thoughts on the Public Display of Plastinated Corpses

8. Vive la differénce

79 chapter eight Vive la differénce Gunther von Hagens and His Maligned Copycats linda schulte-sasse In the past few years, the myriad anatomic exhibitions sweeping the United States have come under increasing scrutiny for dubious ethical practices and a rampant commercialization of human remains preserved through plastination. Curiously, however, the enterprise that started it all in the first place, Gunther von Hagens’s Body Worlds, seems all but exempt from this criticism. After being introduced to the United States through a wildly successful run at the California Science Center in 2001, Body Worlds (as well as its variations Body Worlds 2 and 3) has been hosted by the most prestigious of American museums, lauded by ethics review panels for its inspirational and educational value, and extolled by the American press; in short, it has become the most successful—and lucrative— exhibition ever. Not surprisingly, Von Hagens laments the proliferation of competitive anatomic shows as the product of “greed” in which a worthy venture has been “hijacked by corporate interests.” Body Worlds’ elaborate website explicitly labels rival shows “copycats ” and charges them as inferior ethically (they display the bodies of executed Chinese prisoners rather than of consenting donors) and aesthetically (they “plagiarize” von Hagens’s “unique expressive style” and offer “inferior imitations”). Few in the American press have found reason to question these assumptions. When, in 2008, ABC’s 20/20 did a feature likening body exhibits to horror films, for example, it focused largely on Body Worlds’ competitor Premier Exhibitions, giving von Hagens a 80 linda schulte-sasse forum to distinguish his own work as categorically different. It even showed him wiping away tears when recalling that he once received some bodies of executed prisoners, which he claimed to have cremated . In short, it would appear that, while Bodies Revealed, Bodies, the Exhibition, or Our Body: The Universe Within is to be shunned as morally reprehensible, commercial, and exploitative, Body Worlds is the exhibition of choice for the viewer seriously interested in pondering (according to its website) “difficult philosophical questions” about mortality. It is ironic, then, that in von Hagens’s native Germany and in Europe, where he first launched his shows, he has been plagued by attacks remarkably similar to the ones faced by his“copycats”today. If the New York Times decries Premier Exhibition’s use of bodies of executed Chinese prisoners for commercial gain (November 18, 2005), the headline of German weekly Der Spiegel’s feature article of January 19, 2004, read “Dr Death: The Horrific Dealings of the Corpse-Exhibitor Gunther von Hagens.” If 20/20 expressed shock that bodies are imported for Premier Exhibitions under the label “plastic models for teaching,” the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung sardonically reports that von Hagens’s bodies have made their way into Germany as“animals unsuitable for human consumption”(January 8, 2000). Although Premier supplier Corcoran Laboratories is accused of the selling of human remains to private parties, Spiegel reports that von Hagens offered transparent horizontal slices of humans for 1400 to 2800 euros, depending on the durability, until 2008, when he ceased because of a public outcry. And if public officials like California Assemblywoman Fiona Ma seek to regulate bodies exhibitions in parts of the United States, virtually every city in Europe has tried to prohibit Body Worlds. Von Hagens founded his latest factory and theme park, the Plastinarium, in the economically depressed Guben, Germany, in 2006, only after the City Council of Sieniawa Zarska, Poland, refused him (and his former SS officer father, who was to direct the factory). Spiegel quotes a Polish official saying“the days when you could make soap and lampshades of human skin should be gone forever.” Gunther von Hagens and His Maligned Copycats 81 Seen from this point of view, von Hagens may be distinguishable from his competition for technical and entrepreneurial innovation, but not on qualitative grounds. Far from a violation of von Hagens’s principles, the explosion of “copycat” shows attests to his success in following the logic of capitalism. Least of all would ethical purity set his enterprise apart. If there is one analogy consistently invoked by European critics, it is with the Holocaust. Andreas Nachama of the Berlin Jewish community labeled Body Worlds a logical consequence of twentieth-century history, Nobel laureate Günter Grass called von Hagens “Joseph Mengele 2” (referring to the infamous Auschwitz doctor), and the German horror film Anatomie (2000) fictionally...