I used to live in that part of Cologne. Near the exhibition hall, my son trained in judo at a local club. At the time, at the end of the nineties and the beginning of the new millennium, I could not even imagine that the exhibition, which raised a lot of media dust and which did not leave opponents or advocates indifferent, would come to the neighborhood.
The morning is routinely gray. Here and there, the sun's rays flashed through the cracks of the almost black clouds. I get off at the train station in Ehrenfeld and take my time in the direction of the famous Melaten cemetery. The exhibition is located in front of one of the several entrances to that cemetery.
Back in the 13th century, there was a quarantine for leprosy patients at that place, and then a place for executions. In the 19th century, during the Napoleonic occupation, the central Cologne cemetery was created there. In French, "malade" means sick. The people of Cologne heard it as Melaten. That's how this area got its name.
I don't know if the proximity of the cemetery was decisive for the exhibition organizers to rent space there. But the comparison arises. On one side, a beautifully decorated cemetery, with stone angels, monuments and chapels. It was modeled after the famous Parisian cemetery Pere Lachaise. At the Cologne cemetery, the bodies of the deceased were properly lowered into the ground, buried and left to the natural decomposition of matter. Names, years of birth and death remained on the surface.
The exhibition "Body Worlds" is the exact opposite. The bodies on display were once living people like you and me. But we no longer know their names. They voluntarily bequeathed the body to Gunter von Hagens, the inventor of the plastination process. And he created a bizarre and fascinating exhibition hit from those bodies.
Having purchased my ticket online, I pass by the reception desk without much delay. They thrust the prospectus into my hand and I already stepped into the hall. The subtitle of this exhibition - The Cycle of Life - shows the exhibitor's concept. From the embryonic state to old age, the body is a challenge. And health is an extremely fragile state. This truth did not escape even Gunther von Hagens, the man in whose head this world first came into being. He has been suffering from Parkinson's disease since 2008. Since 2010, his second wife and his son have been running all the businesses.
Von Hagens refers to the aesthetic criteria of Renaissance artists and their thorough study of human anatomy. Under "Surgeon" it is stated that the anatomist sought inspiration from Rembrandt's famous painting "The Anatomy Lesson of Doctor Nicholas Tulp". An oil on canvas from 1632 shows the mayor of Amsterdam and doctor Tulp cutting the hand of a convicted criminal who had been executed the previous day with a scalpel.
Von Hagens' intention is twofold. It points to the enduring connection between anatomy and art. But also on the forgotten connection between public display and opening of dead bodies and gathering of people. In 17th century Europe, anatomy classes resembled theater performances attended not only by medical professionals but also by anyone who would pay a ticket.
Almost four centuries later, with the help of plastinate, Von Hagens stages an operation in which a surgeon holds a human heart in his hand.
DECADES OF CONTROVERSY
Since the 1945s, I have been following the occasional flare-up of polemics surrounding everything Gunter von Hagens did. This man was born in the then Third Reich a few months before its collapse, in January XNUMX, in the territory that then again belonged to Poland. He grew up in communist East Germany. At first, it didn't look like young Gunter would be successful. He left school, then worked as a postman and lift boy. Nevertheless, he fought for a second chance, finished evening high school and enrolled in medicine.
Great history caught him by the tail. He participates in protests against the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968. They imprison him. West Germany buys it from East Germany for 40 marks.
Now you could say it was a good investment. An East German student completed medicine in the west of the country, obtained a doctorate, and showed an entrepreneurial spirit. Although he was born with the surname Libhen, in 1975 he took the surname of his first wife – Von Hagens.
Since 1978, he has developed a procedure for permanent preservation of the body through the complete replacement of fluid from the cells with special silicones. He applied for a patent and founded a company for the production of chemical liquids and equipment for the plastination process, and in 1993 the Institute for plastination.
The philosophy of the body represented by Von Hagens can be read on a board with explanations below one plastinate: "Human life is in any case bodily. We ARE our body. All our thoughts, feelings and actions rest on its functions. Without a body, we have neither the world, nor family, nor friends. We cannot exist without him".
To support these views, Von Hagens asks the dead body to reveal all its subcutaneous splendor to the gaze. "Dancer on toes" shows all the muscles that lie just under the skin. He suggests that they shape our body relief in an essential way: "Muscles convert energy into movement". The "dancer" in his kind of immortality is stopped in such a movement.
The text of the exhibition really warns: "But the body is not only the basis of our existence, but also a mirror of our way of life. Whatever we do or fail to do - how we eat, whether we move, whether we have a healthy social environment, whether we feel acknowledged or neglected, happy or unhappy - all this has a feedback effect on our body. Both positive and negative. If the body refuses to cooperate, it's game over!”
This philosophy is supported by many quotes. Jim Rohn, an American writer, businessman and motivational speaker, is quoted as saying: “Take care of your body. It's the only place you have to live."
ETERNAL BODY AND MORTAL SOUL
After some time spent at the exhibition, I understand what attracted so many people. As if through a keyhole, visitors can peer into anatomically hidden parts of the body. Thus, they actually see their own body as if in a mirror. The imagination was additionally tickled by the fact that the plastinate was a living person in some of the exhibitionist poses. What does his posthumous physical existence tell us?
For me personally - almost nothing. I was not able to add anything human to the exhibits. Apart from the intellect, I did not establish any closer connection with the exhibits. The physicality was plastic, tight muscle fibers under the peeled skin, half a human face, a body on a gymnastic machine.
But at one time I was more shaken by one of Sumanović's landscapes than anything I saw here. Despite my best will, I was not able to connect the world of the living with the world of plastinates. All those former people reduced to an anatomical demonstration in attractive exhibition poses were unable to produce any emotion in me. Maybe I'm a few decades late to this exhibition. She really knew how to shake the public, to delight or enrage them, at the very end of the analog era, more than a quarter of a century ago.
I realize that at that time I felt more deeply the cultural upheavals that Von Hagens was causing in German society because there was no infinite digital curtain between me and the world. Corpses that dance, make love or play football then I might have been able to experience as former people. Now I see them as somewhat bizarre applications of an infinite virtual universe. Like digital avatars. Social networks, games, reality shows, trashy boulevard media, an endless series of television channels, all these have reduced our capacity for empathy and increased postmodern shrugging.
CULT OF THE BODY
In addition, in the decades since the rise of the Von Hagens project, the bodies of millions of living people have become egomaniac projects. They are designed in gyms, tattoo studios and plastic surgery clinics. Bodies are expensive artificial exhibits on the real catwalk of the streets, on the virtual stage of social networks, on the sex exchange of nightclubs, in digital pornographic catacombs. Some people's social media profile is less indicative of an authentic, living body than these plastinates. I stop by a lovely body. A peeling ballerina tries to step forward frozen in an eternal pirouette.
It's not that Von Hagens' exhibits have become less bizarre, but rather that our world competes in bodily bizarreness to the point of insanity. Living people of the digital age are becoming unrecognizable like Von Hagens preparations. It is not a scandalous display of stuffed human bodies and organs. The scandal is the massive transformation of flesh and blood living people into digital zombies. Neither they, nor Von Hagens' dead, want to be more than a staged body in an all-out war for a moment of attention.
It is not Fon Hagens's that is terrible, but our world. A world where we see wars as bloody reality shows. And our body as the only good to which we would give, if not eternity, then at least eternal youth. In doing so, we do not rise above the staging, we do not reach the "wisdom of the body" that Nietzsche rightly pointed out in his "Zarathustra", addressing the "disparagers of the body": "There is more reason in your body than in your best wisdom". In addition, the exhibition highlights the thought of the Lebanese-American poet Halil Džubran: "Your body is the harp of your soul and it is up to you to make sweet music or confused sounds out of it." I cannot shake the impression that these bodies produce nothing but mere silence.
IMAGINABLE AND IMAGINABLE
I think they swarm as I walk through the chambers where we see intestines, kidneys, nerves. Twin placenta. Everything imaginable and unimaginable from the physical universe. Let's say, the dismembered goalkeeper reaches for the ball.
I wonder how the whole thing works. Body preservation is a very old ambition. We all know about ancient Egyptian embalming. This is something else. The process of tissue decay is first stopped by injecting formalin through the arteries. The skin and soft connective tissue are then removed to reveal the muscle, bone and nerve structure. The body prepared in this way is immersed in a solvent, and then in a polymer liquid. In a vacuum, such a liquid, like a special silicone, penetrates to the last cell left by all body fluids diluted with a solvent. This is how the tissues are stabilized. The bodies are brought into the desired pose. The substance hardens. The dead body's second, long-lived life begins.
Thousands and thousands of people around the world have signed a declaration that their body after death is the property of the Von Hagens Institute. It guarantees anonymity. This means that your body, not your name, can experience posthumous glory. "Biology instead of biography", that is the motto under which mummified bodies are made. Nothing from the former life of that body is allowed to reach the visitors. Their view must not be clouded by personal aspects. The nameless plastinates are from the other side of the former soul that lived there.
A KISS TO THE DEAD FOREHEAD
Perhaps this is the reason for the absence of my internal reaction when I am surrounded by probably the most corpses in one place in my entire life so far. I know from experience - when you kiss the dead forehead of a person you care about - that touch of living lips and dead skin is shocking and healing. Shocked because it confirms the visual impression that the loved one is not there, although the body is hers. Where is what made her unique, whether we call it soul, personality, spirit, or something else, we don't know. Religion claims, science thinks it knows, others speculate. The absence of man, his essence, in a dead body is a paradoxical experience, given to those who are still alive. The healing of that shattering experience consists of relief. You are not burying a loved one, but the empty shell left behind. It's easier to put someone in the ground that way.
It seems that the exhibition is still intellectually stimulating. In a culture of obliviousness to death and endless entertainment, it encourages reflection.
Plastinate with binoculars in hand. Admiral. What was this captain without a ship staring at, this Galileo without a sky? The eyes are artificial. No procedure for their preparation was found. These dead men look with borrowed eyes.
Proponents of the exhibition claimed 15 years ago: "The exhibition is left with a lot of awe for the masterpiece - the human body". This was recorded by a journalist from a Berlin newspaper. Her colleague in the same paper took the opposite position: "Von Hagens' 'Body Worlds' remain a consciously exposed desecration of the dead and graves." The dignity of the dead is a continuation of human dignity according to Article XNUMX of the German Constitution. The state is obliged to protect human dignity even after death - and to ban such gruesome performances".
In the meantime, all legal doubts have been resolved. "Body Worlds" are legal. However, people are divided into those who follow their curiosity and those who reject it with indignation.
While for some the work is a contemporary way of presenting a suppressed topic, an enlightening act with aesthetic ambitions, for others the exhibition is a sign of contempt for human dignity that encourages unhealthy voyeurism of the audience.
WHAT DO THE DEAD KNOW?
The intention of "Body World" is probably quite different. Franz-Jozef Vec, a philosopher who was hired as a consultant for the Berlin exhibition, left a note: "Anatomy is an art that illuminates the darkness of life with the light of death."
Angelina Vallej, wife from the second marriage of Gunter von Hagens, also a doctor, says: "Every person is unique, each of us has his own individual, inner face." It seems that the millions of people who come to the exhibition want to face their inner face, looking at the mummified bodies of the dead.
Philosopher Waltz called it "observation of oneself without a mirror", and continuous interest in the exhibition "fascination with the authentic".
It looks like she was bigger a few decades ago. Plastinates may be of human origin. But in the meantime, they seem as authentic as the posts of vulgar beauties who look alike as if they went to the same plastic surgeon or as if they were all shaped by - artificial intelligence.
Von Hagens achieved in his lifetime what most people aspire to - wealth and fame. He was ironically called "Doctor Death", the press accused him of using the corpses of executed Chinese for taxidermy, but then he had to deny it by a court decision. Von Hagens had branches of the Institute in China and Russia, which were closed. He has an honorary doctorate from a Chinese university. More than two decades ago in London, in front of 500 people, he organized a public autopsy on the body of a deceased man. And the cameras were on, a documentary was created. Somewhere it was banned, somewhere not. It will not be shown in Germany until 2021. They say that in 2008, Von Hagens planned to sell plastinates, but he gave up on that under public pressure. The city of Berlin tried to prevent a permanent display in the center of the German capital. After a long-standing dispute, the exhibition remained where it is under certain conditions. Von Hagens tirelessly provoked the conservative part of the public. At one exhibition, he placed a male and female plastinate in the pose of making love. He had to cover that exhibit with foil. It seems that after each scandal, the rush of the audience was greater.
GOD AND THE FLESH
Religious institutions could not remain indifferent to the display of dead bodies in public space. The Gospel according to Matthew (10, 28) says in one place: "And do not be afraid of those who kill the body, but cannot kill the soul..." Therefore, do not be afraid of people even when they kill, but of God who can destroy the body and send the soul to hell.
Perhaps from this message it can be concluded that we should not be afraid even of those who do not let the body die. The great monotheistic religions are in unusual agreement when it comes to the "Worlds of the Body". The Jewish view of the body is quite clear - if the body is not properly buried, it cannot be resurrected. Islam says that the body of a dead person is as valuable as the body of the living, so it must be treated as such. Moral and philosophical discussions are written, books and seminar papers about the exhibition are printed. Ethics commissions are in session. And the exhibition continues to be visited by thousands of people around the world. Von Hagens greets the visitors with this sentence: "Plastinate should also remind us of our own mortality, by saying to the visitor in a somewhat humorous way: I was like you, alive, and you will be like me, dead." However, you can be what I am - a plastinate".
Judging by the fact that the closing date of the exhibition was postponed twice in Cologne, it is likely that the fascination will continue for some time. I'm leaving the showroom, there's nothing left for me here. Mesha comes to mind: "Teach me, dead, how one can die without fear, or at least without horror." But these are not the dead. They pretend to be alive. And the living know nothing.
By the way, Von Hagens was shown with his plastinates back in 2006 in the movie "Casino Royale" from the James Bond series. It has long since become a normal part of our bizarre mass culture.
Bonus video:
