Bodyworlds

Iain Bamforth

In 1997, in the space of four months, more than three-quarters of a million people – the highest attendance for any postwar exhibition in Germany – queued to be admitted to the Bodyworlds (Körperwelten) exhibition at the Technical and Industrial Museum in Mannheim. The show produced similar attendance figures when it moved to Japan and to the traditional European capitals of death, Vienna and Basel, where I caught up with it. It is now showing in Cologne; here, too, it is bringing in the crowds. This is no ordinary exhibition, and not the display of fossilised machine tools from Germany’s long and unfinished history of industrial achievement that might have been expected from the museum’s name. What is on show, in fact, is a collection of about two hundred human anatomical specimens including the usual kinds of body sections, slides of diseased and healthy tissue, organs in glass cases. These are standard objects in an exhibition of this kind. More controversial, and certainly more spectacular, are the 18 ‘plastinated’ cadavers – Ganzkörperpräparate or ‘whole body preparations’.