Unemployed Germans have mixed feelings about a new factory set up by 'Dr Death', writes Derek Scally
New employers are a rare but welcome sight in eastern Germany. When an investor promised to create 300 new jobs and invest €3.5 million in the town of Guben, the locals couldn't believe their luck. The small town on the Polish border has lost one third of its population since 1989 and the unemployment rate remains fixed at 20 per cent. But when the locals heard the name of the investor - Dr Gunther von Hagens - bells of recognition and alarm started to ring in the town hall, the church and the local job centre.
Von Hagens is as notorious as you can get in Germany thanks to Body Worlds, his exhibition of preserved corpses that has toured the world and attracted 18 million visitors. On show are bodies that Dr von Hagens has preserved using plastination, a technique he developed that replaces a corpse's natural fluids with synthetic polymer resins that preserve every vein, muscle and piece of tissue in its original detail.
He says the exhibition is about showing how the body functions and conveying "the vulnerability and transience of our corporeality". But his critics say exhibiting bodies cut open for an inquisitive public is a tasteless and degrading roadshow and they have dubbed the Body Worlds creator a "modern Mengele" and "Dr Death".
The travelling show has grossed around €150 million and nearly 7,000 visitors have signed up to be "plastinated" when they die. This success shows just how many people have no problem with his work, argues Dr von Hagens. "We received 250 job applications without a single advertisement. That shows the support in the community," he adds.
It was a final attempt to answer the question gripping locals in Guben: can you refuse a job on moral grounds in a town where one in five is unemployed? "Food first, morals later," was Bertolt Brecht's commentary on the matter in The Threepenny Opera (1928). But would Brecht have had much of an appetite after visiting "Body Worlds" and seeing von Hagens's most notorious works: a pregnant woman cut open to expose the unborn child in her uterus, or a man with his own skin draped over his arm like a raincoat? Last week, Dr von Hagens presented his new employees to the press and all seemed to be thrilled to be there, including Joachim Bauer who has been unemployed for four years. "I'm a trained butcher so I thought they might take me," he said with a smile. Ilona Wolfram (52), unemployed since 1991, said: "When you find work at my age, it's practically immaterial what you do." Wanda Wronska (47), a former nursing home carer, added: "I've encountered death often enough. I've no inhibitions working with dead people who agreed to serve science and research."
Dr von Hagens's scientific credentials and ethical guidelines have always been questioned but they have taken further, serious hits in the last years. He has been connected - though never charged - with several cases involving the trade in bodies of executed prisoners in China and of psychiatric patients in Kyrgyzstan, two countries where he has plastination factories. Last year he was fined €108,000 after he was accused of trying to pass off as a German title his honorary professorship from a Kyrgyzstan university.
Nevertheless, Dr von Hagens played an excellent PR offensive in Guben, praising the "practical, trade-orientation" of eastern Germans and accentuating his own east German childhood.
Not everyone is impressed.
"Why does he want to come here? Think about it. Eastern Europe is at our doorstop, that's where he gets his bodies," said Ingo Ley, a social worker and local politician. "Right behind the factory he has the River Neiße. He produces acetone as a by-product and that has to go somewhere." But Ley's campaign, and the local pastor's remark that the work of Dr von Hagens was "an assault on human dignity", appeared to cut little ice with the majority in Guben. After a lively meeting, locals voted in favour of the factory and an economic turnaround promised by the mayor, Klaus-Dieter Hübner. "In this matter I cannot just argue with ethics and morals," he said.
The new facility in Guben - located in a former textiles factory - will function as a "body donations centre" as well as the production facility for 2mm-thick cross sections of human bodies that are sold to medical facilities, museums and schools. Part of the factory will be open, allowing visitors to watch the plastination process. Mayor Hübner hopes this will become a tourist attraction.