His mesmerising exhibitions of real-life corpses preserved in plastic have been seen by 47 million visitors... and now Gunther Von Hagens reveals he’s planning a truly extraordinary legacy

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Aman’s body is lying on a table, while a woman in surgical gloves cuts away at his shoulder with a scalpel. His skin is a disturbing shade of green. Other bodies nearby are also being dissected. The room smells like a warm butcher’s shop.

Welcome to the lair of Dr Death.

‘I have changed the way people think about the human body,’ says Gunther Von Hagens, whose team here at the laboratory in Germany are stripping corpses of fat and skin so the nerves, veins, muscles, bones and internal organs all show. They will be preserved in plastic – a process known as plastination – and set in remarkable poses.

This is the vast and gloomy former factory that serves as the headquarters for Body Worlds, where dead humans are processed so they can be put on display all over the world – including at the organisation’s first-ever permanent museum, which is about to open in London.

‘I have changed the way people think about the human body,’ says Gunther Von Hagens, whose team at a laboratory in Germany are stripping corpses of fat and skin so the nerves, veins, muscles, bones and internal organs all show. They will be preserved in plastic – a process known as plastination – and set in remarkable poses

An old music hall in Piccadilly Circus is being filled with macabre displays ranging from the darkly witty – a skinless rider on a skeletal horse holding a whip and his own brain – to the downright disturbing – a woman who died when she was pregnant, with her womb cut open to show the unborn child. The idea is to educate us about the mysteries of the human body as well as to entertain, but if people are shocked, then Gunther Von Hagens will be very pleased.

‘If people are against it that is very good. It propels the discussion. The more discussion, the more people come. It becomes the talk of the town, which is always my aim,’ says the 73-year-old German, who has clearly succeeded, as his work has so far been seen by 47 million people around the world. Is he a scientist or a showman?

‘Showman is a compliment. We are living in an event society. It must be an emotional event. I can only achieve this by stirring up a controversy.’

‘Britain is the only place where there has been such a strong reaction from critics,’ says Von Hagens, who became so infamous, with his deathly pale face and ever-present hat, that his creations even appeared in the James Bond film Casino Royale

He has one more final shock in store, and this one is deeply personal as Von Hagens has declared that he wants to be plastinated when the time comes and put on display in London. ‘I would have talked bull**** all my life if I said no! The idea of rotting in a grave is more frightening to me.’

And as he shows me the secrets lurking in his HQ, some of which are even more macabre than the ones he puts on display, it becomes obvious that death is not just a theory to Von Hagens any more. This may be the last interview he is able to give because he has Parkinson’s disease, and seven years ago the doctors gave him seven years to live.

‘They also said I would be in a wheelchair in four years! I sleep more. I eat better. I have slowed down. I am not in a wheelchair,’ he says defiantly. But Von Hagens does find it very hard to walk at times and has to wait while his body unlocks itself. And Parkinson’s is slowly robbing him of the power of speech – a cruel irony for a man who proudly claims to have done more than anybody to speak up against the taboos around death.

He struggles to answer a question, falls silent for a long time then bursts into tears. When the words do come again, he is angry. ‘Forget it! This is only a body reaction! It has nothing to do with my emotions.’

Von Hagens dabs his eyes with a handkerchief and swallows a dozen pills with some soup. He is wearing chinos, a dark blue shirt, a leather waistcoat and a Panama hat. His eyes look startled behind round specs, strangely matching the look some of his exhibits wear.

‘I have made people more aware of the body,’ he says. ‘They are less frightened about the possibility to see a dead body. You can see yourself in the body. That is the basis of taking more care of your body.’

‘The Rearing Horse With Rider’, 2000. ‘If people are against it that is very good. It propels the discussion,' says Von Hagens

For him, that now involves trying to be less obsessed by running his empire and handing much of it over to his son Rurik, who is the business manager, and his second wife, Dr Angelina Whalley, who now runs all the exhibitions and is fast becoming the public face of Body Worlds as her husband is forced to withdraw to his private laboratory and quarters high up in the old factory. ‘He has retreated quite a bit from everyday work,’ she says.

Von Hagens got his Dr Death nickname in this country for cutting up a corpse live on Channel 4 in 2002. ‘I am still very proud of it. I saw the detectives sitting in the first row.’ The autopsy was illegal, according to the authorities, but no charges were ever brought. There were protests at his first Body Worlds exhibition in London that year, when one body was covered with a sheet and another hit with a hammer. Church leaders and rabbis have called him immoral over the years and one compared him to a body-snatcher, even though all the corpses come from volunteers.

No body is ever identified, as a point of principle. There was a tricky moment in 2004 when a Chinese medical institute working in association with Body Worlds set up its own programme and used the bodies of prisoners who had died and not been claimed by their relatives – including some who may have been executed. Von Hagens ordered an investigation and seven bodies were returned when they were found to have bullet wounds to the head. But his son Rurik is quick to stress that it all happened in China. ‘That was nothing to do with Body Worlds. It was never here.’

One of Von Hagens’ technicians working on a corpse at his Plastination centre in Guben, Germany

Angelina laughs. ‘We have so many bodies in the closet, we don’t need any more.’

Thousands of people have been plastinated in the 23 years since Body Worlds began to display, including five from Britain. Another 167 people from the UK have signed up as potential donors, but there are 18,000 others waiting in other countries, mostly Germany, Austria and the United States. Some will be used to create specimens for hospitals or universities training doctors and nurses, who pay £2,700 for a plasticised organ or £62,000 for a full body. There’s a whiteboard with orders from around the world, including Warwick and Newcastle.

‘Britain is the only place where there has been such a strong reaction from critics,’ says Von Hagens, who became so infamous, with his deathly pale face and ever-present hat, that his creations even appeared in the James Bond film Casino Royale. But as he struggles to speak – and his wife often speaks for him – it becomes clear that there is a new Dr Death in charge.

The glamorous and slightly gothic Dr Whalley says she will be responsible for plastinating her husband when he eventually dies. ‘That has always been the arrangement, since we began,’ she says, although she was shocked when he first asked her to do it. ‘Of course, in the very beginning I thought, “Gunther, you are kidding me! This is something I would never be able to do.”’ But her understanding has changed over the 32 years since they got together and there is now a team of 75 people to help her here in Guben, a small town on the border with Poland and what used to be East Germany. ‘It’s somehow finalising his life’s work. I understand now that it’s more an appreciation and an expression of love for me to do it.’

Gunther Von Hagens with his wife, Dr Angelina Whalley, in 2008. Dr Whalley says she will be responsible for plastinating her husband when he eventually dies

Whalley is 15 years younger than her husband and was his anatomy student at Heidelberg University when they first met in 1986. Friends warned her off the strange teacher, who had already been married and had three children, but she was fascinated by him and the process of plastination he invented in the late Seventies. The result was a new way to preserve organs – but Von Hagens took it further and put them on display. That was when Dr Whalley realised they had a future together. ‘When we started thinking of exhibitions, I knew I had found my place.’

She has curated the new London show herself. ‘The theme is you. I want visitors to get a completely different view of themselves. Our society is more self-oriented than ever and yet still people don’t have any idea what they are made of.’ She has set out to show the different systems and structures of the body, including the effect that conditions like obesity and diabetes have. ‘Of course there are strong emotional reactions, but the vast majority are really positively surprised. People typically say they will change their diet or behaviour or that they will never take their bodies for granted again.’

Schools love to visit. But here in this factory on the outskirts of Guben, Dr Death’s private lair is more creepy than you can imagine.

First we come to the dissecting room, where one of the workers is wearing magnifying spectacles and slowly picking flecks of flesh from another corpse, which has been preserved with formaldehyde.

‘We put a lot of time and effort into a good dissection,’ says Rurik. This is the beginning of the year-long process of turning a dead body into a painted, posed plastic specimen.

I’m truly shocked by the sudden sight of a body with its face sliced off – and the face lying separately on a table nearby, like a weird mask. That was a person not long ago. Those lips were kissed. How much of the original human remains in what I’m seeing? ‘About 30 per cent,’ says Rurik, and Angelina adds quickly: ‘They can’t be identified. The DNA gets smashed up. We have never published any personal data and I firmly believe it would take the power away from the exhibitions. When people enter, they feel they are looking at themselves.’

The official line is that Body Worlds is dispassionate and educational. But as we go further into the headquarters, a darker and much more emotional side to all this emerges.

A worker is constructing a tableau of a skeletal Death cradling the body of a man with a huge hole in his chest. ‘He committed suicide by shooting himself in the heart,’ says Rurik.

In a separate room, the wreck of a VW Golf has been sawn down the middle and displayed with a road sign and the stump of a tree.

‘The driver of this car crashed into a tree where his daughter had already had an accident and died. He then lost his wife to cancer. He was so depressed that he decided to commit suicide,’ says Rurik. So was the driver a donor? ‘His body was so damaged that he can’t be a full body donor. He is in storage. I think he is in formaldehyde.’ Suddenly it all feels very personal.

There are clues to his father’s history too, such as a reconstruction of the prison cell in which he was held for two years by the East German authorities as a young medical student, after protesting against the regime. Eventually he managed to persuade them he was mad and so they sold him to West Germany with a batch of other troublesome political prisoners.

The shed next door houses Von Hagens’ most controversial creation: Blood Christ. This appears to be a human skeleton covered in plastinated, bright red blood vessels, with arms wide and nailed at the hands and feet to an enormous wooden crucifix. Meant as a gift for the Pope, it has never been put on display anywhere but here.

‘Yes, it is provocative,’ says Angelina. ‘It’s very much Gunther. He is a provocative person. He feels that if he is provoking then he is growing.’ She stresses there is actually no human matter involved in this particular exhibit, it is all plastic; but Angelina is clearly uneasy talking about it. ‘There were people around him saying, “Gunther, please don’t do this.” Including myself.’

Von Hagens has seen so much death, is the prospect still frightening?

‘Maybe for others who are not so often confronted with death more than for me. I work hard to alleviate this.’

Preserving bodies in plastic begs the question of what happens to the soul, if there is one. He has described himself as an atheist in the past, but that’s not the case any more.

‘My position is very clear. As a scientist I look at results, but our brain is not constructed to understand everything and I have to accept that. Doubt is my strength. Whether I continue to exist in some way after I die is unlikely but possible.’ Trying to explain, he says something that makes his wife raise her eyebrows. ‘The fish in my aquarium does not know anything about the Christmas tree we might have in the room.’

Will he be anonymous like all the others? ‘I will be an example of a new way of presenting people, together with the life history.’

So Gunther Von Hagens will break his own rule and allow himself to be put on display. Vanity seems to have got the better of him, although his wife observes: ‘As the inventor and as someone who made all this possible, it is only natural for him to be identified.’

He is tiring and will soon go back to his quarters, while she gets on with running the empire they created together. One day, Gunther will take his place at the head of the plastic army – and there’s one thing his wife, the new Dr Death, knows for sure about those specimens. ‘They will outlast us all.’ 

For tickets, go to bodyworlds.co.uk