The museum is a memory site, a location of commemora- tive record and practice, where society anchors the past (Halbwachs 1980, Nora 1976, Le Goff 1992). Unlike other institutions of preservation, the museum collects and displays the material artefacts of a people’s cultural heritage: it exhibits history through objects and stages tangible encounters with the past by recourse to the sensually concrete. In the late 20th century, this mate- riality or ‘thingness’ of museum exhibits has taken on special significance (Korff 2002). For under the impact of global capitalism, in an era marked by the transient, the fugitive and the contingent, the prox- imity of objects in the museum tends to promote a heightened sense of anchorage and truth (Baudrillard 1991). Moreover, the logic of time and the meaning of memory have been radically transposed. The pro- duction of historical consciousness has become increasingly entangled with the commodity form. Encoded by temporal longings, the museum furnishes the common stock for a global memory market. As Huyssen (2003) suggests, by transforming historical pasts into cargo-type products, the museum participates in the ‘marketing of memory’ on a transnational scale; in operating as a ‘cultural memory industry’, it bears the deep imprint of those globalizing forces whereby people’s ethno-national remembrances (among others) are commodified, circulated and consumed. The modern museum is in this sense more than a mere repository of historical artefacts. It is, as de Certeau (1988) asserts, a site for the ‘colo- nization of time by a discourse of power’. Museums not only manufacture new historical archives of peo- ples, places and identities, but also participate in a global exchange of memory. Anthropologists have clearly identified this ‘traffic in memory’ as a key issue during periods of tran- snational crisis and restructuring (Linke 2001). But under globalization, with its destabilizing tendencies, we also encounter a new kind of memory market: his- torical memory as consumer product is increasingly centred on violence and on the body (Linke 2003). Global media rapidly appropriate and circulate images of people’s suffering: the memories of victimhood are commodified, the remembrance of pain is commercial- ized (Kleinman 1997). At the same time, the public interest in and market value of bodies has moved the body to the fore- front of many museum exhibits. This new prominence of the body museum attests to the formation of a ‘physiomanic era’, as Robert Schenda (1998) has phrased it, which emerged ‘on the threshold of epochal transformations’ (Clewing 1998a). Under the impact of deterritorialization, simula- tion and cyberspace, the very proximity of bodies in the museum satisfies an intense desire for realism and authenticity among a con- sumer public haunted by the contemporary struggles with memory, history and temporality. With a focus on this corporal turn in the museum in mind, here I examine the dramatic staging of ‘Body Worlds’ (Körperwelten), a German exhibi- tion on human anatomy sponsored by the Museum for Technology and Labour in Mannheim in 1997. The installation was launched in 1995 in Tokyo and Osaka, under the auspices of the Japanese Society for Anatomy, where it was endorsed as a scientific exhibition on the art of preserving human remains. Following its German debut in Mannheim, the exhibition has toured through Germany and trav- elled to a number of major cities internationally, including Vienna, Berlin, London, Seoul, Singapore and Taipei. Most recently it was shown in Los Angeles and Chicago. According to media reports from Germany, the exhibition’s ‘dead body specimens’ have become ‘a peak attraction for the general public’ (Roth 1998: 50). In this article I examine this contemporary fasci- nation with corpses. In contrast to previous studies (van Dijck 2001, Walter 2004a, 2004b, Csordas 2000), I focus here on the issue of exhibiting human corpses in Germany, a country in which public culture, despite its affini- ties with a global modernity, is also framed by issues of nation-state, genocide and history. corpses in the museum The objects on display in this exhibition, unlike most specimens in a conventional science museum, are real human corpses: cadavers. The bodies are arranged in various stages of dissection, though without showing any signs of decomposition. The corporeal remains have undergone a preservation procedure known as plastination: the plas- ticized corpses ‘do not rot or smell, and they maintain the structure, colour and texture of the original tissue and organs down to the microscopic level’ (Herscovitch 2003). Rescued from decay with an ‘unprecedented measure of realism’, the dead are forever preserved in bodily forms that bear the mark of deep anatomical intrusions (Clewing 1998a). The bodies have been flayed, cut open, dismembered and sectioned to expose the interior world of human physiology. In this late modern era, dominated by the perpetual simulation of the sen- sual, the materiality of dead bodies has taken on new meanings. For under the impact of global capitalism, 1. A comparative analysis of the many German anthropological exhibitions containing living and embalmed bodies from the late 19th and early 20th centuries exceeds the scope of this paper. For exemplary references, see Hilke Thode- Arora: Für fünfzig Pfennig um die Welt: Die Hagenbeckschen Völkerschauen (Frankfurt/M.: Campus, 1989), and Angela Matyssek and Rudolf Virchow: Das Pathologische Museum (Darmstadt: Steinkopff, 2002). ANTHROPOLOGY TODAY VOL 21 NO 5, OCTOBER 2005 13 Touching the corpse The unmaking of memory in the body museum Uli linKe Uli Linke has conducted ethnographic field research in urban Germany, Turkey, Norway and the United States. She is currently associate professor of anthropology at the Rochester Institute of Technology in New York. Her interests include visual culture and violence, the political anthropology of the body, and the cultural politics of memory. She is currently working on a new project in which she explores the political technology of the senses in modern states. Her email is uhlgss@ad.rit.edu. GUNTHER VON HAGENS / INSTITUT FUR PLASTINATION, HEIDELBERG Fig. 1. Longitudinally exploded body. In this exhibit, posed in a sitting position, with a penis dangling down to his knees, a man’s torso and head have been vertically stretched to create fissures and interstices that render the interior of the body visible.