Transparent man (Dresden)

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Transparent woman in the German Hygiene Museum , 1947.
In 1958, an employee of the Hygiene Museum explains the transparent woman to young people in Dresden.

The transparent human being and the transparent woman are anatomical human models made of plastic developed by the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden . Two models are currently on display in the Hygiene Museum in the Saxon state capital. The museum has exported numerous other Transparent People around the world since the 1930s.

properties

The life-size three-dimensional models are not made of glass , but of the transparent plastic Cellon . They got their name because "glass" is a synonym for "transparent". The skin and muscle tissue is transparent, so that a view into the detailed interior of the body - the skeleton , internal organs with blood vessels and nerve tracts - is clear. The skeleton is cast from aluminum . The internal organs are made of plastic; More than 40 built-in light bulbs light up the organs at the push of a button. Museum visitors can actively use this lighting. Nerve tracts and blood vessels are formed from 0.2 millimeter thick wire with a total length of more than twelve kilometers. 1800 working hours are required to produce one copy. At a height of 1.67 meters, a transparent woman weighs around 28 kilograms.

Exhibition in the German Hygiene Museum

The German Hygiene Museum Dresden, which was founded in 1912 and has been located in the museum building in the Pirnaische Vorstadt since 1930, dedicates a separate room to the Transparent People in its permanent exhibition "Human Adventure". You can see two transparent women. One of them is the first Glass Woman produced in the museum. It was donated in 1935 by the textile manufacturer S. H. Champ from Jackson, Michigan . A year later she came to the New York Museum of Science, then she toured the United States for years . From its last location in North America, the Science Center in St. Louis , the model was donated to the German Historical Museum in Berlin in 1988 . The Transparent Woman is making this available on permanent loan to the German Hygiene Museum, which is exhibiting it in a special showcase. The skeleton, veins and internal organs are very well carved out in the Transparent Woman, but the plastic has yellowed over the decades. A functional model with a colorless plastic layer built in the early 1980s is also part of the exhibition. The Glass Woman is the most famous exhibit in the museum.

history

German Hygiene Museum in Dresden, entrance area on Lingnerplatz, 2006.

The model maker Franz Tschackert, taxidermist at the German Hygiene Museum, developed and manufactured the first prototype of the Transparent Man in Dresden in 1927 - a three-dimensional male figure with a transparent shell. The Transparent Human was presented to the public for the first time at the II. International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden in 1930. At the time of its development, the model was a technical and scientific sensation for experts, the international press and the public. It was presented in a darkened room. The internal organs, starting with the heart , lit up one after the other and a voice played on a gramophone explained how they worked.

Before this invention, only individual organs were presented, but the Transparent Man is the first visual model that shows all essential parts of the body in their original position, in a functional context and integrated into a complete body. They were visible without removing the surface or injuring tissue. He thus marked the preliminary climax of the centuries-old tradition of depicting the human anatomy. She began with the studies of great artists of the 16th century, among them Albrecht Dürer and Michelangelo , and found a continuation in 1895 in Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen's discovery of X-rays that could shine through the body. The purpose was to educate people about their own body and prevent disease , but the idea of ​​a functioning, standardized human machine also plays a role.

Model in the DASA , Dortmund

In response to demand, the German Hygiene Museum produced nine more Transparent People by 1945, including one for the Museum of Science in Buffalo in 1934 . In 1935 it also produced a transparent woman for the first time. The models were shown all over the world. A Transparent Man from Dresden was also on display at the Paris World Exhibition in 1937 . After 1949, another 56 men, 68 women, including a pregnant woman, as well as five glass horses, eight glass cows and several two-meter cells were created. The mother-and-child show “The glass woman with organ lighting”, which the German Hygiene Museum showed in the Delitzsch town hall, caused quite a stir at the beginning of February 1954.

A transparent woman has been on display in the German Röntgen Museum in Remscheid since the 1980s . Since 2014, the State Museum of Archeology in Chemnitz has exhibited the Glass Neanderthal. For the Expo 2000 in Hanover , the Hygiene Museum developed a virtual human on behalf of the Free State of Saxony. The Elbe flood in 2002 survived one of the Transparent Women exhibited in Dresden unscathed.

For several years now, the concept of the transparent human has been used primarily as a metaphor for data protection , which stands for the negative perception of the complete "screening" of people and their behavior by a monitoring state .

literature

  • Rosmarie Beier and Martin Roth (eds.): The Transparent Man - A Sensation. On the cultural history of an exhibition object. Stuttgart 1990: Gerd Hatje. ISBN 3-77570-3187 .
  • Susanne Roeßiger and Julia Radtke: The "Transparent Man" in the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. In: Journal of Art Technology and Conservation. 29.1 (2015), p. 5 f. (and there further articles on the history and materiality of the figures).
  • Christian Sammer: Transparent full-body models in the war of systems. The Transparent Figures from Dresden and Cologne, 1949–1989. In: Sybilla Nikolow (ed.): Know yourself! Strategies for making the body visible in the 20th century. Cologne u. a. 2015: Böhlau, pp. 179–197. ISBN 978-3-412-22380-9 .
  • Klaus Vogel: The Transparent Man. Some Comments on the History of a Symbol. In: Robert Bud, Bernard Finn and Helmut Trischler (eds.): Manifesting Medicine. Bodies and Machines. Amsterdam 1999: Harwood Academic Publishers, pp. 31-61. ISBN 90-5702-408-X .

Web links

Commons : Die Gläserne Frau (German Hygiene Museum)  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1800 working hours , accessed on March 14, 2013.
  2. ↑ bildindex.de: Die Gläserne Frau , photos from 1959 , accessed on February 28, 2013.
  3. ↑ dhmd.de: press photos , accessed on February 28, 2013.
  4. ↑ Heike Weichler: The glass world of the Dresden Hygiene Museum , welt.de, February 13, 2005 , accessed on February 28, 2013.
  5. ↑ Wissen-im-museum.de: Die Gläserne Frau ( Memento of the original from April 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , accessed February 28, 2013.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / Wissen-im-museum.de
  6. ↑ dhm.de: Der Gläserne Mensch , accessed on February 28, 2013.
  7. ↑ Manfred G. Stüting: Old lady made of glass presents Saxony. Transparent man as a contribution to the Expo 2000 in Hanover / Schommer drew an interim balance. In: Dresdner Latest News , September 24, 1998, p. 6.
  8. ↑ Glass woman in the town hall. In: Delitzsch-Eilenburger Kreiszeitung, February 5, 2004, p. 12.
  9. ↑ rp-online.de: "Gläserne Frau" is revived , November 16, 2011 , accessed on February 28, 2013.
  10. ↑ Der Tagesspiegel about the smac in Chemnitz
  11. ↑ netzeitung.de: «Gläserne Frau» survived flooding in the toilet , August 27, 2002 ( memento from April 12, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ), accessed on February 28, 2013.