Marija Peričić's novel Exquisite Corpse tells the grisly story of Carl Tänzler who lived

Marija Peričić's novel Exquisite Corpse tells the grisly story of Carl Tänzler who lived with a corpse

Carl Tänzler was a German radiographer who, in the 1930s, lived for seven years with the corpse of the woman he loved.

Australian author Marija Peričić, who won The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award in 2017 for her debut novel, The Lost Pages, first learned about Tänzler in 2017.

For several years the macabre tale played on her mind and eventually inspired her new novel, Exquisite Corpse (Ultimo Press).

It features — just as Tänzler's own story does — a dangerous obsession, a bespoke mausoleum and an illegal body exhumation.

Who was Carl Tänzler?
Tänzler — also known as Carl von Cosel — was born in Dresden, Germany in 1877.

He travelled to Australia in the early 1900s. At the outbreak of World War I, he was detained in an internment camp at Trial Bay Gaol in NSW with other "enemy aliens" — mostly fellow Germans.

After the war, Tänzler was deported to the Netherlands, where he married a woman named Doris Schäfer and had two children.

They emigrated to the US in 1926. The following year Tänzler moved nearly 700 kilometres away to the American island Key West, leaving his family behind, to take up a job as a radiographer at the Marine Hospital.

It's here that he met patient Maria Elena Milagro de Hoyos, or Elena.

"He was at work one day, and [Elena] came in. She was very beautiful, and he instantly fell in love with her," Peričić tells ABC RN's The Book Show.

The 21-year-old Cuban-American woman was diagnosed with tuberculosis, a typically fatal disease at the time.

A lovestruck Tänzler "took it upon himself to try to save her life", Peričić says.

He tried a range of treatments in his efforts to cure Elena, and even constructed an X-ray machine from scratch to treat her with radiation.

Unfortunately, no one knows how Elena, who was already married, felt about being the subject of Tänzler's ministrations.

"We don't have her version of the story, but she agreed to these treatments — she had no other option available," Peričić says.

A deluded obsession
Tragically, despite Tänzler's efforts to help, Elena died in 1931.

Distraught, Tänzler commissioned an elaborate mausoleum and a coffin to house her body, custom-designed to minimise decomposition.

"He took over every detail of the funeral: the music, the clothes, the flowers. As time went on, his obsession with her only grew," Peričić says.

Tänzler spent hours daily at Elena's grave until, one day, he did the unthinkable — he stole Elena's body from its tomb and took it home.

"He tried to restore her body using household objects like wax and piano wire and horsehair," Peričić says.

The author says, in Tänzler's mind, he and Elena were having a domestic relationship.

"He had her dressed in this gown, she lay on his bed, he would make breakfast for her and dance with her and talk to her."

This went on for seven years.

During that time, Tänzler dedicated himself to building equipment and machinery designed to bring Elena back to life.

But it was what happened next that truly piqued Peričić's interest.

Love story or tale of coercion?
Eventually, Elena's sister, Florinda, discovered the body was missing from the tomb and went to the police. Tänzler was arrested and the story became front-page news.

Tänzler was presented as a tragic hero — and the public lapped it up.

"Women flocked to the prison to support him … They were serenading him, they were bringing him gifts, everyone thought he was the most romantic man alive," Peričić says.

"That idea [that he was a romantic hero] really horrified me."

Elena's body was eventually returned to her family and given a proper burial in a secret location.

The legal case against Tänzler was dropped. He went on to build a life-sized effigy of Elena that he lived with until his death in 1952.

"The whole story is so much wilder than what I have put in the book," Peričić says.

That story has inspired the writing of Exquisite Corpse, in which Tänzler becomes Dr Carl Dance, a man who falls in love with his patient, Lina, in Stockholm, not Florida.

Peričić tells the story from the perspective of four characters: Lina, her sister Greta, Dr Dance and his wife Doris.

"I really wanted to reclaim the story … [for] the women," Peričić says.

She was also interested in exploring the idea of romance, which she believes we tend to associate with "roses and someone lovely taking you out to dinner … It's sort of adjacent to love".

But in practice, she sees romance as something very different — closer to a fantasy than anything else.

"It's very much based on idealising someone … and not really apprehending the person. This [Tänzler] story interested me so much because it's that concept taken to the extreme," Peričić says.

If you are in Carl Tänzler [or] Dr Dance's version of the story, it's a romantic story.

"But from everyone else's point of view, it's a story about misunderstanding and entitlement and coercion, and I wanted to bring those elements out."

While Peričić says both Tänzler and Dr Dance are unlikeable characters who did awful things, she ended up feeling a little sympathy for the real man.

"[Tänzler] preferred this dead woman to any other living person," she says.

"[His] must not have been a very rich life."

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