Romantic hero or coercive criminal? The man who lived with the corpse of the woman he loved

Carl Tänzler was a German radiologist 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 Prize in 2017 for her debut novel, The Lost Pages, first discovered Tänzler in 2017.

For several years, the macabre story played on his mind and ultimately inspired his new novel, Exquisite Corpse (Ultimo Press).

It features – much like Tänzler’s own story – a dangerous obsession, a custom-made mausoleum and an illegal exhumation of bodies.

Who was Carl Tänzler?

Tänzler – also known as Carl von Cosel – was born in Dresden, Germany in 1877.

He traveled to Australia in the early 1900s. At the outbreak of the First World War, he was held in an internment camp at Trial Bay Prison in New South Wales with other “enemy aliens” – for most German compatriots.

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 United States in 1926. The following year, Tänzler moved nearly 700 kilometers away to the American island of Key West, leaving his family behind, to work as a radiologist at the Navy hospital.

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

“One day he was at work and (Elena) came in. She was very beautiful and he immediately fell in love with her,” Peričić told ABC RN’s The Book Show.

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

Tänzler, in love, “took it upon himself to try to save her life,” Peričić says.

He tried a range of treatments to cure Elena and even built an x-ray machine from scratch to treat her with radiation.

Unfortunately, no one knows how Elena, already married, felt about being the object of Tänzler’s care.

A deceptive obsession

Tragically, despite Tänzler’s efforts to help her, Elena died in 1931.

Distraught, Tänzler ordered an elaborate mausoleum and coffin to house his body, custom-designed to minimize decomposition.

Tänzler spent hours every day at Elena’s grave until one day he did the unthinkable: he stole Elena’s body from her grave and took it home.

“He tried to restore his body using household items like wax, piano wire and horse hair,” says Peričić.

The author says that, in Tänzler’s mind, he and Elena had a domestic relationship.

“He would make her dress up in this dress, she would lie on his bed, he would make her breakfast, dance with her and talk to her.”

It lasted seven years.

During this period, Tänzler dedicated himself to building equipment and machines intended to bring Elena back to life.

But it was what happened next that really piqued Peričić’s interest.

Love story or coercion story?

Eventually, Elena’s sister, Florinda, discovered that the body was missing from the grave and went to the police. Tänzler was arrested and the story made headlines.

Tänzler was presented as a tragic hero – and the public appreciated him.

“Women flocked to the prison to support him… They serenaded him, they brought him gifts, everyone thought he was the most romantic man in the world,” Peričić says.

Exquis Cadavre gives voice to the women of Tänzler’s history.(Provided: Ultimo Press)

Elena’s body was eventually returned to her family and buried properly in a secret location.

The legal proceedings against Tänzler were dropped. He then constructed a life-size effigy of Elena with which he lived until her death in 1952.

“The whole story is much wilder than what I put in the book,” says Peričić.

This story 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 and not Florida.

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

“I really wanted to reclaim history… (for) women,” Peričić says.

She also wanted to explore the idea of ​​romance, which she thinks we tend to associate with “roses and someone adorable taking you out to dinner… It’s sort of adjacent to love.”

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

“A lot of it is based on the idealization of someone… and not really on the apprehension of the person. This story (of Tänzler) interested me so much because it’s this concept pushed to the extreme,” says Peričić.

“If you’re in Carl Tänzler’s (or) Dr. Dance’s version, it’s a romantic story.

Even though Peričić says that Tänzler and Dr. Dance are unlikeable characters who have done horrible things, she ended up feeling some 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.”