What happens in the body after a person dies? Judith Brauneis has been fascinated by death since she was a small child, and today she works as a taxidermist. A conversation about death masks, autopsies and a less visible profession.
Interview by
Gerhard Fischer, Munich
When Judith Brauneis was a child, her great-grandmother died. She did not understand this, and she wanted to know death without dying herself. Today Brauneis, 45, is a mortuary taxidermist and emergency chaplain at the Klinikum rechts der Isar – and she has written a book about her work that is cheerful but does not spare the reader: The head is sawed open, it is about excrement. “Frollein’s death. There’s salmon in heaven” was published last week.