The unquietly decaying German dead

Life becomes Gothic: bodies buried in German cemeteries have stopped decaying.  Instead, they're becoming white waxy things, according to Der Spiegel.

A high moisture content in the subsoil combined with low temperatures and a lack of oxygen are the main culprits. These conditions transform the soft tissue of many bodies not into humus, but rather "a gray-white, paste-like, soft mass," says soil expert Rainer Horn from the Christian Albrecht University in Kiel, Germany.

Gothic readers may well remember this Mark Twain account of a previous century's uncanny German dead:

One day, during a ramble about the city, I visited one of the two establishments where the Government keeps and watches corpses until the doctors decide that they are permanently dead, and not in a trance
state. It was a grisly place, that spacious room. There were thirty-six corpses of adults in sight, stretched on their backs on slightly slanted boards, in three long rows--all of them with wax-white, rigid faces, and all of them wrapped in white shrouds.

Life on the Mississippi, 1883.
Read on for the rest of this Gothic tale:

Along the sides of the room were deep alcoves, like bay windows; and in each of these lay several marble-visaged babes, utterly hidden and buried under banks of fresh flowers, all but their faces and crossed hands. Around a finger of each of these fifty still forms, both great and small, was a ring; and from the ring a wire led to the ceiling, and thence to a bell in a watch-room yonder, where, day and night, a watchman sits always alert and ready to spring to the aid of any of that pallid company who, waking out of death, shall make a movement--for any, even the slightest, movement will twitch the wire and ring that fearful bell. I imagined myself a death-sentinel drowsing there alone, far in the dragging watches of some wailing, gusty night, and having in a twinkling all my body stricken
to quivering jelly by the sudden clamor of that awful summons! So I inquired about this thing; asked what resulted usually? if the watchman died, and the restored corpse came and did what it could to make his last moments easy. But I was rebuked for trying to feed an idle and frivolous curiosity in so solemn and so mournful a place; and went myway with a humbled crest.

(thanks to LibraryBob, Steve Burnett, and other Gothic minions!)

Comments

[Gardner]

Sounds a bit like grave-wax, which (if memory serves) Sir Thomas Browne was the first to analyze in what we would call a modern scientific way. Probably in "Urn Burial," but I can't remember for sure.

[Bryan Alexander]

That would be a rich text to return to, I think.