Born in Saarbrücken, Zahnhausen studied at the Richard-Strauss-Konservatorium München [de] with Hermann Elsner.
[2] In October 2002, he began teaching recorder at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München.
In 2005 he received a scholarship for a working stay at the "Millay Colony for the Arts" in Austerlitz/New York.
He was the initiator of new recorder works by the composers Harald Genzmer, Günter Kochan, Walter Mays, Elis Pehkonen, Rodion Shchedrin, Hans Stadlmair, Boris Tishchenko, Atli Heimir Sveinsson, Þorkell Sigurbjörnsson and Ruth Zechlin.
[9] Being a professional musician, learning and actively using Morse code (CW) was comparably easy for him and thus became one of his ham radio pastimes.