I'd take a look at the ~literal pseudo-element in the docs .. that looks like it should be able to do what you need.

Untested, but ..

  my $literal = HTML::Element->new('~literal',
    'text' => ' '
  );
  my $element = HTML::Element->new('td', "class"=>"zwischanspalte");
  $element->push_content($literal);
[download]

might give you some ideas :)

Hope that helps ...