THE LONG SHADOW OF ALOIS BRUNNER

Two actors come to a rehearsal with text fragments, historic documents and personal memories. They try to figure out what their story is about. Where is the piece? What roles are they meant to play? The documents deal with the true and shocking history of the Nazi criminal Alois Brunner. He was able to go underground, undisturbed, in the young Federal Republic of Germany, before escaping to Damascus in 1954 and, protected by the regime there, participating in creating the brutal secret service. In addition, both actors find unfinished scenes by their Syrian friend and dramatist Mudar Alhaggi in which he imagines meeting Brunner as a young man in Damascus. And Mudar writes about how he is dealing with his current exile in Berlin. But why did Mudar disappear? Why didn’t he finish the piece?

Part archival research, part detective work, part reenactment: The two actors unveil the fragile and deeply moving experiences in which traumatic biographies are caught in an endless loop of fears, lies and the hope for an end. THE LONG SHADOW OF ALOIS BRUNNER is about questions of justice, going underground, experiencing fleeing and the theatre as an act of unveiling – in the context of two important conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries.

Collective Ma‘louba (Arabic for „upside down“) was founded by Syrian theatre makers on the initiative of Theater an der Ruhr in 2016 to make professional work conditions for artists from Syria possible in Germany. In their theatre works, they question the political and social composition of the Arabic and European world in the face of the latest social changes.