The Long Shadow of Alois Brunner

“The Long Shadow of Alois Brunner” interrogates the true story of one of the most wanted Nazi criminals to escape sentencing. Instrumental to the deportation of over 100,000 people to concentration camps and ghettoes, Alois Brunner evaded numerous arrest attempts – fleeing to Damascus where he was instrumental in building Syria’s intelligence services passing on Nazi torture methods, among other things.


Arriving in twentyfirst century Berlin as a refugee, Syrian playwright Mudar Alhaggi discovers Brunner’s story and begins to research obsessively before disappearing...In this gripping play, we meet two actors piecing together the fragments of Alhaggi’s research as personal experience, world history, truth and fiction all collide.


Weaving together Syrian and German history, The Long Shadow of Alois Brunner explores exile, accountability and political memory – and the complex thread that ties the past to the present.It raises searing questions about refuge, justice and hope.


Ma’louba – Arabic for “Upside Down” – was founded as a collective by Syrian theater makers, who graduated from the Higher Institute of Dramatic Arts in Damascus and are now based across Europe. Collective Ma’louba’s works reflect on the lived experiences of Arabs in a global context: their historical, political and colonial links and the unsettled status of existences.


The company was initiated in 2016 by Theater an der Ruhr to offer professional working conditions to Syrian artists in Germany.