Where the present and the past come into dialogue

“It’s wonderful to keep making new connections with former students from the HfK Bremen so long after I graduated in 2012, and to realize that there are bonds that last a lifetime,” says Janis E. Müller. The musician and sound designer studied fine arts at the HfK Bremen, was a master student under Prof. Jean-François Guiton, and a recipient of the Karin and Uwe Hollweg Prize. He is now responsible for the music in the documentary theater piece “Raub. Verladene Erinnerungen” by Melina Spieker and Jan Grosfeld at Theater Bremen—and was able to collaborate with three other HfK graduates on the production.

What is the play about?

The freight forwarding company “Kühne + Nagel,” founded in Bremen in 1890 and still based there, profited from the Holocaust. This was no small factor in the rise of the medium-sized firm to its current status as a global logistics conglomerate. On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor; as early as April 1933, Adolf Maass, a 45% shareholder in “Kühne + Nagel” and a Hamburg merchant born into a Jewish family, was forced out of the business; he and his wife were murdered at Auschwitz concentration camp. Co-founder Friedrich Gottlieb Nagel had already died in 1907.  On May 1, 1933, Alfred and Werner Kühne joined the NSDAP. Soon, “Kühne + Nagel” became a “model National Socialist enterprise” with a “Gau Diploma” and a partner in the Nazi looting operation “Aktion M,” particularly in France and the Benelux countries. 

“Kühne + Nagel” transported the belongings of fleeing and deported Jews to Bremen and Hamburg, where they were auctioned off to finance the Nazi regime and its war efforts. By 1944, 29,463 railroad cars and at least 580 cargo ships had brought the looted goods to Germany. Meanwhile, “Kühne + Nagel” established branches across Europe—“growth in the footsteps of the Wehrmacht.” After the war, the Kühne brothers were swiftly denazified so they could continue their business in line with Allied interests. Today, the company is led by the founder’s grandson and majority shareholder Klaus-Michael Kühne, who refuses to address the company’s history. All of this is recounted in this excessively fact-driven theatrical evening set against the backdrop of Nazi history.

HfK graduates designed the space for the performative reading. The somber, haunting atmosphere is provided by the music of Janis E. Müller. Carla Warneboldt and Lauren Müller are responsible for the stage installation. They graduated from the Integrated Design program at HfK Bremen in 2021 and 2025, respectively. Their collaboration on this project arose from their shared work as set design assistants at Theater Bremen. 

Instead of memorial stones, the two now have 1,000 boules glistening on the stage floor, occasionally shrouded in fog (symbolizing repression). Above them, a screen spins like an empty projection surface. “The staging concept does not attempt to embellish or dramatize this story (of Bremen during the Nazi era and the ‘Kühne + Nagel’ figures). Instead, it creates a quiet space that draws attention to the text and the documentary materials. A pared-down, focused atmosphere allows the audience to listen closely to the narrative—to remember, to process, and also to reflect on their own connections to history,” explain Warneboldt and Müller. Deliberately understated, the stage, costumes, and imagery are designed to oscillate between systematic arrangement and casualness, movement and stillness. 

“We wanted to place a special focus on the question of what traces of this history remain in the urban landscape and in our personal daily lives to this day—often inconspicuous, unrecognized, or even repressed.” When the question arose of finding suitable video artists who deal with similar themes in their work and, ideally, also live in the Bremen area, the curators quickly thought of Patrick Peljhan, whom they knew from their time as students at the university. He completed his studies in Fine Arts as a master student under Prof. Natascha Sadr Haghighian. In 2023, he received the 46th Bremen Prize for the Visual Arts. With him, the theater team—with its diverse artistic expertise and experience—was complete.

Peljhan filmed the videos playing in the background of the stage. They show the locations of the events in their current, everyday state, where there is no trace of Nazi injustice. These include venues where looted goods were auctioned, such as the Weserstadion; sales locations for looted goods, such as today’s “Aladin” (Hemelingen); or storage facilities for looted goods, such as the one on Friesenstraße (Steintor); as well as “Kühne + Nagel” company headquarters and the residences of their executives. The idea behind it: “Video layers featuring footage of today’s locations are superimposed with historical contexts, making different eras visible simultaneously. This creates an open space of remembrance where the present and the past interact,” the artists explain.