Universen: Hafenstraße

"At this location, Hafenstraße 52, ten people died in an arson attack on January 18, 1996. They had come to Germany to find shelter here. The event fills us with grief and pain. Those responsible for the crime have not been identified. The death of the victims and the suffering of the bereaved remind us to stand up for the rights and safety of refugees."

This is the inscription on the memorial plaque commemorating the attack, which is now located where a house once stood before it was demolished: Lübeck, on the corner of Hafenstraße and Konstinstraße, a former seamen's home, three stories high. At the time of the fire, it housed 46 asylum seekers from various countries and crisis areas.
With this atrocity, Lübeck joins an inglorious list of cities that came to the public's attention in the 1990s due to attacks on refugee accommodation - Hoyerswerda, Rostock-Lichtenhagen, Mölln, Solingen. But one thing is different in Lübeck, because here, despite a number of leads, the perpetrators were never identified.
Hafenstraße will recall the ten murders and allow various contemporary witnesses to have their say in interviews. There is a gaping wound in the city that threatens to fade from the collective memory. What do this guilt and its legacy mean for Lübeck today?

In an interview, three representatives of the Hafenstraße'96 initiative give an insight into their work, coming to terms with the attack and their expectations of the play: www.theaterluebeck.de/produkti...