Documentary drama about the bomb attack: The will to bomb success

The world's first time bomb attack left more than 80 people dead and hundreds maimed. The explosion did not even occur on the high seas, as planned, but while loading the transatlantic steamer “Mosel”.

The crime was reported with horror throughout Europe and America at the time. However, at the site of the event, in Bremerhaven, December 11, 1875 is not etched into the city's history as a traumatic date. There is a memorial stone at a mass grave and a notice board at Seebäderkaje. Every now and then an exhibition details the course of the crime, and the only relic, the ship's bell from the “Mosel”, is part of the collection of the German Maritime Museum.

Now the city theater has approached the event. With the live radio play “True Crime: The Thomas Catastrophe” by Coco Plümer, a full-time actress at the Junge Theater Bremerhaven, it follows a trend. The most popular media formats currently include those that enthusiastically focus on authentic atrocities and trace perpetrator profiles. Director Luzie Kurth doesn't question the hype. She serves him. The applause at the premiere indicates a great success.

The stage is a radio play studio and refers to the theme with a torn-up ship's hull in the background. Lotta Hackbeil and Marc Vinzing stand as hosts behind music stands, exuberantly half-seriously posing as Bremen's Chief Inspector Schnepel and US detective Pinkerton.

But they also take on other roles in order to bring to life the development of the main character and hints at the historical background, stylized into types, equipped with speech bubble dialogues, which are often colored dialectally for fun.

Specifically, it's about Alexander Keith in Halifax, Canada. The director prepares his biography as a lesson in how orientation towards a role model arises from a “feeling of hopeless insignificance”. Keith begins to idolize his uncle, who became rich and famous as a mayor, private banker and brewery owner.

Hero rhymes with money for the protagonist. Wealth, he claims to have realized, gives people the power to decide for themselves what is true and false, right and wrong. Free from rules, laws, morals, it is ruthlessly possible to do anything for your own benefit.

First Keith rips off his uncle, then other business partners, sides with the slavery states of the South in the American Civil War, breaks the naval blockade with ships and smuggles goods.

The serious criminal, who now calls himself William King Thomas, flees from police investigations to Europe and, in order to make further money, builds his “infernal machine” with 13 hundredweight of explosives. Highly insured as supposedly valuable cargo, it is supposed to tear the ship apart on the high seas so that all traces are buried and the policy is paid out.

It doesn't matter that almost 600 passengers, mostly emigrants, and 100 crew members would have died. When the Thomas catastrophe occurred on the quay in Bremerhaven, the perpetrator shot himself two bullets in the head.

Frank Auerbach plays the villain primarily as a charming, friendly gentleman. Everyone takes away from him the kind-hearted husband and father, even if the calculating fraudster is a cold-hearted mass murderer.

This is told very straight forward, but without revealing sources for the true crime plot or making it clear what is circumstantial speculation and what is pure fiction. Analog sound backgrounds and digital sound overpaintings are attractive.

Foley artist Simone Nowicki makes the clocks click-clack and acoustically recreates actions. So she fingers around with newspaper when someone opens a newspaper according to the text. The trampling of horses, footsteps in the snow, and all kinds of weather events are created into illusions.

All in all, a great-sounding, meticulously crafted, charmingly old-fashioned evening of theater for true crime sensationalism. Which isn't new either: William King Thomas's head was placed in formaldehyde and exhibited in museums in order to be able to look into the empty eyes of the enigma of evil.