Eva Diamantstein's play and production of Nachtmahl (Supper) premiered during the Spielart Theatre Festival in Munich, Germany, in November 2001, and subsequently toured to Frankfurt am Main, Hamburg and Vienna in 2002. Both a research project and a theatrical enterprise, Nachtmahl is based on the biographies of four women who actively participated in various Nazi projects. Seated at a long table and having a four-course dinner together with the female characters, the spectators gradually discover their histories while the theatre becomes a dynamic space of coexistences, in which the continuities between past and present acquire a material and experiential quality. By situating Nachtmahl within the historiographical strategies crystallizing around women and National Socialism, the author discusses the production's use of social rituals, strategies of domination and intimidation and mechanisms of collective communication. The production explores how culturally conditioned strategies of exoneration function as devices for separating oneself from a seemingly distanced past.