The theatre collection of Carl Niessen (1890–1969), professor of theatre studies in Cologne, contains a draft of a comprehensive research institution for theatre studies (Reichstheaterinstitut) from 1943. This draft consists of a blueprint of a museum of global theatre history and a written outline. In the blueprint, the objects and documents were presented in a sequential narrative so that visitors would be able to explore a global theatre history through the embodied practice of walking through a setting of interrelated theatre concepts. Drawing on Diana Taylor's distinction between the archive and the repertoire, I argue that, although never realized as planned, this blueprint conceptualized Niessen's ideas of how to think about, exhibit, present and experience theatre history through material traces, as an anthropological constant – a conditio humana varying in time and space.