Different Bombs

With their cooperation project DIFFERENT BOMBS, the Marc Sinan Company and Ensemble Resonanz confront the difficult relationship between perpetrators and victims. They take a look at the simultaneity of the phenomena as a contemporary historical and highly topical problem by trying to get to the bottom of the mechanics behind the air war against the civilian population. Steve Reich's (*1936) piece DIFFERENT TRAINS, which will be presented in the second part of the evening, serves as a model for the processing and negotiation of historical events and, above all, for the musical treatment of documentary language material. Based on a personal experience - the daily train journeys between Los Angeles and New York - Reich builds a bridge to the simultaneous deportations of Jewish families to the Nazi concentration and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe. As a Jewish boy, he seems to have escaped this fate only by chance - his geographical location separates him from the danger. The composition DIFFERENT BOMBS by Marc Sinan also takes personal experiences and individual narratives of the artistic participants as its starting point. During the Second World War, Marc Sinan's father experienced the Allied air raids on Berlin together with his family. The possible simultaneity of victimhood and perpetration runs like a thread through the composer's artistic work. DIFFERENT BOMBS places the composer's aunt at the center of the narrative, who experiences her youth in the Berlin war years as severely traumatizing. At the same time, it fills her to this day with a certain pride to have transported the plans for the V2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2) through the city as a "secret courier" on behalf of the National Socialists. Its planning served primarily to spread fear, terror and destruction among the Allied civilian population. This unresolvable ambivalence characterizes the piece. The story of the young Berliner is sung by Sinan's daughter Alma Su Baute, who is now seventeen years old, about the same age as her great-aunt was at the end of World War II. The universal vision of DIFFERENT BOMBS goes beyond concrete historical condemnations: it is about the idea that differentiated remembering is possible when the traumas of different groups of victims are acknowledged and told. The singularity of the National Socialist crimes remains untouched by this and demands continued denunciation.