2023 marks the 80th anniversary of “Operation Gomorrah”. Between July 24 and August 3, 1943, Hamburg was largely destroyed by heavy bombing raids. The wounds that the Nazi regime and its war of destruction inflicted on urban society and architectural structures are still present in the collective memory today. 80 years after the historical events, it is clear that the commemoration of the victims is complex: among the 34,000 people who died in “Operation Gomorrah” were not only members of the perpetrator society, but also thousands of Hamburg residents, foreign forced laborers and prisoners of war who were persecuted by the Nazi regime. Unimaginable suffering befell innocent victims as well as supporters and accomplices of the National Socialist regime. The Marc Sinan Company and Ensemble Resonanz are tackling the difficult relationship between perpetrators and victims with their collaborative project Different Bombs. They focus on the simultaneity of the phenomena as a contemporary 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 is the 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 danger. The composition Different Bombs by Marc Sinan also takes the personal experiences and individual stories of the artists involved as its starting point. During the Second World War, Marc Sinan’s father and his family experienced the Allied air raids on Berlin. The possible simultaneity of victimhood and perpetration runs like a red thread through the composer’s artistic work.   Different Bombs focuses on the composer’s aunt, who experiences her youth during the Berlin war years as severely traumatizing. At the same time, it still fills her with a certain pride to have transported the plans for the V2 (Vergeltungswaffe 2) through the city on behalf of the National Socialists as a “secret courier”. The primary purpose of their planning was to spread fear, terror and destruction among the Allied civilian population. This ambivalence, which cannot be resolved, 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 at the end of the Second World War. The universal vision of Different Bombs goes beyond concrete historical condemnations: it is about the idea that differentiated remembrance is possible if the traumas of the various victim groups are recognized and told. The singularity of National Socialist crimes remains untouched by this and calls for continual accusation.