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Steve Reich's Different Trains

ARTICLE FEBRUARY 1990
DOI: 10.1017/S0040298200061076

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1 AUTHOR:
Christopher Fox
Brunel University London
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Steve Reich's 'Different Trains'

Author(s): Christopher Fox
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 172 (Mar., 1990), pp. 2-8
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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Fox
Christopher
Steve Reich's 'DifferentTrains'

Steve Reich's Different Trains is a 27-minute

work for string quartet and tape, written in
I988 to a commission from the Kronos Quartet.
It has already enjoyed a wide circulation: the
Kronos have toured it extensively (in Britain
they premiered it in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a
performance that was recorded for a subsequent
television broadcast) and recorded it for
Nonesuch.' Reich's reputation has never been
confined to 'serious' new music circles and the
combination of his (so-called) 'crossover'
credentials with those of the Kronos (and the
pairing on record of Diferent Trainswith Reich's
Electric Counterpoint,written for the equally
cultish Pat Metheny) is the stuff of record
company executives' wilder dreams. If one
assumes that the meaning of any musical work
owes as much to the means of its production
and dissemination as to the sounds themselves,
then Diferent Trainsis a contemporary cultural
phenomenon whose significance is quite different from that of most new music and almost
certainly unique amongst new works for string
quartet. The present article is an attempt to
explicate that significance, not so much through
a note-to-note analysis of the music as through
an analysis of the ideas the music articulates.
To any listener, whether Reich aficianadoor
not, the most immediately striking aspect of
Dffereiit Trainsis the contribution made by the
tape part. To the sound of the live string quartet,
the tape adds anotherthreelayersof stringquartet
sound, the sounds of trains (engines, whistles,
etc), sirens and bells, and a sequence of short
extracts of recorded speech. It is this last element
that is the most remarkablefeatureof the work.
Reich has linked the voices of his former
governess, Virginia, of a retired American
railway steward, Lawrence Davis, and of three
survivors of the Nazi holocaust, Rachel, Paul
and Rachella, all reminiscing about their experiences during the Second World War.
Inevitably these experiences were radically
different. As Reich says:
'Stcvc Reich, Ditlircnt TrainIslElectric
Counterpoint,Nonesuch
979176-2,

1989.

I travelledbackandforthbetweenNew YorkandLos
Angeles from .I939 to 1942 accompanied by my

governess. While these trips were exciting and

romanticat thetime,I now look backandthinkthat,
if I hadbeenin Europeduringthisperiod,as aJew I
wouldhavehadto rideverydifferenttrains.
Reich uses just 46 spoken phrases during the
courseof the piece, groupedin threemovements,
as shown in Table I. As can be seen, through
them Reich is attempting nothing less than a
brief history of perhaps the most appallingly
systematic onslaught, in this or any other
century, by a government on the lives of millions
of people. By focussing on the personalhistories
of a few individuals he is able to emphasize the
inhumanity of the Nazis' invasion of so many
people's lives; the juxtaposition of the two
Americans with their Europeancontemporaries
establishes the contrast between normality and
the Europeans' experiences. Thus when the
Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, says in the
third movement, 'But today, they're all gone',
he is recalling the luxurious transcontinental
trains on which he worked; however, for the
listener, these words can also become an elegy
for the millions of people who died between
1933 and I945.

Such a project is, like any which seeks to

make art out of other people's suffering, fraught
with danger;and Reich courts this danger with
his decision to attempt some sort of resolution
within the work. The evolution of the music,
from the brisk confidence of the start of the first
movement to the silence which follows the
wailing sirens and the words, 'Flames going up
to the sky - it was smoking' at the end of the
second, is totally convincing. But by writing a
third movement in which the voices from the
first movement, together with some of the
musicalideasassociatedwith them, return,Reich
risks devaluing the impact of what has gone
before with some pat recapitulatoryconclusion.
Indeed, the bustling opening of the last
movement - as a series of entries unfolds around
figures (a) and (b) (see Example I) - suggests

Reich may be about to do just that. However,

these fears prove groundless: the optimism

SteveReich's'DifferentTrains'

TABLE 1
1 America - Before the war
'from Chicago to New York' (Virginia)
'one of the fastest trains' (Virginia)
'the crack train from New York' (Lawrence Davis)
'from New York to Los Angeles' (Lawrence Davis)
'different trains every time' (Virginia)
'from Chicago to New York' (Virginia)
'in 1939' (Virginia)
'1939' (Lawrence Davis)
'1940' (Lawrence Davis)
'1941' (Lawrence Davis)
'19411 guess it must've been' (Virginia)

Europe - During the war

'1940' (Rachella)
'on my birthday' (Rachella)
'The Gerlans walked in' (Rachella)
'walked into Holland' (Rachella)
'Geimans invaded Hmingpry' (Paul)
'I was in second grade' (Paul)
'I had a teacher' (Paul)
'a very tall man, his hair was concretely plastered smooth' (Paul)
'He said, 'Black crows invaded our country many years ago' (Paul)
'and he pointed right at me' (Paul)
'No more school' (Rachel)
'You must go away' (Rachel)
'and she said 'Quick, go!' (Rachella)
'and he said, 'Don't breathe!' ' (Rachella)
'into those cattle wagons' (Rachella)
'for 4 days and 4 nights' (Rachella)
'and then we went through these strange sounding names' (Rachella)
'Polish names' (Rachella)
'Lots of cattle wagons there' (Rachella)
'They were loaded with people' (Rachella)
'They shaved us' (Rachella)
'They tattooed a number on our arms' (Rachella)
'Flames going up to the sky - it was smoking' (Rachella)

After the war

'and the war was over' (Paul)
'Are you sure?' (Rachella)
'The war is over' (Rachella)
'going to America' (Rachella)
'to Los Angeles' (Rachella)
'to New York' (Rachella)
'from New York to Los Angeles' (Lawrence Davis)
'one of the fastest trains' (Virginia)
'but today they're all gone' (Lawrence Davis)
'There was one girl who had a beautiful voice' (Rachella)
'and they loved to listen to her singing, the Germans' (Rachella)
'and when she stopped singing they said, 'More, more' and they applauded' (Rachella)

Steve Reich's'DifferentTrains'
Ex.1
a)

b)

mp

implicit in the figures and their association with

the phrase, 'The war is over', is surelyexpressing
the immediate personal response of Holocaust
survivors to their arrival in America, rather
than a more general historical assessment of the
world in the post-war years. As the movement
continues, interweaving Rachella's voice with
those of Reich's governess and Mr Davis, and
particularlyas it concludes in the extraordinarily
poignant music that accompaniesRachella'sfinal
reminiscence, Reich would seem to be suggesting that while America provided a new world in
which to escape the external reminders of Nazi
oppression, the internalwounds of the Holocaust
are not so easily resolved.
In retrospect, Reich's career as a composer
can be seen as a quest for the techniques that
would allow him to confront the expressive
challenge of Different Trains. This is not the
place for a summary of that career- others, most
notably K. Robert Schwartz in his extended
article 'Steve Reich: Music as a GradualProcess'
in Perspectivesof New Music,2have successfully
accomplished that - but it is useful to consider
the ways in which Reich has employed voices in
his work and also to compare Reich'sconception
of form in Different Trainswith that of earlier
works. During the 1970s the voice seemed to
hold little interest for Reich, at least in its
traditional role as a carrier of texts. Whilst
women singers appearedas regularmembers of
his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, and
featured in works such as Drumming(197I),
Musicfor Mallet Instruments,Voicesand Organ
(1973) and Musicfor Eighteen Musicians (1974-6),

they were there to provide another instrumental

timbre - in particular, Reich used women's
voices for their ability to act both as sustaining
instruments and as highly mobile treble instru2 K. Robert Schwartz, 'Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual
Process', Perspectivesin New Music (Fall-Winter I98o/Spring
Sulmmerr196), pp.373-394 (Part i) and (Fall-Winter 1981/
Spring- Suimmer 1982), pp.226-286

(Part 2).

ments capable, through the use of different consonants, of a wide range of percussive attacks.
However the very processes underlying all
Reich's instrumental music of the I970s had
first appearedin his work in two tape pieces of
the mid-sixties, It'sGonnaRain(1965) and Come
Out (1966), both of which take as their source
materialrich examples of utterly authenticvocal
behaviour. Schwartz gives an extended account
of both these pieces;suffice it to say here that, in
each, Reich takes a tape recording of a live
speaker against which he sets one or more
identical recordings which gradually shift out
of phase with one another. Thus what begins as
documentary evidence of a particularspeaker(a
black revivalist preacherin It's GonnaRain, for
example) is slowly transformed into a dense
canonic texture in which the rhythms and
intonationof the originalperformancebecome at
least as important as the sense of what was said.
In his book, WritingsaboutMusic, Reich has
described how he began to explore ways of
developing his use of the 'phase shifting'
technique, discoveredin these tape works, within live instrumentalmusic. Although the musical
traces of this exploration are to be heard most
readily in works such as ViolinPhaseand Piano
Phase (both I967) and Drumming,the legacy of
phase shifting is present in even the most recent
music. Reich's players areno longer requiredto
imitate the mechanicalprocess of tape machines
slowly moving out of synchronization; but the
musical product of that process - the gradual
appearance of a second version of a musical
figure at a rhythmicallydiscernibledistancefrom
its first appearance- remains Reich's primary
means of achieving proliferation within a
musical texture. At its simplest this can be oldfashioned canon, as in the vocal entries at the
start of Tehillim (1981), or old-fashioned
imitation, as in the instrumental imitations of
the speakersin DifferentTrains,a device which I
shall discuss later. In the more complex textures
of ElectricCounterpoint(1987) one is aware not
so much of the workings of voice against voice
as of the elaborate cross-rhythms that result
from their combination.
In the early I98os Reich createdtwo works in
which live voices were given texts to articulate:
in Tehillimfour women's voices, accompanied
by chamberorchestra,sing settingsof the psalms
in the original Hebrew; in The Desert Music
(1984) a chorus of 27 voices, with orchestral
accompaniment, sing settings of poetry by
William Carlos Williams. However inventive
they are, either vocally or instrumentally - and
Tehillim is, I believe, one of Reich's finest

SteveReich's'DifferentTrains'

achievements - neither work can be said to break interestin the politicalimplicationsof his music,
new ground in their combination of words and last in evidence in the benefit concert that
music. Perhaps because text-setting itself was premiered Come Out in April I967, for the renew to Reich (with the exception of student trial of the "Harlem Six" of which Daniel
works) when he came to write Tehillim, and Hamm, the voice on the tape, was a member'.6
setting an English text was new to him when he DifferentTrainsis certainly a triumphant fulfilwrote The Desert Music, he adopts a straight- ment of those intentions.
forward, predominantly syllabic approach in
Perhapsthe most obvious differencebetween
both pieces. As Keith Potter observed soon after Reich's plans for the successor to My Name Is
the premiere of The DesertMusic:'The use of an and DifferentTrainsis the absenceof any attempt
English-language text is entirely new in Reich's at real-timeprocessingof the voices used. Above
mature, "repetitive" music and... he sets the all else Reich is a composer with a strong sense of
words in a manner resembling the Western the art of the possible: much of his instrumental
music in the I970s evolved aroundthe particular
traditional notion of the term "setting" '.3 Only
in Different Trains is the significance of the re- gifts of the musicianswith whom he worked, and
introduction of words into Reich's music the documentationaccompanyingthe recordings
through Tehillimand TheDesertMusicconfirmed. of works such as MusicforLargeEnsemble(1978)
It might appear that the problems presented and Octet (1978-9), in which the process of
by texts were ignored in the years between It's revision after the first performanceis described,
Gonna Rain and Tehillim until the potential of demonstrates Reich's determination always to
the phase shifting technique discovered in the achieve the most idiomatically successful form
early tape pieces had been refined. It is neverthe- for his ideas. Reich'svisits to IRCAM, in I980 for
less important to note that throughout this work on My Name Is and laterwhile he worked
period Reich returned from time to time to a on Sextet (I985), must surely have convinced
'work in progress' that did involve words. This him that, although equipment was available
be capableof the sort of
was My Name Is: EnsemblePortrait,begun in which would technically
live signal processing he required, the problems
1967 and only provisionally completed in 1980.
Ian Gardiner has described it as
presentedby the use of this equipmentin rehearsal
and performancewere too greatto be practicable.
dating back to a loosely structuredpiece of 1967,
In particularthe live integrationof passagesof
wherethenamesof theaudience,tapedastheyentered
the hall and then edited onto tape loops, were prerecordedspeech with the sort of instrumental
improvisedon by Reich,crossingphaserelationships music that Reich writes is bedevilled by the fact
acrossthreeportabletaperecorders.In 1980hevisited that few speakers adhere to the regular pulse
IRCAMin Pariswith theaimof discoveringthetech- that is such a characteristicof all Reich's work.
nologicalmeansto reapplythis conceptin realtime, If this pulse was absent in the vocal material,
of hisown ensemble, that material would be felt to stand outside the
usingthenameof theperformers
andwith thephaserelationships
organizedin advance. world of the live instruments; whereas Reich's
At its firstperformance,in New YorkonJanuary6, aim
was, as Schwarts says, 'to utilize live
198I, the eight performersof Octetsteppedforward instruments ... to imitate the sounds
[of the
to the microphonesandintroducedthemselves...the
...
as
well
as
to
the
voices]
complete
implied
tapephasedeachname,one at a time.4
harmonic, melodic and rhythmic inferences of
Schwartz quotes Reich as insisting thatMy Name the resulting patterns'.' (It is worth noting that,
Is: EnsemblePortrait'is just a sketch... because in the initialstages of planning TheDesertMusic,
the important part of it is to introduce... instru- Reich considered using a tape of William Carlos
ments' so that 'one would end up with a tape Williams - author of the poetry chosen as text
and a live score'.5 Schwartz also reports that, in for the work - reading one of his poems. Here
the work for which My Name Is was the sketch, too the rhythms of the prerecordedvoice would
Reich hoped also to add real-time treatments of inevitably have meant that the voice was heard
voices from history, such as Hitler or Roosevelt at one remove from Reich's music and, perhaps
perhaps. As Ian Gardiner has observed, these for that reason, Reich abandoned the idea.)
Reich's solution of this technicalproblem was
intentions 'would seem to indicate a renewed
typically
elegant and practical. One of the great
3KeithPotter,'TheRecentPhasesof SteveReich',Contact
29
in commercially manufactured
revolutions
(Spring 1985), p.3 1.
in the I98os has been the
music
technology
4 lan
Music was a
the
Gardiner,
gradualprocess: rediscoveryof
traditionin the music of Steve Reich since I976, (MA Thesis,
Keele University, 1983), pp.37-8.

s Schwartz, op cit.,

p.263.

Gardiner,op cit., footnotes p.iii.

7 Schwartz, cit., p.262.
op

Steve Reich's'DifferentTrains'

Steve Reich (photo:( 1989 MarthaSwope Assocs.)

development of digital sampling: Reich used

the Casio FZ-I and FZ-IoM samplers to
record, edit, transpose and play the fragments
of speech that make up the vocal element of the
tape part. In this way he was able to draw his
'documentary' material into the rhythmic and
harmonic scheme of the work. By similarly
sampling and editing the train sounds, sirens
and bells also used in the tape part they too
could be fully incorporated into the structureof
the music. Thus the repeated semiquavers of
the string writing are unmistakably coupled to
the clatter of trains, while, most memorably,
the train-whistles signal tonal shifts. Some might
argue (Boulez has always offered this as a defence
of the unwieldy technical requirements of
Repons)that live electronics offer a flexibility in
performance that a preordainedtape part cannot

match. In the end this became an impossible

luxury for DifferentTrains, as Reich decided to
multiply the Kronos and have three extra
versions of them on tape, but recent experience
would seem to suggest anyway that younger
performers (Kronos themselves or, in very
different music, the new generation of
Stockhausen interpreters)can learn to play live
with tape in such a way that their music-making
sounds completely spontaneous. (On record,
the medium through which the majority of
people get to know music today, the distinction
is of course quite irrelevant.)
Sampling and the manipulation of samples
have become mainstays of a lot of pop music in
the last few years; but if sampling offered Reich
the technology through which he could integrate
the vocal and ambient sound materials of
DifferentTrainsinto the kinds of rhythmic and
harmonic patterns which now characterizehis
music, he did not succumb to the lure of the
flashing lights of the acid-house party. Whereas
House-music favours abruptly edited samples,
obsessively repeated sound-bites dominated by
an insistently regular tempo, in DifferentTrains
the speed of each voice's delivery is always
respected. Consequently, although Different
Trainsis cast in three distinct movements, there
are many tempo-changes within each movement, the pace of the music being adjusted to
accommodate the speed of each new phrase so
that the identity of each voice and of each phrase
is preserved. However, Reich does sometimes
loop one or two words within a phraseto createa
new rhythm out of the rhythms alreadypresent.
This is particularlythe case in the firstmovement
where, for example, the second phrase starts as
'one of the fastest trains' (repeatedthree times),
and then becomes 'one of the fastest trains,
fastest trains' (repeated four times), and then
becomes 'one of the fastest trains, fastest trains,
one of the fastest trains' (repeated seven times)
before the next phrase is introduced (see
Example 2).

Ex.2

.m

one of the fast

est trains

of the
one of
fast
the fast
one

est trains
trains
est

//'
fast
fast

n j.

one of the fast

--

est trains
trains
est

Music examples ? copyright

i.
-

J
est trains

.fast
L

fast
of the
the fast
one of
one

1989 by Hendon Music Inc.

est trains

trains
est trains
est

SteveReich's'DifferentTrains'
In the sleeve-notes for the recording of The
Desert Music, Reich talks about his fascination
with 'that constant flickering of attention
between what words mean aridhow they sound'.8
In Diferent Trains where, rather than being set
to music as in The Desert Music, the words
themselves becomemusic, that ambiguity is even
more evident. Reich says in the sleeve-notes for
Different Trains that 'in order to combine the
taped speech with the stringinstrumentsI selected
small speech samples that are more or less clearly
pitched and then notated them as accurately as
possible in musical notation'. As example he
gives the opening phrase (see Example 3). Yet it

music and text back through The DesertMusic,

Tehillimand, especially, My Name Is: Ensemble
Portraitto ComeOut and It's GonnaRain.
In the same way I think it can be demonstrated
that the formal sophisticationof DifferentTrains,
unprecedented though it is in Reich's work, is
neverthelessthe resultof an evolutionary process
that can be traced through his earlier works,
particularly those of the I98os. With the
exception of the four-movement Drumming,'l
each of Reich's works in the I97os was cast in a
single movement with a continuous unchanging
pulse. Within these large structures the music,
though cearly sectionalized,is rhythmicallyand

Ex.3
T
_

P4

from

Chi-ca - go

is important that the words are heard and

understood, and to this end Reich always assigns
an instrument to the task of either anticipating
and/or echoing each phrase. These instrumental
imitations act both as indication that a new
phrase is about to be introduced and - especially
useful in the second movement, where some
voices are almost submerged in the instrumental
music - as a recurrent impression of the voice's
inflection, enabling the listenergraduallyto piece
the phrase together. At the same time an intriguing ambiguity is set up between the gradual
unfolding of the music's narrative and that of
the speakers' various stories.
Reich's sleeve-notes for Different Trains
acknowledge this ambiguity: he argues that 'the
piece thus presents both a documentary and a
musical reality' and goes on to claim that it also
'begins a new musical direction'. However, as I
have already suggested, the new direction taken
by DifferentTrainscan also be seen as a fulfilment
of a number of ideas more or less explicit in
Reich's earlier works. In I980, in an interview
with the Christian ScienceMonitor, Reich said
that 'I believe that music does not exist in a
vacuum ... My work [is] ... moving back...
toward a more mainstream approach',9and the
use and choice of texts in his work in the I980s is
a clear indication of his desire to engage with
major contemporary themes: humanity's
relationship to God in Tehillim, to the environment in The DesertMusicand to itselfin Different
Trains. It is also possible to trace the roots of
Different Trains' approach to the interaction of
8 Steve Reich, The DesertMusic, Nonesuch 797 IOI-I, 1985.

9 David Sterritt, 'Tradition Reseen:

Composer Steve Reich',
Christian Science Monitor, 23 October

1980, p.20.

to New Yor - k

harmonically consistent: as Reich said of Music

for EighteenMusicians,'The relationshipbetween
the different sections is... best understood in
terms of resemblances between members of a
family. Certain characteristics will be shared
but others will be unique'." In Tehillim,
however, Reich divides the work into four clear
movements, characterizednot only by different
tempi (in the scheme fast-fast-slow-fast) but
also by distinctly different melodic, harmonic
and rhythmic material;and the majority of his
works from the I980s similarly consist of a
number of separatemovements. Both New York
Counterpoint(1985) and Electric Counterpoint
adopt a three-movement, fast-slow-fast outline
while The Desert Music and Sextet are both in
five movements.
Reich seems to'have a particularpredilection
for symmetrical forms and in The DesertMusic
takes this to its logical conclusion, organizing
the music in an arch-like form - ABCBA where the central movement is itself a tripartite
structure- CDC (he even admits to having first
read William Carlos Williams because, aged I6,
he was attractedby the symmetry of the poet's
name!). Geometric schema are easily read in a
two-dimensional representation, less easily in
threedimensions, and with greatdifficulty when
articulatedthrough time,12 so while the symmetries of The DesertMusicmay please the eye they
'0However Drummingis perhaps best regardednot as a work
in four movements but as four transformations of the same
material.
" Steve Reich,
Musicians,ECM I I29, I978.
MusicforEighteen
12
Reich's MusicforMalletInstruments,
VoicesandOrgan,where
each section is based on a process of gradual durational
expansion followed by contraction, is almostan exception to
this rule!

Steve Reich's'DifferentTrains'

make rather less sense to the ear. To avoid the

stagnation possible in a structure requiring such
wholesale repetition Reich modifies each repeat,
setting a different text when the first movement
returns as the last movement, adding an extended orchestral introduction before the voices
enter, and a siren-like wail for the violas in the
last part of the middle movement.
Implicit in any narrative, dramaticor musical
form where the end is a return to the beginning
is a sense of existence as a ring of destiny out of
which it is impossible to progress. For all its
striving to convince us that
Manhassurvivedhithertobecausehe was too
ignorantto know how to realizehis wishes.
Now thathe canrealizethemhe musteither
changethemor perish.

In each of Steve Reich's major works with

text from the I98os there is a concern with the
very act of making music. Most straightforwardly, in the last movement of Tehillim
Reich sets Psalm 150, an exhortation to worship
for all musicians:
PraiseHim with drumanddance,
praiseHimwith stringsandwinds.
PraiseHim with soundingcymbals,
praiseHim with clangingcymbals.
In TheDesertMusicReich chooses for the central
section of the middle movement a text that
might almost read as an injunction to his
performers:
It is a principleof music
to repeatthetheme.Repeat
andrepeatagain,
as thepacemounts.The
themeis difficult
butno moredifficult
thanthefactsto be
resolved.
(WilliamCarlosWilliams,TheOrchestra)

The Desert Music, by arriving ultimately at the

point from which we started, takesus no further.
Perhaps as a result of Reich's at least subconscious awareness of this, symmetry in Different
Trainsextends to no more than a fast-slow-fast
distinction between the three movements;
indeed, by running the first two movements while in the second and fourth movements the
together, Reich deliberatelyavoids any emphasis text can be read as a description of the type of
even of this symmetry. Continuity between the
listening Reich's music requires:
first and second movements is achieved both
Well,shallwe
verbally - 'I941 I guess it must have been' is
Is
think
or
listen?
there
a soundaddressed
fbllowed by '1940' - and through tempo:
not whollyto theear?
the
slower
Virginia's phrase anticipates
speeds
Wehalfclose
of the following movement. More subtly, the
oureyes. Wedo not
same accompaniment figure, first heard at the
hearit throughoureyes.
work's opening (Ex.4) and present throughout
It is not
a flutenoteeither,it is therelation
of a flutenote
Ex.4
to a drum.I amwide
awake.The mind
is listening.
(WilliamCarlosWilliams,TheOrchestra)
mf
the first movement, continues to be heard
throughout the second movement, albeit much
slower. At the start of the last movement,
however, this figure disappears- to return, only
briefly, when Mr Davis's voice returnswith the
words 'from New York to Los Angeles'. Thus,
while the renewed vigour of the music at the
beginning of the third movement may initially
imply a return to the 'America - Before the war'
from which the work began, the absence of this
accompaniment figure suggests something quite
different. It is through the use of such essentially
simple musical devices that the 'musical reality'
of DifferentTrainsachieves its meanings.
*

In Different Trains Reich turns to one of the

fundamental question posed by the Holocaust:
how is it possible that the same music can be
enjoyed by both oppressed and oppressor? At
the end of the work the voice of the Holocaust
survivor Rachella describes how 'There was
one girl, who had a beautiful voice, and they
loved to listen to the singing, the Germans, and
when she stopped singing they said, "More,
more" and they applauded'.By placing this text
at the end of Dfferent TrainsReich demands that
we recognize that the people who carried out
the Final Solution were ordinary men and
women, not just the inhuman executioners
simplistically conctructed by popular myth; he
also insists that we examine ourselves as we in
turn say 'more, more' and applaud.