Even five decades after its emergence, the term ‘Krautrock’ remains contested among artists affiliated with the music. In Christoph Dallach’s 2021 oral history of Krautrock, Klaus Schulze called the term ‘dreadful’, while Wallenstein drummer Harald Grosskopf found it ‘wonderful’; Mani Neumeier of Guru Guru thought of the term as ‘not even unsympathetic’, whereas Jaki Liebezeit rejected the ‘rock’ part even more than the derogatory ‘kraut’, and preferred to think of his band Can as a ‘pop group’.Footnote ¹ This diversity of opinions extends to heated discussions on social media by self-described Krautrock fans as to which bands should be included and excluded and how to rank the included ones as to their importance and significance.Footnote ²

Generally, Krautrock is used as a catch-all term for the music of various West German rock groups of the 1970s that blended influences of African American and Anglo-American music with the experimental and electronic music of European composers. Many Krautrock bands arose out of the West German student counterculture and connected leftist political activism with experimental rock music and, later, electronic sounds. There are no precise dates for Krautrock, and while the heyday of the movement was roughly from 1968 to 1974, one could also argue that it lasted well into the 1980s. Krautrock was primarily a West German art form and differed significantly from East German Ostrock, with the latter’s emphasis on more traditional song structures. Krautrock and its offshoots have had a tremendous impact on musical production and reception in Britain and the United States since the 1970s. Genres such as indie, post-rock, EDM, and hip-hop have drawn heavily on Krautrock and have connected a music that initially disavowed its European American and African American origins with the lived experience of whites and blacks in the United States and Europe. At the same time, while reaching for an imagined cosmic community, Krautrock, not only by its name, stirs up essentialist notions of national identity and citizenship.

Viewed as a genre, Krautrock seemingly points to a specific national identity, but it continuously transgresses spatial borders and defies rigid classifications. Therefore, even its one seemingly definitive component (its ‘Germanness’) is dubious. Historically, the term itself was only one among many describing West German popular music from the 1970s. Until about 1973, the music magazines Musikexpress and Sounds used Deutsch-Rock (‘German Rock’) to label the new groups from West Germany. Alexander Simmeth dismisses the theory that the British music press invented the term Krautrock and cites producer Konrad ‘Conny’ Plank’s music publishing house Kraut, which was established in 1969, as well as an Amon Düül song from the same year, ‘Mama Düül und ihre Sauerkrautband spielt auf’ (Mama Düül is Playing with Her Sauerkraut Band), as early namesakes.Footnote ³

Yet, it should be noted that the word ‘kraut’ is short for ‘sauerkraut’ only in its English definition – in German Kraut refers to, among other things, herbs, weeds, and even drugs (for Mani Neumeier, Krautrock referred to the Kraut ‘that you smoke’ rather than the Kraut ‘that you eat’Footnote ⁴). Arguably, the actual term Krautrock was introduced by British DJ John Peel and taken up by the British music press, which interchangeably also used other terms like ‘Teutonic rock’ or ‘Götterdämmer rock’. In an ironic move in response to the popularisation of the term, the band Faust called the first song on their 1973 album Faust IV ‘Krautrock’.

For a long time, the West German music press used ‘Krautrock’ as a term to dismiss specific artists. Even as late as 1982, a special edition on the ‘Neue Deutsche Welle’ (New German Wave) by the music monthly Musikexpress repeatedly invoked negative connotations of Krautrock as sounds that were considered passé: Hanover punk bands were countering ‘pompous Kraut-Rock a la Eloy or Jane’; Düsseldorf bands like Kraftwerk and Neu! were developing innovative electronic music concepts, ‘while musicians in the rest of Germany were still ploughing through Krautrock by the sweat of their brow’.Footnote ⁵ The dismissal of Krautrock was part of a more general trend in the German music press to view domestic productions as less important than British or American ones.

Incidentally, it was Krautrock’s success in Britain that made the term more acceptable in West Germany. In 1974, the Hamburg label Brain issued a triple-album compilation of West German music under the title Kraut-Rock. In his liner notes, Winfried Trenkler wrote: ‘Rock from the Federal Republic [of Germany] doesn’t have to hide behind Anglo-American rock, in particular when German musicians don’t even try to sound like their famous colleagues from the USA and England.’Footnote ⁶ Apart from the musicians cited earlier, most of the German public, if aware of the term, does not seem to find it offensive and many music aficionados even embrace it as a seal of approval.

While German and American publications did not apply positive connotations of the term for a long time, the British music press gave it a more positive spin. The publications Melody Maker and New Musical Express soon raved about West German bands, some of which, like Faust and Amon Düül II, became more successful in Britain than in their home country; Tangerine Dream’s album Phaedra, for example, even reached the UK Top 20 in 1974. It should be noted that the positive use of ‘Krautrock’ in Britain only became more common after an initial barrage of World War II stereotypes, as Uwe Schütte has shown for the example of Kraftwerk.Footnote ⁷

Another term commonly used for some German music from the 1970s is kosmische Musik (cosmic music). It was introduced by Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser to market Krautrock artists like Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream, and Klaus Schulze. Although also rejected by many artists associated with it, kosmische Musik remains a useful term to describe the synthesiser-heavy, meditative anti-rock of some West German musicians of the 1970s since a cosmic, ‘New Age’ identity was one way in which Krautrock musicians conceptually and sonically re-imagined ‘Germanness’.

Taken together, the ongoing debates about Krautrock among fans and scholars, the context of its musical diversity, and, in particular, its spatial ambiguity and conflicted expression of German national identity show the relevance of what I prefer to call a ‘discursive formation’ (rather than the more restrictive notion of ‘genre’) in re-imagining regimens of sound, space, and place in non-hierarchical ways.

The Reception of Krautrock

The reception of Krautrock inside and outside of Germany shows the instability of a musical formation that was generally only recognised as anything cohesively ‘German’ by non-Germans. Initially, Krautrock did not leave much of a legacy in its country of origin. Artists who had been commercially successful – like Kraftwerk, La Düsseldorf, and Michael Rother – gradually retreated from the scene, while other artists like Faust are still fairly unknown in their home country. Some groups – like Tangerine Dream – remained successful throughout the 1980s but were rarely associated with their 1970s output or any concept of ‘Krautrock’. The term itself, which had never been accepted by most of the musicians associated with it, was increasingly used by publications like the German Sounds in the 1980s to classify music that was seen as overblown and outdated – the bloated progressive rock of bands like Eloy, Grobschnitt, and Triumvirat. German punk and Neue Deutsche Welle, in contrast, briefly appeared as a fresh alternative that responded to the trends coming from Britain and even to Germany’s Schlager (literally ‘hit’) legacy.

Since the 1990s, Krautrock has been successfully re-branded as a genre in countries that include Germany and Britain, but also the United States and Japan. For instance, in April 1997, British Mojo magazine ran a thirty-page special under the title ‘Kraftwerk, Can and the Return of the Krautrockers’. An instrumental figure in the 1990s revival of Krautrock was the British musician Julian Cope, who published the now out-of-print Krautrocksampler in 1995. In his thoroughly entertaining but highly subjective account, Cope argues that Krautrock ‘was borne on the high East wind that soared above the rage of the 1960s British and American scenes’ and comprises ‘some of the most astonishing, evocative, heroic glimpses of Man at his Peak of Artistic Magic’.Footnote ⁸ As the first readily available discussion of something that could be recognised as ‘Krautrock’ and as an introduction to bands that proved to be influential afterwards, the book became quite popular among British and American music insiders and musicians. As Cope has pointed out, his main reason for writing the book was ‘to introduce the word “Krautrock” in a more positive, pouting glamrock way’.Footnote ⁹ Partly as a result of Cope’s book, entire genres of British and American popular music openly borrowed from Krautrock groups like Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Tangerine Dream, including, but not limited to, punk, post-punk, post-rock, industrial, disco, various forms of EDM like techno, ambient, and house, hip-hop, and indie rock. Even bestselling groups like Radiohead and Wilco clearly indicated that they were indebted to West German music from the 1970s.

The renewed interest in Krautrock as subcultural capital specifically in American indie rock discourses is exemplified by the reception of the music in the online publication Pitchfork Media, founded in 1995. In 2004, Pitchfork published their ‘Top 100 Albums of the 1970s’. With a disproportionate amount of German music, the list included three LPs by Can (Ege Bamyasi, Tago Mago, and Future Days), two by Kraftwerk (Trans Europa Express and Die Mensch-Maschine), and one each by Cluster (Zuckerzeit), Neu! (Neu!), Faust (Faust IV), and Giorgio Moroder (From Here to Eternity). Also included were the two Krautrock-inspired LPs by Iggy Pop (The Idiot and Lust for Life), as well as David Bowie’s Low, which topped the list. In interviews conducted in 2013 with a number of the Pitchfork editors responsible for reviving Krautrock as an important influence on popular music, they described the appeal of the music as an alternative to standard Anglo-American and African American models and how for them it represented a certain coolness through being ‘weird’ and ‘otherworldly’.Footnote ¹⁰

In addition to ‘popular’ interest in Krautrock (in the sense of trickling out into popular consciousness after its subcultural value had been introduced by gatekeepers like Julian Cope), the past decade has seen a significant increase in scholarship on the music. Earlier English-language accounts by well-known musicians and journalists like Cope and Lester Bangs often suffered from a fascination with what they perceive as the Germanness of an exotic Other – for instance, although many Krautrock musicians explicitly distanced themselves from the past, the Germany chapter in Jim DeRogatis’ seminal book about psychedelic rock from 2003 was entitled ‘The Krautrock Blitzkrieg’.Footnote ¹¹ Another early approach was to simply list all West German groups, no matter how obscure, as Stephen and Alan Freeman did in their 1996 compendium Crack in the Cosmic Egg.Footnote ¹² Two non-scholarly German books by Henning Dedekind and Christoph Wagner provided meandering and detailed histories of Krautrock with the inclusion of some groups deliberately excluded from Julian Cope’s Krautrock canon, such as Missus Beastly, Kraan, Anima, and Checkpoint Charlie.Footnote ¹³

Musical Context

Because of the music’s stylistic diversity, a musicological definition of the term Krautrock is equally as difficult as a semantic or historical definition. The influence of music traditionally perceived as German, such as the compositions of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, on what would evolve around 1968 as Krautrock is negligible (the history of any distinctively ‘German’ music mostly dates back to the nineteenth century and is more a product of writers and politicians than of classical composers).Footnote ¹⁴ Krautrock also stood in stark opposition to popular forms like Schlager, German-language pop songs with simple melodies and sentimental lyrics, and Volksmusik (‘oom-pah music’), traditional regional styles mostly from Bavaria. Finally, Krautrock rejected heavily Anglo-Americanised or African American–derived forms of post-war popular music like the toned-down German-language rock ’n’ roll of Peter Kraus and the early 1960s German beat bands like The Rattles and The Lords, who merely imitated their Anglo-American models.

Despite its rejection of Anglo-American influences, Krautrock did pay tribute to some of the psychedelic rock bands and other countercultural artists from Britain and the United States, namely Pink Floyd, Frank Zappa, and Jimi Hendrix. Yet, instead of merely developing another replication of the major Anglo-American and African American styles that dominated the airwaves, Krautrock artists also drew from two distinctive musical developments that were outside of mainstream rock’s framework, both geographically and structurally: experimental composition and free jazz.

The Darmstadt Summer Courses, ‘instituted in 1946 to bring young Germans … up to date with music unheard under the Nazis’,Footnote ¹⁵ became increasingly international over the years and involved composers like Edgar Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Boulez. The Darmstadt school’s embrace of total serialism and resistance to neoclassicism foreshadowed many of Krautrock’s developments (as did musique concrète and minimalism). Stockhausen, who taught two of the musicians who later founded the Krautrock group Can, collaborated with the Studio for Electronic Music in Cologne as early as 1953 and began ‘sampling’ and electronically manipulating non-Western music and national anthems in his compositions Telemusik (1966) and Hymnen (1966–7). Another vital influence on Krautrock clearly outside of Anglo-American traditions were German free jazz musicians like Peter Brötzmann, Manfred Schoof, and Alexander von Schlippenbach, part of a central European (Scandinavian/German/Dutch) scene that was departing from the harmonic and rhythmic conventions still retained in American free jazz.

Sonically, Krautrock came to encompass a range of styles, from the electronic music of Klaus Schulze and the jazz rock of Kraan to the political songs of Floh de Cologne, the folk rock of Witthüser & Westrupp, and music that is even harder to classify but had a long-lasting impact, like that of Faust, Cluster, or Popol Vuh. Krautrock was influenced by African American music but also involved the conscious departure from blues scales, as those were the building blocks of Anglo-American rock music. Unlike psychedelic rock groups in the United States, many Krautrock performers had a background in European classical music and ties to the electronic music of ‘serious’ composers. Krautrock’s embrace of the dilettante, abstract, and experimental contrasted with British progressive rock’s focus on composition and Romantic themes. The early use of synthesisers, non-traditional song structures, and the employment of a steady, metronomic beat (generally referred to as motorik) instead of rock ’n’ roll’s backbeat also set Krautrock apart from Anglo-American music of the 1970s. Through their connections to the avant-garde art world, through their more intellectual approach, and through abandoning traditional song structures, Krautrock bands were in some aspects more daring and radical than comparative groups in Britain and the United States like Pink Floyd, the Beatles, or the Beach Boys.

As the music scene in West Germany was flourishing in the 1970s, it became increasingly harder to generalise about Krautrock. While many groups included classically trained musicians, diverted from the blues scales of American psychedelic rock groups like the Grateful Dead, released albums on small labels like Ohr, Pilz, and Brain, moved to the country to live in communes, and employed electronic instruments, none of these characteristics applied to all Krautrockers. Among the many different and unconnected local scenes were Düsseldorf, with the slick electronics of Kraftwerk, Neu!, and Wolfgang Riechmann; Hamburg, with the experimental rock of Faust; Cologne, with the groove-heavy minimalism of Can; Munich, with the psychedelic progressive rock of Amon Düül II; and West Berlin, with the synthesiser drones of Klaus Schulze, Ash Ra Tempel, and Tangerine Dream. To some extent, the stratification of Krautrock is a West German phenomenon, where one of the examples of the denazification-motivated decentralisation after World War II led to making the provincial town of Bonn the capital. The stylistically pluralist and heterogenous nature of Krautrock can hence be related to the federalist nature of West Germany.

Also, Krautrock was an exclusively West German phenomenon. To explain the absence of the music in East Germany, it is useful to consider the differences of the counterculture between East and West. Students in East Germany had more fundamental needs, which were expressed by singer-songwriters, many of whom were harassed or banned by the Communist government. The sole political party, SED, or Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands (Socialist Unity Party of Germany), strenuously tried to prohibit Western rock music, which made it a sought-after commodity and difficult to consistently access. East German rock groups like the Puhdys walked a fine line between supporting the government and subtly critiquing it, and musically mostly imitated British and American bands while adding German lyrics.Footnote ¹⁶

Since Marxism was part of the establishment in the East, many young people viewed the United States as a potential liberator, and there was not the same urge to reject Anglo-American influences as ‘imperialist’ as in Krautrock.Footnote ¹⁷ Jazz and rock were sought after as a ‘window to the West’.Footnote ¹⁸ With the difficulty of obtaining and accessing music from Western countries, Krautrock was also simply not big enough to make it over to East Germany. Despite the absence of Krautrock in East Germany, understanding the divided nation is crucial for the politics of the music, in particular West Berlin groups like Tangerine Dream and Ton Steine Scherben, who were tied to West Germany ideologically but not geographically.

Krautrock and Spatiality

There are a number of theoretical approaches one could apply to Krautrock. For instance, the historical context of West Germany’s student revolution of 1968 has been thoroughly analysed by Alexander Simmeth, and gender would be an important lens to consider (with Krautrock groups defying the hypermasculinity of ‘cock rock’ yet overwhelmingly featuring male artists).Footnote ¹⁹ Here, I want to highlight spatiality as a concept that helps to understand the significance of the music and can even work to broaden the scope of what could be included (for instance, while many fans might disagree, I consider Donna Summer as part of Krautrock, challenging racialised and gendered notions of the music.)Footnote ²⁰ Considering the spatiality of Krautrock can help re-thinking concepts of sound, belonging, and genre.

I hesitate to call Krautrock a ‘genre’ or ‘movement’ and would rather describe it as a ‘discursive formation’. According to Foucault, ‘the unity of a discourse is based not so much on the permanence and uniqueness of an object as on the space in which various objects emerge and are continuously transformed’.Footnote ²¹ Foucault applies this instability of seemingly fixed systems of classification to medical science, economics, and grammar, but it also informs the fragmented relationships between different musical expressions discussed under the contested term Krautrock. Connected merely by their destabilising of the seemingly coherent notion of national identity, Krautrock musicians rarely worked with each other (or even knew of each other) and did not form local scenes that expressed larger issues in regional ways. Indicative of a discursive formation, ‘influences’ on and by Krautrock artists did not operate in linear ways, a central figure did not emerge, and even the term Krautrock was only retroactively applied from outside of Germany. For Foucault, discursive formations are an attempt to apply some regularity to ‘systems of dispersion’ (like Krautrock), to describe ‘series full of gaps, intertwined with one another, interplays of differences, distances, substitutions, transformations’.Footnote ²²

Rather than through a purely musicological or historical lens, I view Krautrock as being constructed through performance, articulated through various forms of expressive culture (among them, communal living, spirituality, visual elements but, most importantly, sound) by people not even directly interacting with each other but still structurally related. This explains how Krautrock succeeded through time and space and does not merely reflect historical events.

Barry Shank has addressed the complex and dynamic relationship between music and identity in which real politics can emerge: ‘The act of musical listening enables us to confront complex and mobile structures of impermanent relationships – the sonic interweaving of tones and beats, upper harmonics, and contrasting timbres – that model the experience of belonging to a community not of unity but of difference.’Footnote ²³ Shank goes on to state that, rather than reifying identity, musical forms help ‘capturing an emergent sense of the world’.Footnote ²⁴ While Shank’s examples are mostly Anglo-American, Krautrock serves to illustrate the transnational dimension of the politics he so aptly describes.

By employing a derogatory term for Germans in its name, Krautrock is clearly linked with national identity, but, particularly in times of increased globalisation, the nation-state appears as the mediator between the local and the global.Footnote ²⁵ The study of Krautrock allows for an anthropologically motivated study not just of what Deleuze and Guattari have called ‘de-territorialisation’, but also of ‘re-territorialisation’, a re-localising of culture in new or changed contexts. Néstor García Canclini describes the process of de-territorialisation and re-territorialisation as ‘the loss of the “natural” relation of culture to geographical and social territories and, at the same time, certain relative, partial territorial re-localisations of old and new symbolic productions’.Footnote ²⁶ Canclini’s context is 1990s Latin America, but with the disruption of World War II, Krautrock artists also expressed a fragmented, porous transnational identity that, in Canclini’s words, lacked ‘consistent paradigms’ and experienced the loss of ‘the script and the author’.Footnote ²⁷ Krautrock’s de-territorialisation, its negation of the nation-state as a stable identifying force, plays with national identity through expressing an international or cosmic non-German Germanness and through ironically invoking older, seemingly stable forms of Germanness. The latter re-territorialisation also involves non-German subjects identifying with a transformed and transmogrified Germanness as evidence of Krautrock’s ‘globalisation’.

In addition to de-territorialisation, hybridisation helps to understand the transnational dimension of Krautrock. Despite critiques of biologism and the obviation of issues like class and gender, cultural hybridity can be useful for describing the exchanges that take place between the centre and the periphery or between different peripheries.Footnote ²⁸ Hybridity can function as a form of resistance but does not necessarily entail oppositional politics. Canclini warns of reducing the study of hybridised popular culture to either deductivist or inductivist notions (i.e. assuming either that cultural production is exclusively determined by hegemonic sectors or that subaltern forces are solely responsible for shaping popular culture). Krautrock’s hybridity appears in a variety of ways, from Kraftwerk’s blurring of ‘man’ and ‘machine’ to the linguistic slippages of Neu!’s appropriation of advertising slogans and the syncretic spirituality of Popol Vuh, who blended Eastern religions with a reformed Christianity.

It should not come as a surprise that the spatiality of popular music is one of the major factors that create its hybridity. As George Lipsitz has noted in describing a poetics of place:

Lipsitz’s description of popular music as both transcending and reaffirming a sense of place applies to Krautrock’s double discourse of the national and the transnational. In a different approach, Josh Kun has developed the notion of ‘audiotopias’, in which music itself appears as a spatial practice: ‘Music is experienced not only as sound that goes into our ears and vibrates through our bones but as a space that we can enter into, encounter, move around in, inhabit, be safe in, learn from.’Footnote ³⁰ One might add that as an alternative space, music is not always safe but disruptively appears in what Lipsitz calls ‘dangerous crossroads’. Josh Kun goes on to argue that political citizenship does not necessarily equate cultural conformity, and that ‘music can be of a nation, but it is never exclusively national; it always overflows, spills out, sneaks through, reaches an ear on the other side of the border line, on the other side of the sea’.Footnote ³¹

It follows from the ability of music to transgress and trespass invoked by Kun and Lipsitz that the relationship between national identity and music is always interpenetrative.Footnote ³² In their seminal book on popular music, identity, and place, geographers John Connell and Chris Gibson talk about the contested enterprise of linking music and nation-states when ‘boundaries are porous, constantly being broken, necessitating new national anthems and new attempts to sustain imagined communities in the face of transnational flows’.Footnote ³³ I disagree with Connell and Gibson’s assessment that national sounds are by definition ‘retrospective and nostalgic’,Footnote ³⁴ and posit that unlike national anthems, Krautrock allows for a more flexible expression of nationality that necessitates moving across borders, as well as questioning essentialist and fixed notions of what it means to be German.

Conclusion

I have exercised different modes of theorising Krautrock here: analysing the semantics of the term, tracing the reception of its sounds, and taking a stab at its musicological characteristics; one could add the underlying historical contextualisation of World War II and the student revolution of 1968. I have mentioned gender as yet another promising aspect to study in further research on the topic. In the last section, I have illustrated how national/transnational identity and spatiality can serve as concepts that connect Krautrock’s history, identity formation, and overall politics.

Drawing on the history and music of Krautrock, I perceive its de-territorialisation and hybridisation in different ways. Groups like Can, Kraftwerk, and Neu! created a post-war German identity that engaged with and set itself apart from the Nazi past and the influx of Anglo-American music by blending man-made and machine-made music, negotiating internationalism, stereotypical ‘Germanness’, and anti-capitalism. Other Krautrock bands like Amon Düül I and II, Faust, and Ton Steine Scherben explored living in communes as alternative spaces and expressed notions of community and conflict in vastly different ways, while responding to similar modes of oppression. Performers of kosmische Musik like Ash Ra Tempel, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, and Popol Vuh developed post-national notions of New Age cosmic identity and spirituality, which involved the consumption of psychedelic drugs and the invention of new sounds, in particular through the employment of the synthesiser. Popol Vuh also exemplifies the parallels between Krautrock and the New German Cinema of the 1970s, as there are connections between the landscapes of Werner Herzog’s films and the soundscapes provided by the band (the soundtracks by bands like Tangerine Dream and Can are also promising topics for future research). Finally, I would like to argue that it is necessary to stretch the definitions of Krautrock as transnational by including Italian-German producer Giorgio Moroder’s collaborations with African American disco singer Donna Summer as well as the three years British pop star David Bowie spent in West Berlin in the 1970s.

As has become abundantly clear, when viewed as a discursive formation, Krautrock eludes any strict definition, easy theorising, or quick summation. Its boundaries remain contested and its understanding unfinished. This, however, is the intellectual work that Krautrock continues to challenge us to do, and I for one am happy that I am not done thinking about its ramifications.

Krautrock emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s and cannot be understood without the upheaval of ‘1968’. In some respects, 1968 actually had a more political contour in West Germany than in other Western European countries – with the exception of France, perhaps. There were three main reasons for this: the immediate pre-history of the ‘Third Reich’, the fact that the country was at the crossroads of the Cold War, and a philosophical tradition of thought that was always on the trace of fundamental truths.

Attitudes towards National Socialism had shaped the youth revolt in West Germany, and it was already fully formed before 1968. The vast majority of the older generations had been entangled with National Socialism through active complicity or all-too-passive acceptance, and therefore could not claim a guiding role in the present. Imprints of National Socialism continued to exist in a hidden anti-Semitism, anti-communism, and authoritarianism. A considerable section of society and politics opened the door to the elimination of democracy through the introduction of the Notstandsgesetze (Emergency Laws) in 1968, which allowed the government to curb civil rights in the case of uprisings, leading to suspicions of the door being potentially opened to a new dictatorship. The social force that was able to loosen these ties to the past was the young generation, especially young intellectuals. Detachment from Nazi ties as a prerequisite for social reform was an almost unquestioned basic argument in debates about sexuality, forms of housing, and political measures.

West Germany’s position on the eastern front of the West and the division of Germany with the GDR as the antithesis of the Federal Republic had already created an anti-communist climate in the 1950s that shaped political and cultural discourses in general. Abstract art was a manifestation of Western freedom, which in turn was threatened by rock ’n’ roll; communist agitation was also repeatedly suspected behind strikes and demonstrations. Unlike all other countries of Western Europe – except for the fascist dictatorships in Spain and Portugal – the Communist Party had been banned since 1956. A left-wing opposition thus had no parliamentary mouthpiece and was relegated to the streets.

Rudi Dutschke, the informal leader of the student movement, was born in East Germany and thus was particularly strongly politicised. The fact that a young Nazi sympathiser attempted to assassinate him in Easter 1968, the late effects of which were to kill him in 1979, contributed to the enormous radicalisation of the West German student movement. A particularly militant expression of radical thinking could be observed in the irreconcilable criticism that many actors directed at 1960s consumer society. This kind of society was represented not least by the United States, who were also delegitimised by the Vietnam War at the time. Symptomatic of this militancy was the arson attack on two Frankfurt department stores on 2 April 1968, carried out by Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, Thorwald Proll, and Horst Söhnlein, a week before Dutschke’s assassination – an act that is not unjustly regarded as a precursor to the terrorism of the Rote Armee Fraktion, or RAF (Red Army Faction). Political radicalism, in the shape of militant action and communist groups, continued to represent a relevant part of the political outcome of 1968 during the 1970s.

However, one must look at the whole of 1968 and understand it as a melding of new cultural currents and radical politics. While research in countries like Britain or Denmark has always emphasised the cultural revolution, in West Germany the focus was for a long time on politics and thus the student movement. Only in recent years has the perspective broadened to include the cultural aspects of 1968 and its significance as a youth revolt. Here, music plays a central role as an emotional bonding element and semantic carrier of meaning. Folk and pop music, especially from the United States and Britain, represented a youth culture, transported the ideal of a lifestyle separated from the older generation, and propagated political ideas that oscillated between participation and revolution. In West Germany, these musical imports were at the same time opposed by the political reservation that they were being used by the culture industry to make profits and manipulate consumers.

Scepticism towards the culture industry was more widespread in West Germany than elsewhere and led to the development of a genre of its own – Krautrock – which was quite heterogeneous both musically and politically but was characterised by the endeavour of German musicians to develop a style of their own that set themselves apart from the American and British models. In this way, the German scene reacted to a feeling of over-saturation that had already set in by the autumn of 1967: flower power, the expansion of consciousness, and psychedelic and pop art dominated magazines and record shelves without having any provocative effect. The emergence of Krautrock can thus only be understood in the specific German political context of 1968, from which, at the same time, it partially distanced itself.Footnote ¹ The intermingling of pop culture and politics in the 1968 period fell apart shortly after – into a radical political scene on the one hand and a lifestyle-oriented music and drug scene on the other. However, contrary to received wisdom, in the practices of the Krautrockers, musical preferences were combined with radical political ideas and activities for a long time, partly even into the punk scene that emerged years later.

Catalysts: Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser and the Waldeck Festival

The mixing and unmixing of culture and politics can be traced particularly vividly in the story of Krautrock’s most important protagonist, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. This story is closely connected with the precursors of Krautrock, the festivals at Waldeck Castle, and the Essen Songtage of 1968. Kaiser, born in 1943, was one of the most enigmatic figures of the counterculture. He came from the folk-and-protest-song scene, had political interests, and recognised the signs of the times early on, rising with the beat and underground culture and falling because of its professionalisation, which he himself had helped to spur. As organiser of the Essen Songtage, an author and publisher of several books, and a record producer, he played a central role in the breakthrough of the underground in West Germany between 1966 and 1972. He persistently worked through the question of how the rebellious core of the new culture could be further disseminated and at the same time preserved from culture-industrial dilution.

Kaiser advocated a mixed concept of left-wing positions in terms of content and experimental aesthetics. This mixed concept became particularly visible in the years around 1968; during the early 1970s, the aesthetic side gained a preponderance. Kaiser sensed new tendencies earlier than others and immediately put them into practice – through interventions at Burg Waldeck festivals, talent cultivation, his own festival, magazine distribution, and book and record production. No other player in the West German counterculture combined reflection on new trends so early and effectively with the production of pop cultural material. This made him an avant-gardist on the one hand, but on the other hand he appeared as an opportunist who knew how to turn a new mass movement into cash. Kaiser himself saw his initiatives as part of an economy of counterculture that did not strive for commercialisation but for popularity. A culturally critical public – especially on the left – did not accept the drive to commercialisation as exemplified by the concert agency Lippmann + Rau or rock bands that earned money in and with the counterculture.

An important focal nucleus of West German underground culture was the festivals held at Burg Waldeck in south-west Germany between 1964 and 1969. Songwriters such as Franz Josef Degenhardt, Dieter Süverkrüp, and Walter Mossmann came to prominence through their performances, while at the same time international folk stars such as Phil Ochs or Odetta provided a connection to developments in other countries.Footnote ² In the context of the student movement, the festival became radicalised and, in 1968 and 1969, also offered a space for young German bands (like Xhol Caravan or Checkpoint Charlie). Moreover, it became a forum for discussion about German counterculture. The initiators of the Waldeck, somewhat older intellectuals, were considerably more sceptical about the potential of beat music than Kaiser. At this point already, in the debate about a possible renewal of the Waldeck Festival of 1967, he was accused of wanting to ‘commercialise’ the festival.Footnote ³ The fact was that Kaiser had pleaded, firstly, not only to accept the rise of folk music to mass culture, but to welcome it joyfully, and secondly, to spike it with that rebellious sting through politicisation that would ensure the spread of its emancipatory content and stop it flattening out commercially.

The Monterey Festival had shown what an electrified mass culture could achieve, and Waldeck 1967 had shown that the German folk song offered heightened political potential. It was important to combine the two into a new event concept. When the political protest movement spread after 2 June 1967 – when Berlin policeman killed a student during a demonstration – Kaiser noticed the new thrust that his concept received from this movement and spiced it up with fashionable vocabulary. The ‘new song’, he declared in 1968, gave a ‘foretaste of what the revolution is capable of achieving’.

The Revolution Begins: Internationale Essener Songtage

Kaiser became famous through the International Essen Song Days in 1968. He had pleaded in vain for the annual meeting, which had become traditional, to no longer be held in the youth-movement context of Waldeck Castle, but to be moved to an urban space.Footnote ⁵ Through urbanisation, the festival was to be brought closer to society, absorbing its current tempo and new musical forms. Essen was born out of the impulse of the American underground, mixed with London and Amsterdam influences, and the heterogeneous elements of the counterculture that were meanwhile also blossoming more strongly in the Federal Republic – from the protest singers to the early communes and experimental pop bands to the Provo subcultures. Under the sign of the non-commercial fusion of pop and politics, the Songtage were the most important event of the West German counterculture in the late 1960s.

They were embedded in a theoretical framework that Kaiser had created: political pop music could become mass culture, but in order not to be at the mercy of the exploitative interests of companies and public media, the ‘new people’ needed independent means of production and performance spaces.Footnote ⁶ From 25 to 29 September 1968, not only well-known American underground greats like The Fugs and Mothers of Invention, along with British artists like Alexis Korner, Brian Auger, and Julie Felix, performed in Essen, but also singer-songwriters like Dieter Süverkrüp and Franz Josef Degenhardt and hitherto mostly unknown German music groups like Amon Düül, Guru Guru Groove, Xhol Caravan, and Tangerine Dream.Footnote ⁷ With 40,000 participants, the biggest pop festival in Europe at that time, it represented a European Monterey from which impulses emanated beyond just the commercial. Pop music was in the foreground, but the political element was more heavily weighted here than in the American or British scenes. Music and happenings were complemented by political texts, radical cabaret, and discussion rounds.

Essen showed, firstly, that alongside the politically grounded protest culture, a broad pop-cultural field had established itself, which in part contained political components. However, one may doubt that it represented, as the organisers claimed, ‘the beginning of the end of conventional and only commercially oriented music exploitation’.Footnote ⁸ First, while the festival did provide a forum for bands like Amon Düül and Tangerine Dream, who combined electronic, improvisational sound patterns with political demands, attracting media attention for the first time and winning record contracts, this did not mean the end of the commercial exploitation system, but rather its opening and differentiation. Second, it became clear from the reactions of the audience and the public that the electrified version of the underground attracted larger crowds of young people than the traditional, more chanson-based scene of protest singers. Their audiences were and remained limited. Third, it became apparent that there were narrow limits to the political radicalisation of the masses. While many visitors probably shared the connection between pop and politics, but felt little inclination to engage in activities of their own in this context, only a small group was prepared to push the concept of individual political action further at the expense of music.

Thus, in the early autumn of 1968, it became clear that a more radicalised political wing was separating itself from the bulk of the counterculture. On the other hand, the connection between pop and politics had proven itself precisely through the festival, and many of its protagonists – not least the spiritus rector himself – held on to it until the early 1970s. To some observers, it seemed as if pop music in the variant visible here had a politicising effect. The writer Erasmus Schöfer, at any rate, was convinced after Essen that ‘the phenomena of beat and pop were latently critical of society in their broad impact on the young generation and would gradually come to an awareness of this character of theirs’.Footnote ⁹

Politicisation of the Music Scene Since 1970

Between 1968 and 1970, the two elements of the counterculture of 1968 – radical politics and ‘youth culture’ – drifted apart again. Yet there was no lack of attempts to hold them together. The politicisation of pop came from various sources: the protagonists of pop journalism, bands, some recipients, and the state. Just how important pop culture had become could be seen in summer 1970, when about 500,000 young people attended the various pop festivals in the Federal Republic, including a large part of the left-wing scene.Footnote ¹⁰ The climax and end point was the Love and Peace Festival, which took place on the island of Fehmarn in early September. Instead of a European Woodstock, however, Fehmarn turned into a provincial Altamont – the culmination of those negative phenomena that determined the image of the festival summer of 1970.

The conclusions that radical left-wing masterminds drew from this experience were broad. Pop music was attractive to large masses and thus profitable. Instead of protesting the miserable conditions under which the festivals were held – inflated prices, failing bands, and aggressive security – and changing them through political action, the visitors remained in an apathetic consumerist attitude. In their eyes, this showed that ‘capitalists in hippie look’Footnote ¹¹ had also incorporated this originally rebellious segment into the capitalist manipulation context. One could only refuse this appropriation, even if one liked the music offered there. In spring 1971, right at the beginning of the new festival season, several subculture activists – among them Henryk M. Broder, Jens Hagen, and Helmut Salzinger – called for a boycott of pop concerts and festivals. One of the underground magazines argued:

But the festivals were also politicised from above when the Bavarian Ministry of the Interior issued a general ban on festivals in July 1972. According to the ministry, open-air pop festivals represented a ‘serious disturbance of public order’ caused by loud music, endangerment of minors, hygienic deficiencies, devastation of the landscape, but above all the mass consumption of narcotics.Footnote ¹³ As a result, more than fifty rock bands sent an open letter to the Bavarian minister of the interior demanding the withdrawal of this measure.Footnote ¹⁴ For many commentators, it was clear that the drug problem was only a pretext to put an end to a new, unwelcome youth culture. Politicians were only interested in eradicating the mass experience ‘that it is possible to live together without social constraints in a very nice way and much more freely than it is possible in this state so far’.Footnote ¹⁵

The journalist Ingeborg Schober pointed out that in West Germany social problems were responded to with bans, while in neighbouring countries like Denmark or the Netherlands, youth centres and free rock concerts were financed by the state, without the occurrence of many of the negative side effects of commercial festivals.Footnote ¹⁶ In general, this debate forced the scene itself to differentiate more precisely and propelled the tendencies towards self-organisation. This could best be realised at self-made festivals with a regional reach. But it was precisely these festivals that were being deprived of the opportunity to develop alternatives to the greed of the promoters, not focusing primarily on profit.Footnote ¹⁷

In general, a national component could not be overlooked in the anti-commercial self-image of the German scene. The underground magazine Germania saw it this way: while the British and American bands were already completely paralysed by the consumer industry, the potential for the German scene, which was ‘still three years behind’, was to ward off the threat of commercialisation through self-organisation.Footnote ¹⁸ In essence, the rise of German rock bands in the early 1970s, under the sign of authenticity and self-organisation, was underpinned by national tones directed against commercial dominance from abroad.

Tim Belbe and Thomas Wollscheid from Xhol Caravan contrasted the ‘consumer music’ produced by the music industry of the ‘Anglo-Saxon countries’ with the ‘music of indigenous groups’, which was characterised by ‘free’ production and ‘honest’ statements and was thus ‘folk music of our time’.Footnote ¹⁹ The 1973 appeal of the ‘IG Rock’ (rock music union) stated that ‘foreign groups are flooding the Federal Republic of Germany so massively’ that German bands hardly had any performance opportunities left, and that when international greats toured, the opening programme was also ‘dictated by foreign countries’, against which joint action by ‘all German musicians’ was necessary.Footnote ²⁰ The feeling of dominance from outside was coupled with considerable self-confidence. Surveys in 1972/73 showed that about one-third of concert-goers and over half of German rock musicians seriously expected German pop groups to be able to ‘outflank’ their British and American competitors in a few years.Footnote ²¹

Between 1971 and 1973, several associations were set up to promote cooperation between bands – in Hamburg there was a ‘Rock Lib Front’, in southern Germany a ‘Band-Coop’, in Mainz a ‘Rock-Büro’ and in West Berlin a ‘Rock Front’. By cutting out producers, middlemen, and promoters, the groups were expected to be able to maintain their freedom and market their products more cheaply. Finally, these approaches to self-organisation were to form nodes of a countercultural network, as the theoretician of West German counterculture, Rolf Schwendter, had in mind as a model of a counter-economy within the capitalist system.Footnote ²²

The ideal groups were rock bands who produced and distributed their music independently and played for a small fee, or often for ‘free’, such as Ton Steine Scherben, Franz K., Hotzenplotz, or Can. Although three-quarters of West German rock musicians thought the principle of self-organisation was advantageous, most attempts at cooperation promptly failed.Footnote ²³ Professional bands who were not primarily politically oriented quickly realised that overcoming competition in the pop scene was an arduous business and speculated that, in view of the desolate situation, ‘a big, commercially raised agency for German groups’ would be more likely to help.Footnote ²⁴ The slogan of mutual aid, in any case, as the group Kraan saw it, had instead promoted exploitation under countercultural auspices: if the bands did not play cheaply, or preferably for ‘free’, they were ostracised as a ‘commercial group’.

The economy of anti-commercial consumption included other practices that enabled low-cost participation in popular culture. They not only had the advantage of costing nothing or little, but also gained an ideological superstructure through the morality of anti-consumerism, which had a long tradition in Germany. These practices not only included the forcing of free concerts, but also the production and distribution of bootlegs, theft from book or record shops and the individual hijacking or collective storming of concert halls. Especially between 1969 and 1971, groups of young people – often numbering 100 to 200 – stormed the halls at concerts of popular bands like Steppenwolf, Canned Heat, and Pink Floyd to gain free admission.

Unlike the rock ’n’ roll and beat riots of the 1950s and mid-1960s, these actions contained a weighty political component that was in the spirit of the times. ‘They are very young’, said concert organiser Peter Hauke of the participants. ‘All under 20. Mostly students who hide behind political arguments. And say this is just a political demonstration against capitalism.’Footnote ²⁵ Their slogan, ‘The concert halls are ours!’, once again made clear their claim of ownership over pop music. Actions were primarily directed against the concert organisers, but also against bands who did not fulfil audience expectations. The radical-left scene cheered on such activities as social revolutionary self-activity. In 1971, The West Berlin underground gazette 883 justified this concept in detail:

Most concert-goers, on the other hand, appeared to be all too compliant consumers. They were therefore considered ‘direct allies of the pigs’ and had to reckon with physical attacks on another occasion when 883 called for a boycott of all pop concerts: ‘If you pay, you get punched in the face.’Footnote ²⁷ Less radical activists tried to de-escalate. Tom Schroeder, for example, also considered pop music to be the property of the public but warned against ‘putschist individual actions’ and called for the use of ‘organisation, discipline and imagination’.Footnote ²⁸ He called for the opening of larger halls for this new mass culture – barracks, exhibition halls, or football stadiums – to reduce ticket prices to a minimum.

Because entrepreneurs who did not act with the required seriousness thrived, the ideological construction that had already been omnipresent in the 1960s was once again booming on this battlefield of consumer culture: mindless ‘managers’ tried to exploit the young people who had been manipulated by artificially arousing their needs. However, the scene itself was already taking a closer look. While promoters like Hauke or the agency Mama Concerts, founded in 1970, were considered primarily profit-oriented, Lippmann + Rau was able to defend a profile as an ethically motivated and fair promoter. Papers like Underground and Sounds gave Fritz Rau – the organiser of the disastrous Jethro Tull concert in Frankfurt on 21 February 1970 – plenty of space to explain his position.Footnote ²⁹ In fact, Rau provided a far from superficial analysis of the novel practice of storming concerts to enforce a right to free music consumption: The industry had ‘operated a bit too much with buzzwords like “underground” and “pop revolution”’, so that now a ‘friction’ had arisen:

From Rau’s point of view, too, this political activism represented a German specificity that was not to be observed in the large north-western European live cultures in England and Scandinavia.Footnote ³¹

In fact, it cannot be overlooked how strongly the German rock scene stood out from other national scenes due to its political underpinnings. In Britain or Denmark, for example, youthful musical taste was regarded as a leisure time enjoyment whereas in West Germany it was essentialised as the expression of a generation-specific spirit of opposition. In his feature ‘Germany Calling’ for the New Musical Express, Ian MacDonald saw a special feature in the fact that the German scene was much more political and militant than the British one.Footnote ³² In an interview with Pop magazine in 1973, Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant complained at length about the politicisation of their music in Germany, which had already led to riots on their first tour in spring 1970, and summed up his view in a nutshell: ‘The German audience is O.K. in and of itself, just far too political.’Footnote ³³ After boycott actions against his concerts, Edgar Broughton also considered German fans to be partly ‘more arrogant than elsewhere’; they were ‘less hippie-like and much more political’.Footnote ³⁴ The band Ten Years After even claimed they saw ‘madness sparkling in the eyes of the German audience’ at their gigs.Footnote ³⁵

In its anti-commercial self-image, it already becomes clear to what extent the German rock scene linked its musical preference to radical political claims. A quantitative insight into the connection between music and radical politics is provided by the research conducted by Rainer Dollase and colleagues in the early 1970s. As many as 17 per cent of concert-goers said they were led to a ‘socially critical attitude’ by the music.Footnote ³⁶ Musicians attributed an even stronger political component to it, with 53 per cent of them generally intending to contribute to social change and 42 per cent setting themselves the goal of promoting socio-critical attitudes among their audience – not only through political song lyrics or statements, but also through the composition and arrangement of the tunes.

Even if such ideas remained more than vague, the political aspirations of rock music among producers and recipients alike were remarkably high and in this formed a specific feature of the time and of national culture. The German audience could also appear as particularly political because music was not to be consumed passively but was meant to lead to political practice. Thus, at the end of their concerts, Floh de Cologne always called for the audience to become active in left-wing youth associations, and Ton Steine Scherben were known for their mobilising power, especially during demonstrations.

From Ohr to Cosmic Couriers: Revolution as Ecstasy

In 1970, Kaiser realised that the real existing counterculture was actually changing society. By changing their lives, following more informal values and building their own networks of production, distribution, and communication, the followers of the counterculture changed ‘not only their own situation, but also the balance of society as a whole’.Footnote ³⁷ Kaiser was still interested in further expanding this countercultural network – especially its media sector. Among the many initiatives with which he fertilised the counterculture was the discussion about the further development of a ‘hedonistic left’.Footnote ³⁸ The debate about how ‘rationalist’ (i.e. political) and ‘emotional’ (i.e. music- and drug-centred) sub-cultures could be held together began in spring 1970 and ended with a split into two currents, with Kaiser belonging to the faction focusing on pop, drugs, and religious beliefs, while Rolf Schwendter was the protagonist of a more politically contoured direction.

What particularly upset many critics of Kaiser was the fact that in 1970, in addition to his powerful position in the press, he also set up an independent record label for the countercultural sector of pop music, together with an old veteran of the record industry. Peter Meisel (Hansa Musik Produktion), who also produced German Schlager stars, joined Kaiser to found the label Ohr (ear) in spring 1970.Footnote ³⁹ Meisel, who was considered a ‘pike in the carp pond’ of the record industry in the mid-1960s, had taken Amon Düül under his wing and produced two successful LPs with them.Footnote ⁴⁰ Connected to Metronome’s distribution network, Meisel and Kaiser looked after five German rock bands in June 1970, covering a broad musical spectrum and with a partly political, in any case anti-commercial claim, including Embryo, Tangerine Dream, and Floh de Cologne. Later, bands like Amon Düül I, Birth Control, and Guru Guru joined them.Footnote ⁴¹

At first, the German pop scene had high hopes for Ohr, because having their own label was the first step towards holding their own in a market dominated by British and American bands. For the bands, the cooperation with Kaiser and Meisel had advantages, because they now had sufficient technical possibilities to produce records for the first time and were being promoted systematically. On the other hand, members of the counterculture had already been irritated in 1968 by the PR avalanche unleashed by Kaiser and Broder, which had promised a lot but could by no means deliver everything. Now, as the founder of Ohr, Kaiser once again preyed with financially heavy promotion on a clientele that was not only unprepared for it, but also resolutely rejected the usual commercial hype.

In addition, he hung ideological labels on his bands, for example claiming that they were committed to a particularly altruistic ethic (which led to irritations in marketing) and ended up selling them as mediums of cosmic supernaturalism. The application of grandiloquent advertising to the underground scene contributed significantly to Kaiser’s already damaged reputation, eroding dramatically from 1970 onwards.Footnote ⁴² From the more pragmatic point of view of the bands, the fact that no political or aesthetic constraints were imposed was to Ohr’s credit. In fact, the connection between an established representative of the record business and an up-and-comer from the folk and underground scene was innovative in that Ohr systematically placed German rock music on the market for the first time, thus preparing the national and international Krautrock boom. In 1972, leading industry magazine Musikmarkt identified a ‘considerable asset’ in this market segment and praised Kaiser for having ‘significantly promoted’ this development. Of course, approval by a mouthpiece of commerce irrevocably damaged Kaiser’s reputation in the counterculture: ‘He was one of the first to grasp the market opportunities for a new German pop music and beat the advertising drum accordingly.’Footnote ⁴³

In autumn 1971, Kaiser and Meisel founded a second label called Pilz (mushroom), which presented a programme oscillating between folk rock and contemplative electronic music with groups such as Bröselmaschine, Hölderlin, and Popol Vuh. The commercial success of these two ventures was considerable; in the 1972 polls of the German magazines Musikexpress, Sounds and Schallplatte, they occupied thirty-seven places, with the Ohr band Birth Control ranking first in each case.Footnote ⁴⁴ With his last creation, the Kosmische Kuriere record label of 1973, Kaiser concentrated almost exclusively on spherical sounds and also took off for unattainable heights. From around 1971 onwards, he became increasingly vehement in his advocacy of a mystical view of the world, which was mainly fed by the ideas of Timothy Leary. Kaiser saw himself as a ‘dealer’ who helped spread those substances with which a new ‘sensitivity’ could be created: hashish, LSD, and rock music. As such, he did not primarily want to earn money, but to spread an alternative consciousness and strengthen the sense of community in the counterculture.

In his view, drug use helped to overcome individual and social failings: drug users ‘hear more finely, react more sensitively, dress more fantastically, live more peacefully and take care of each other. Their hearing is sharpened, their eyes look deeply, their feeling responds sensitively.’Footnote ⁴⁵ Robert Feustel described the overriding context thus: ‘the hope of finding a way out of the valley of failed modernity hangs on the chemical substance’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Conclusion

It is true that in the two typically separated subcultures elements of each other’s preferences were still present – pop music consumption in radical political subcultures and leftist positions in the subcultures of music and drug consumers. Nevertheless, with their explosive growth, the scenes also became increasingly separated from each other. More political bands on the one hand – Floh de Cologne, Ton Steine Scherben, or Franz K – split with bands more interested in new musical paths like Amon Düül, Can, or Tangerine Dream. That they were nevertheless united by their countercultural origins is illustrated by the fact that they all were subsumed retrospectively under the rubric of Krautrock. The stronger attraction of the sensually disordered is demonstrated by the example of the Munich pop journalist Ingeborg Schober. In 1967, at the age of twenty, she went to London, fell completely into the pop frenzy there, and returned in summer 1969 to Munich, which had become more radical – politically as well as culturally. In an interview with her, director Wim Wenders described his first encounter with the band Amon Düül at a festival at the Academy of Arts in spring 1968. According to Wenders, the band modelled their approach on bands like Velvet Underground or Hapshash and the Coloured Coat:

In such statements, political claims still shine through – a reference to society and the emancipatory potential of self-activity – but had moved far from the directly political claims of left-wing radicalism that emerged in a much purer form in the music of bands like Ton Steine Scherben.

Printed in the September 1975 issue of Creem magazine and accompanied by the drawing of an imperial eagle and a swastika, the Detroit-based music journalist Lester Bangs wrote:

This quote condenses several core points concerning Anglo-American media perceptions vis-à-vis German popular music in the mid-1970s: embedded in German stereotypes, Krautrock was perceived as an ‘electronic’ phenomenon, as cold and emotionless ‘machine music’, as a new kind of pop music defying basic Anglo-American elements and roots, and, above all, as a style that would profoundly change the course of pop in the years to come.

In many ways, 1975 can be seen as a peak in the classic phase of Krautrock, most certainly in terms of its transnational recognition and its presence in the Anglo-American music press.Footnote ² Boldly entering the American market and widely discerned as a game changer for pop music and pop culture as a whole, it had solidified its lasting influence and the almost mystical adoration it enjoys today. Only very few people in the pop-cultural diaspora of late 1960s West Germany, however, would ever have imagined such a development; early Krautrock experiments were often met with scepticism and German media outlets mirrored that sentiment. After a short glimpse at the initial media coverage in Germany, this chapter explores the appearance and the discursive formation of Krautrock in the Anglo-American music press and highlights differences in their respective perceptions, such as the varying popularity of individual groups and musicians, as well as shifting paradigms in the ascriptions of stereotypes and clichés.

Amateurs and Dilettantes? Initial Press Coverage in Germany

Already in the early 1970s, Krautrock’s beginnings outside the Anglo-American norms of pop-cultural production were often seen as a pillar of its success;Footnote ³ the freedom to develop unique soundscapes and performative spaces were rooted in necessity at first and would not have been possible in predetermined forms of an established industry. In late 1960s West Germany, however, those unusual experiments still drew contempt, most certainly in large parts of the early West German media coverage. In particular, the feature pages of German newspapers and news magazines up to the early 1970s were full of articles and reports subjecting Krautrock with harsh criticism over new albums, concert performances, or any attempt of the young scene to establish a market outside the ‘almost 100 per cent Anglo/American closed shop’.Footnote ⁴

Often painting a picture of amateurish dilettantism, critics dismissed Amon Düül II, for example, as ‘pot-smoking children of affluence’Footnote ⁵ trying to copy their Anglo-American heroes and producing nothing but unintelligible noise. Right after successfully organising the Internationale Essener Songtage in 1968 – a ground-breaking pop festival not only on a German but also on a European scale – the leading West German news magazine Spiegel symptomatically accused organiser Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser of facilitating nothing but ‘utter incompetence’.Footnote ⁶

There were exceptions from the rule, however. New magazines dedicated to progressive pop music that grew out of subcultural beginnings in late 1960s Germany were the first to be interested in the young experimental scene at home. The magazine Sounds (not to be confused with the British publication of the same name) was at the forefront: the first xeroxed issues were published irregularly, until it turned into an increasingly professional monthly in 1970.Footnote ⁷ By then, it had developed into the leading West German pop magazine for progressive music, heavily influencing the discourse about the newest musical trends and developments among a pop-cultural avant-garde, including Krautrock. The rise of new music magazines coincided with the appearance of a distinct West German pop journalism based on the Anglo-American paradigm:Footnote ⁸ largely in conjunction with Krautrock, writers such as Ingeborg Schober and Winfried Trenkler emerged who, like Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, were among the first to understand the importance and transformative character of the phenomenon.

On a broad scale, however, West German journalists, decision makers, executives, and other leading figures in the music industry still skimmed Anglo-American print media for the newest trends abroad, eager to import what had already been successful somewhere else.Footnote ⁹ Still during the 1970s, thousands of British music magazines made it to West Germany every week, as did print publications from the United States (although in much smaller numbers).Footnote ¹⁰ It is no surprise that things in West Germany started to change only with growing British interest in Krautrock. Ironically, in the first broad multi-page article scrutinising the West German scene in 1972, English music critic Ian MacDonald explicitly pointed out the fact that Germans obviously accepted their ‘own’ artists only after they had been recognised abroad.Footnote ¹¹

Indeed, once the music weeklies in Britain started to pick up the phenomenon that same year, West German periodicals followed, painting a decisively more positive picture of the domestic bands. Next to newspapers and magazines as well as more conventional music publications, even highly circulating teenage magazines such as Bravo or Pop (with runs of more than a million copies) began to show interest, with little text but lots of pictures and posters, celebrating musicians for their unlikely success in Britain.

Britain – ‘Germanness’ as a Common Denominator

It was in 1972 that Krautrock made it into the British music press, and the interest in the new West German phenomenon immediately gained traction. It was Krautrock’s ‘rockier’ manifestations such as Amon Düül II, Can, and Faust that enjoyed early widespread popularity. However, in terms of market share and media attention, they would remain all but fringe phenomena in the United States, where interest would only pick up years later and almost entirely focus on the electronic variations such as Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk, also popular in Britain.

Despite different stylistic ranges, however, the music press in both countries perceived Krautrock, in all its varieties, as specifically ‘German’. Krautrock always has been categorised on national origin, and even though national or regional categorisations in pop music (e.g. Southern Rock, Brit Pop, K-Pop, etc.) usually share at least some kind of common stylistic ground, Krautrock does not. Trying to find any kind of similarities, say between Kraftwerk and Amon Düül II, would be a challenging endeavour. The perceived ‘Germanness’ of all stylistic varieties of Krautrock, no matter how different, is the leitmotif of its Anglo-American reception in the 1970s – and of this essay.

In Britain of 1972, Krautrock faced an entirely different media environment than back in Germany.Footnote ¹² Five music weeklies in large newspaper format served the market, among them Melody Maker and the New Musical Express; in addition, a varying number of independent or subcultural music magazines followed and pushed the newest developments. Furthermore, print publications amplified interest in Krautrock on other media channels, in contrast to West Germany, most notably John Peel’s legendary radio shows on the BBC. In the early 1970s, Peel heavily promoted Krautrock as ‘the most interesting and genuinely progressive music anywhere in the world’,Footnote ¹³ an appreciation Peel’s listenersFootnote ¹⁴ as well as the music weeklies shared, leading to substantial British interest in the following years.

For example, Barry Miles, a writer and activist in the British counterculture since the 1960s, saw ‘the true sound of the decade coming from Germany’.Footnote ¹⁵ For Michael Watts, Melody Maker’s US editor in the early 1970s, it was ‘a new European music, like it’s never been heard in this country before’Footnote ¹⁶ and ‘genuinely different to anything that Britain or America has thrown up’.Footnote ¹⁷ Disc, another British music weekly, similarly described Krautrock’s soundscapes as ‘so apart from everything we’ve ever heard … devoid of the usual R’n’B and soul roots’.Footnote ¹⁸ Early on, the phenomenon was perceived not only as the most recent innovation, but as decisively different and entirely new, seemingly detached from pop music’s Anglo-American heritage.

When MacDonald’s aforementioned multi-page report about Krautrock was published in late 1972, the first on this scale in Britain, he dubbed it the ‘strangest rock scene in the world’.Footnote ¹⁹ He found not only the music and appearance of the bands strange, however, but also and much more generally the modes of production and distribution. For a British observer, he noted, the lack of professionalism was striking, as was the radical anti-capitalist stance of many musicians who often actively resisted professional management. In turn, MacDonald praised Krautrock’s freedom to experiment, its freedom from cultural-industrial constraints, and, as a result, its challenge to ‘virtually every accepted English and American standpoint’.Footnote ²⁰ He was one of the first to draw the connection between a lack of professionalism and the freedom to experiment, which added to the perception of otherness already prevalent in British media.

When Krautrock acts began to tour Britain in 1972, their stage performances further solidified this perception. One aspect linked to the increased politicisation of Krautrock musicians, and repeatedly pointed out on stage, for instance, was the missing hierarchy: seemingly without band leaders, ‘no glittery stardust hype, no crotch-brandishing macho rockers, no mike-swinging crowd pleasers’,Footnote ²¹ all that made Krautrock acts again appear entirely different from Anglo-American performers. However, as with the large stylistic variety of Krautrock’s soundscapes, its stage performances hardly had any common pattern: Amon Düül II made a commune-like, spontaneous appearance; on stage, Can were described as a highly sophisticated collective; Faust employed visual art installations; Tangerine Dream sat with their backs to the audience in front of their instruments; and Kraftwerk eventually vanished from stage entirely, replaced by mannikins in suits. Despite their varied performances, the music press would come to identify a common thread that could be used to classify them as a more unified, homogeneous movement. The perceived otherness based on Krautrock’s soundscapes, performances, and modes of production demanded, it seems, a categorisation, and that categorisation was ‘Germanness’.

One of the first recurring themes of British Krautrock reception in that respect was its supposed relation to the music and ideas of Richard Wagner. ‘Wagnerism’ had shaped the British imagination of Germany and ‘Germanness’ for almost a century, and it permeated into the 1970s pop discourse to a surprising extent.Footnote ²² At first, it was directed towards Amon Düül II during their initial stage appearances in Britain, when observers saw them ‘influenced by the great classical music tradition that’s so much part of German life – in particular Wagner’.Footnote ²³ For Duncan Fallowell, a British Krautrock connoisseur who travelled in the West German scene extensively in the 1970s, Amon Düül’s performances evoked ‘spacey gothic landscapes, lots of growling electronics, drums like a Panzer division, the whole Wagner in black leather bit’.Footnote ²⁴ Others simply called them, again using Wagnerian imagery, ‘aggressively Teutonic’.Footnote ²⁵

Even though references to Wagner became less explicit over time, they never quite vanished. Kraftwerk’s music, design, and performances of the late 1970s, to point at a particularly prominent example, would be related to the Wagnerian idea of a Gesamtkunstwerk (total work of art). Writer Andy Gill saw Kraftwerk as ‘the only completely successful visual/aural fusion rock has produced so far’.Footnote ²⁶ Mentioning Emil Schult’s visual artwork – a decisive and often undervalued contribution to the band’s concept – Gill added that ‘the music couldn’t be other than it is. The form determines the content … The form can probably only be fully understood in relation to the German cultural and psychological make up.’Footnote ²⁷

The notion of modernity, also inseparably linked to Wagnerism and another leitmotif of British Krautrock coverage of the 1970s, further contributed to the imagination of a specific ‘Germanness’. This narrative was based on the fact, as most observers continued to point out, that Krautrock had severed its ties to Anglo-American musical roots – a core objective of the West German musical movement – but also on the extensive or even exclusive use of electronic instruments, still new in popular music at the time. In the Anglo-American pop market of the early 1970s, it was mainly those two aspects that branded Krautrock as ‘modern’, as the newest development, or even as pop music’s future: Amon Düül II, for example, were regarded as ‘terrifying modern’;Footnote ²⁸ Can as ‘quite a distance ahead’;Footnote ²⁹ and Faust even as the ‘perfect definition of the term avant-garde’.Footnote ³⁰ While sometimes Anglo-American acts had to serve as reference – Pink Floyd, for instance, were told that Tangerine Dream had ‘advanced far beyond them electronically’Footnote ³¹ – Kraftwerk’s Mensch-Maschine (Man-Machine) album was called ‘modern electronic music’Footnote ³² by the end of the decade.

Imagining the future of pop music, provoked by Krautrock’s soundscapes, even entered another dimension in the British (and later American) reception of the 1970s. With the Space Age still in its earlier stages and science fiction experiencing a boom in literature and film, linking Krautrock to outer space seemed like a logical next step. Even Amon Düül II were lauded for their ‘space effect’Footnote ³³ and, referring to Stanley Kubrick’s still new epic, proposed as ‘a possible soundtrack from a possible 2001 Part 2’.Footnote ³⁴ However, it was most of all Krautrock’s electronic variations that sparked futuristic connotations, most prominently Tangerine Dream and, a little later, Kraftwerk. Tangerine Dream’s stage outfit during concerts in the mid-1970s were met with astonishment by British audiences in the face of their enormous amounts of electronic equipment, with blinking, wandering diodes on synthesisers towering over the three musicians.

For many, it appeared more like the helm of a spaceship than the stage of a concert performance and it visually amplified the futuristic electronic soundscapes, creating a multisensory experience that left the audience ‘mesmerised’.Footnote ³⁵ In 1978, Kraftwerk took the imagery a step further by creating their futuristic ‘man machine aesthetic’ based on classic modernism, but also evoking cyborgs or androids. At the time of its release, the album was described as ‘hard-edged, mechanised to the ultimate, de-humanised, even inhuman’.Footnote ³⁶ By then this ‘Prussian ice-age of Kraftwerk’Footnote ³⁷ had replaced ‘something as gentle as’Footnote ³⁸ Tangerine Dream, but nonetheless, the futuristic remained prominent.

Ghosts From the Past: Nazi Clichés

Another very different notion of Germany and Germanness – not connected to modernity or even the future, but much rather to the past – was a continuously prominent companion of Krautrock’s reception in the 1970s: German stereotyping based on World War II and Germany’s Nazi past. British popular culture in the 1970s was soaked with depictions of Germans as militarist, warmongering Nazis goosestepping through the screen or magazine pages. The fascination ran deep and disseminated throughout British pop culture itself: expressing admiration for Nazi aesthetics or using them as a (very effective) form of provocation was not foreign even to British pop stars such as Mick Jagger or David Bowie. Likewise, the first generation of London punks frequently sported swastikas in another extreme manifestation of this phenomenon. It was this environment that also set the tone for the British music press’s analysis of ‘Kraut’-rock.

Looking at the term Krautrock, the common narrative goes as follows: the term was invented by the British music press as an expression of disdain or at least mockery for pop music produced by krauts, a derogative term for Germans, but eventually turned into a quality seal for some of the most inventive and progressive sounds of the decade.Footnote ³⁹ However, at least in its simplicity, this narrative is unlikely true. The term had already appeared in the West German music scene in 1969, long before British writers and journalists took any notice;Footnote ⁴⁰ even in 1973, when Faust as well as Conrad Schnitzler both released tracks titled ‘Krautrock’, the term was far from ubiquitous in the British music press. ‘German Sound’, often used interchangeably, remained far more common.

In any case, Germany’s Nazi past was an ever-present asset in British Krautrock reception and again it spanned the entire stylistic range of the phenomenon. To stick with the two examples already mentioned, it affected Amon Düül II at the beginning of the decade just as much as Kraftwerk at its end, when their album was described as ‘the soundtrack for an afternoon teabreak at Krupp’s … almost off to invade Poland’.Footnote ⁴¹ Nazi connotations were partly intertwined with Wagnerian notions (compare the ‘drums like a Panzer division’Footnote ⁴²), but was often more blatant and explicit. In most cases, the irony was easy to decipher, although not always.

Clearly ironic, full of cultural references, and one of the most extreme examples of promoting Nazi connotations and symbolism was Lester Bang’s 1975 article on and interview with Kraftwerk, quoted at the beginning of this essay. Written in Bang’s unique and radical style, it not only appeared in the Detroit-based Creem magazine, but also, in a slightly edited version and under a more explicit caption, in the British New Musical Express.Footnote ⁴³ Published across the entire Anglo-American market on the pinnacle of Krautrock’s transnational fame, the article is in many ways a prime example of Krautrock’s depiction in the British and American music press of the 1970s.

With the title, ‘Kraftwerk – The Final Solution to the Music Problem?’,Footnote ⁴⁴ referring to the Nazi genocide of European Jews in World War II, and a two-page depiction of the Kraftwerk musicians collaged into photos of swastika flags and Nazi rallies, the framing of Bangs’ article in the New Musical Express could hardly have been more graphic. Indeed, it marked a stark intensification of the Nazi symbolism used more sparingly in the Creem version of the same review. This is symptomatic in the sense that Nazi connotations played a much larger role in British media than they did in the United States, although such connotations were present in both. Even more important, it is also symptomatic in the sense that nothing in Bangs’ interview with Kraftwerk, the basis for the article, hinted in any way at Kraftwerk having sympathies for Nazism or Nazi aesthetics.

Quite the contrary: Bangs, not surprisingly considering his radical and provocative approach, seems to have implied Nazi connotations more than once, although without Kraftwerk entertaining them. In fact, Kraftwerk, clearly well-prepared for the interview and with a clear-cut vision and strategy, laid out their narrative of a ‘zero hour’ in German popular culture at the end of World War II, Anglo-American cultural dominance in West Germany’s post-war decades, and their push to create a new, explicitly central European cultural identity, drawing on 1920s German classic modernism ‘unspoilt’ by the Nazis.Footnote ⁴⁵

Before arriving in the United States, as their US manager Ira Blacker put it retrospectively, Kraftwerk already had ‘very distinct ideas as to their identity’.Footnote ⁴⁶ There is evidence that Kraftwerk’s famous concept of the man-machine developed out of a dialectic between actively constructing this identity and its very reception in the Anglo-American music press, that the media stereotyping based on Kraftwerk’s attempts to construe a new identity in turn influenced the very process of identity building itself. However, resorting to various cultural fragments from the pre-Nazi era and cutting ties to dominant Anglo-American popular culture were common themes among Krautrock artists in general. What set Kraftwerk apart was their highly stylised, conceptual approach that went far beyond music and included visual arts as well as performative aspects, not least in interviews. In the context of Lester Bangs’ interview in 1975, Kraftwerk described the ‘German mentality’ as ‘more advanced’,Footnote ⁴⁷ an example of (self-)ironic play with anglophone clichés about German national identity.

However, it turned out to be a very controversial quote in West Germany because most observers there had initially read the interview under the drastic Nazi imagery employed by the New Musical Express. Kraftwerk repeatedly rejected any such accusations, which were, in fact, rooted in the Anglo-American media reception; the band itself always promoted a cosmopolitan identity, and some of their core themes such as individualism versus collectivism, human and technology, or digitisation clearly hit the zeitgeist of the 1970s and beyond. And it is those latter aspects to which the discourse turned by the end of the decade, away from national clichés and stereotypes, towards a more universal imagination.

Future Music from Outer Space: Krautrock in America

The American market for pop journalism in the 1970s was decisively different from its British counterpart, despite the permanent exchange of ideas and countless mutual contributions.Footnote ⁴⁸ On the one hand, trade journals played a significant role, most of all the highly influential Billboard magazine, which also circulated widely among West German leaders in the music industry.Footnote ⁴⁹ In the late 1960s and 1970s, ground-breaking new magazines such as Rolling Stone or Creem appeared and, after humble beginnings, successfully established themselves on the market.Footnote ⁵⁰ It was Rolling Stone that published the first multi-page features on Krautrock for the American market in 1972 and 1973. With Krautrock acts (especially most of the groups mentioned in both articles) being marginal in the United States at the time – despite an already strong interest among music professionalsFootnote ⁵¹ – the motivation for those two features is not entirely clear.

One likely reason might have been that Rolling Stone picked up on the interest in the British media. However, the driving force seems to have been Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s tireless efforts to promote his labels and groups in the United States. The first article in 1972 de facto showcased his portfolio and was based on promotional material Kaiser had sent over the Atlantic. Not hiding a certain degree of confusion and bewilderment, Rolling Stone then noted that ‘rare indeed it is that we have the opportunity to observe another culture in the throes of its own transition. … There is something going on here, but we don’t know what it is at the moment.’Footnote ⁵²

The second article in 1973 described English author Charles Nicholl’s visit to one of Kaiser’s last release parties for his label Kosmische Kuriere in West Germany. Nicholl, cognoscente of the Anglo-American counterculture of the 1970s and writing for the London office of Rolling Stone, at first found it ‘hard to avoid a patronising nostalgia for the mid-Sixties, as if the reverberations from the West Coast had only just been translated into a rather stodgy German terminology. The exotic costumes. The hazy cosmic jive. And acid. The ghost of Timothy Leary.’Footnote ⁵³ However, the music presented that day obviously appealed to Nicholls, who described an impromptu live performance by Tangerine Dream as ‘something special’.Footnote ⁵⁴

Unfortunately for Kaiser, however, large-scale interest for Krautrock in the United States only picked up one year later in 1974. By then, he had already disappeared from the scene, unable to harvest what he had so relentlessly been trying to seed for years. Richard Branson signed Tangerine Dream to his Virgin label, and Kraftwerk made it to the American market through Ira Blacker and his company Mr. I. Mouse Ltd; both bands would dominate the early Krautrock discourse in the United States.

The interest in those new appearances was immense: the trade journal Cash Box saw them as a sign of ‘Germany’s increasing influence on the international music scene’,Footnote ⁵⁵ while Variety saw rock music beginning a ‘Teutonic phase of its evolution’ with ‘virtually every U.S. label … in the market for the so-called “German Sound”’.Footnote ⁵⁶ With Tangerine Dream and Kraftwerk dominating its reception in the United States in the second half of the 1970s, Krautrock was, as mentioned, primarily understood as an electronic phenomenon: the ‘German electronic trend’Footnote ⁵⁷ was ‘pushing new frontiers’.Footnote ⁵⁸

To no big surprise, then, technology and the ‘hypnotically structured’Footnote ⁵⁹ electronic sounds were two of the primary elements at the core of this reception. In that context, new terms and descriptions appeared in the pop-cultural language that would make a return one and a half decades later, again with considerable German contribution: ‘techno’ and ‘trance’. Creem, for instance, described Krautrock as a ‘techno flash’,Footnote ⁶⁰ music critic Robert Hilburn called it, slightly more traditionally, ‘techno-rock’,Footnote ⁶¹ and according to Circus magazine, Krautrock’s electronic soundscapes put listeners into a state of ‘trance’.Footnote ⁶² Not everyone was necessarily happy with the increasing role of electronic elements infused into pop music by the Germans, however. Critic Larry Rohter lamented that ‘the age of synthetic music is upon us’Footnote ⁶³ and found that to be ‘menacing’,Footnote ⁶⁴ while musicologist Robert Palmer, equally sceptical, saw mere ‘simulations’Footnote ⁶⁵ at play.

But the days in which the American Federation of Musicians demanded a ban of electronic instruments were over,Footnote ⁶⁶ and the fascination for new musical technology far outpaced the traditionalist’s incredulity. For most critics and writers listening to Kraftwerk or, in this case, Tangerine Dream, it was ‘fascinating to see what technology can accomplish’,Footnote ⁶⁷ a perception many musicians and music professionals obviously shared. A tangible example of Krautrock’s influence on the music scene already in the 1970s was the observation that, at a 1977 Tangerine Dream show in California, ‘musicians frantically wrote notes and musical notations’.Footnote ⁶⁸ Kraftwerk, of course, were equally considered to be part of the technological avant-garde; science fiction author Jim Aikin, a critic for the pioneering trade magazine Contemporary Keyboard, laconically declared Kraftwerk’s 1978 album Mensch-Maschine, a ‘technical triumph’.Footnote ⁶⁹

It is not a coincidence that in the 1970s, a writer of science fiction would endorse new musical technologies. As already seen in Britain, Krautrock’s soundscapes were broadly understood as ‘future sounds’, and what was true for Amon Düül II back in England was most certainly true for the electronic acts favoured in the United States. For many observers, ‘German Sound’Footnote ⁷⁰ was alternatively, a ‘sound like science fiction’,Footnote ⁷¹ a ‘genuine listening experience … from outer space’,Footnote ⁷² ‘space tripping … future music’,Footnote ⁷³ or, as Kaiser had already insisted half a decade earlier, ‘cosmic music for cosmically inclined audiences’.Footnote ⁷⁴ Being the avant-garde of electronic pop music and a forerunner of newest musical technology, however, did not only evoke cosmic visions. Again, the art was tied back to the national origin of its creators – Germany – with all the known clichés.

The usual set of German stereotypes entered many reviews and feature pages. Far beyond Nazi pictures and symbolism, one of them was the supposedly cold and emotionless German linked to technological mastery. Lester Bangs, even before publishing his Kraftwerk feature, called electronic Krautrock ‘music made by machines on ice’;Footnote ⁷⁵ Rohter referred to it as ‘mechanical music for a machine age’,Footnote ⁷⁶ while Circus claimed it was ‘totally in control, unemotional and detached’.Footnote ⁷⁷ ‘Machinelike’,Footnote ⁷⁸ icy, detached: for many readers, typical German traits; for many writers, convenient stereotypes to employ.

Conclusion

The leitmotif of both American and British Krautrock reception in the 1970s was the continuing popularity of German stereotypes and clichés, with the music press coverage in both countries differing only in nuances. From Amon Düül II to Kraftwerk, Krautrock in all its vastly different stylistic variations was perceived as ‘unmistakably Germanic’,Footnote ⁷⁹ and it was not before the end of the decade that those ascriptions and stereotypes slowly started to fade away. By then, it was the broad consensus among critics and pop journalists that Krautrock had, as music critic John Rockwell put it, ‘evolved a musical style so removed from the blues-based fervour of 1950s rock that it is hard to think of this music as rock-and-roll at all, except that it’s sold through the same market’.Footnote ⁸⁰

From the start, but even more by the end of the decade, the ‘future sounds’ of Krautrock were widely regarded as a transformative contribution to pop music and culture; far beyond the early commercial success of the well-known acts mentioned in this chapter, its more obscure and experimental manifestations, as well as solo projects and new formations from Düsseldorf to West Berlin and beyond entered British and American music journalism. Starting in the 1990s, then, renewed interest in the phenomenon finally re-discovered it in its full breadth, far beyond the stars of the initial decade, and far beyond the stereotypes and clichés that dominated the initial reception.

Independent of changing patterns of attention and appreciation, the shift in the Anglo-American music press’s understanding of Krautrock in the 1970s suggests that Krautrock’s mission to create a new and transnational cultural identity, for themselves and for West Germany, can ultimately be considered successful. British as well as American observers clearly placed Krautrock outside the Anglo-American realm of pop music, viewing it as a distinct West German phenomenon detached from pop music’s Anglo-American roots. In addition, and as a result, Krautrock’s soundscapes and performative elements were not only considered modern, but also futuristic pop music, not just a passing trend, but a transformative contribution, and the first fundamental contribution to pop music from outside the Anglo-American sphere.

Possessing a distinct kind of otherness compared to the world of pop in the 1970s, reactions to Krautrock sometimes fell back on preconceived notions of ‘Germanness’ and inconsistent German stereotypes – some writers actually misunderstood, others simply played with clichés, some referred to the past, others to the future. Tying Krautrock back to its national origin, however, seems to have changed those very preconceived notions of Germanness in the Anglo-American music press at the same time. By the end of the decade, clichés and stereotypes faded from the pages of music magazines, and with them Wagner, swastikas, and the looming spectre of the icy German.

The Krautrock phenomenon formed part of a global revolution in pop music and culture in the 1960s and 1970s, but in sharp contrast to the Anglo-American world, Germany’s music business infrastructure for countercultural rock music was initially underdeveloped. That was different in Britain and the United States, where a surge in independent record labels and studios with the latest recording technology followed the rock ’n’ roll era. With multitrack recording expanding, artists began to use the studio as an instrument, and more independent producers like George Martin, Brian Wilson, and Phil Spector appeared on the scene. Rock music became more complex and increasingly focused on the record as a work of art. Experimental use of new studio tools, inspired by the production techniques of The Beatles and The Beach Boys and the progressive and psychedelic rock styles of acts like Pink Floyd, Yes, and King Crimson, accompanied a shift from singles to album LPs.Footnote ¹

Linked to this development was the widespread opening of recording studios independent of major record companies, such as Associated Independent Recording (London, 1965), Trident Studios (London, 1968), Sound City Studios (Los Angeles, 1969), and Electric Lady Studios (New York, 1970), and the establishment of dedicated rock engineers like Tony Visconti, Glyn Johns, and Alan Parsons. The economic infrastructure was changing simultaneously, with established major labels recognising the widespread desire for rock music and the need for new release opportunities. Decca was the first major that in 1966, staffed by young, enthusiastic rock fans, created the sub-label Deram for rock music, releasing Procul Harum and Ten Years After. EMI and Philips followed suit and opened the sub-labels Harvest and Vertigo, respectively, in 1969, with Pink Floyd, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, and Uriah Heep on their rosters. Rock music production was progressing, and rapidly becoming more professional, leading to many now-classic albums.

Live music, also in a state of flux, gave club culture more relevance. Well-known examples are the Whisky a Go Go in Los Angeles (1964) as a prime venue for rock music, or the now legendary Cavern Club in Liverpool, which gained prominence through performances by The Beatles (1961–3). A significant event for the development of international popular music culture was the Monterey Pop Festival in 1967, which marked the beginning of the ‘Summer of Love’. Woodstock followed it in 1968, and the Altamont Free Festival in 1969. All three festivals made history and inspired pop festivals all over the world. On the business side of things, dedicated rock managers emerged with renowned professionals such as Brian Epstein (The Beatles), Peter Grant (Led Zeppelin), and Allen Klein (The Rolling Stones). Due to the popularity of Anglo-American rock music, a supportive infrastructure was quickly established in Britain and the United States, contributing to the music’s global success.

In West Germany, there was a profoundly different situation. The infrastructure was much less developed, but it was precisely this disadvantage that provided the breeding ground for Krautrock.Footnote ² The German music industry was built on Schlager, a commercial form of pop music intended to appeal to the sentiments of the public,Footnote ³ produced by major labels in their own studios. Independent record labels for rock music did not exist, nor was there an adequate club and concert infrastructure for such music. Moreover, roles like music managers were practically forbidden until the mid-1970s. The Arbeitsamt (Federal Employment Agency) held a special department for artists and had a monopoly on managing musicians, but it lacked suitable personnel for rock music.Footnote ⁴ So bands either took over their management duties themselves or recruited an external ‘band member’, neither of which was usually suited for the job. Moreover, both approaches were violations of the law and carried hefty fines.

These structural deficits disadvantaged German artists, but they were also one of the reasons why such an unusual form of rock could develop in Germany with Krautrock. The lack of structure provided ample space for creativity and exploration outside Anglo-American norms, without which Krautrock would probably not have developed as it did. The structural disadvantage was transformed into an artistic concept. While the late 1960s were still a developmental time for Krautrock, the period between 1970 and 1974 was marked by professionalisation, institutionalisation, expansion, and transnationalisation.Footnote ⁵ Innovative independent record labels, recording studios, and distribution networks emerged for progressive rock music, enabling experimental German rock artists to produce records and release them internationally. Many of the industry professionals involved were just as relevant to the creative output as the artists.

Clubs and Festivals

German progressive rock bands did not benefit from an established infrastructure of performance venues in the 1960s. Early Krautrock bands had to be content with performing at art galleries and exhibitions, bars and universities, such as the canteen of the Technical University of West Berlin, an important meeting place at the time.Footnote ⁶ Dedicated rock clubs were rare, one of which was the Star Club in Hamburg (1962–9). Best-known for providing a stage for The Beatles in 1962, it also impacted Krautrock, given that influential recording industry figures were involved in the live events and house label Star Records. For example, Amon Düül II, Popol Vuh, and Can were signed by Siegfried Loch, an artist and repertoire representative at Philips Records and later head of the German branch of American label Liberty Records.Footnote ⁷ Inspired by Andy Warhol’s Factory and the Dom in New York, a club culture began to develop in West Germany by the late 1960s.

Zodiak Free Arts Lab played a crucial role in Berlin. Founded by musicians Conrad Schnitzler and Hans-Joachim Roedelius, the club had, despite its short existence between 1968 and 1969, a profound influence on what later became known as the ‘Berlin School’ of electronic music.Footnote ⁸ As an avant-garde space for musicians, artists, creatives, and the counterculture, Zodiak hosted daily open-stage sessions with little distinction between audience and artists. It encouraged anyone to pick up an instrument and experiment with free jazz, progressive rock, and avant-garde styles. The boundaries between performing and rehearsing were fluid. Many Krautrock bands originated there one way or another from those jam sessions: multimedia artists Agitation Free were the house band, Edgar Froese and Klaus Schulze of Tangerine Dream were regulars, and Kluster formed directly from the sessions. Besides Zodiak, composer Thomas Kessler’s Electronic Beat Studio, a publicly funded semi-professional studio in a music school, provided electronic instruments and recording facilities for early Berlin Krautrock bands.Footnote ⁹ Ash Ra Tempel were formed in this studio.

Düsseldorf became as equally important as Berlin with the development of a ‘Düsseldorf School’. Kraftwerk, its most famous representative, alongside Neu!, La Düsseldorf, and later acts such as DAF, Der Plan, and Propaganda, made Düsseldorf Germany’s capital of electronic pop music.Footnote ¹⁰ Just as in Berlin, the early scene was concentrated in a few central locations. Near the renowned Düsseldorf Art Academy with contemporary artist Joseph Beuys and a thriving art gallery run by Konrad Fischer, Creamcheese (1967–76) was Germany’s first psychedelic club to combine pop music and art.Footnote ¹¹ Even more so than Zodiak, Creamcheese emphasised multimedia elements, realised through light and video projections, art installations, and music, to unite the senses. Spectacular events and performances from bands like Pink Floyd, Genesis, and Deep Purple brought the club considerable media attention. Prominent Krautrock bands Kraftwerk, Can, and Tangerine Dream also performed at Creamcheese.Footnote ¹²

Other cities also had clubs relevant to Krautrock. In Frankfurt, the Sinkkasten jazz club and Heidi Loves You basement bar became hubs for the local psychedelic scene, and Munich had the PN Hit House with house band Amon Düül.Footnote ¹³ Even though no club came close to Zodiak and Creamcheese, they all had something in common in that Krautrock musicians initiated and shaped the operation of these clubs, which helped establish a social and performative infrastructure for progressive rock music.Footnote ¹⁴ In contrast to earlier venues like Hamburg’s Star Club that hosted strictly organised live performances by mainstream bands, the new progressive clubs encouraged experimentation and promoted the interplay of art and music. But these clubs were rare, so it was difficult for bands to tour the country.

While clubs provided the breeding ground for bands and their progressive styles, one event was fundamental to the institutionalisation of Krautrock: International Essen Song Days from 25 to 29 September 1968. Inspired by the Monterey Pop Festival of 1967, music journalist Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, who later founded the Krautrock labels Ohr, Pilz, and Kosmische Kuriere, conceived the event as a non-profit festival. The generous support of Essen’s Department of Youth made it possible to sell tickets at low prices.Footnote ¹⁵ Over these five days, more than 200 musicians from Germany and abroad played forty-three performances at eight venues. Among the foreign bands were Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention, Alexis Korner, and The Fugs. Notwithstanding a considerable financial loss, the festival profoundly impacted German pop culture. With 40,000 visitors, it was Europe’s biggest pop music event at the time and marked the beginning of a festival boom in Germany.

Festivals becoming integral to pop culture triggered the debate between commercial interest and the countercultural authenticity central to Krautrock.Footnote ¹⁶ Essen Song Days was also a noteworthy event in another respect; Krautrock bands like Tangerine Dream, The Guru Guru Groove, and Xhol Caravan benefitted from both a broader audience and more media attention than was possible with performances at arty clubs and galleries. What followed was the formation of professional networks and Krautrock bands receiving their first record contracts: Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream, Xhol Caravan, and Birth Control were signed to the Hansa label by Peter Meisel, Schlager producer and owner of Hansa Studios in Berlin.Footnote ¹⁷ Due to its myriad influences on German pop culture, Essen Song Days was a momentous milestone, marking Krautrock’s inception; some even see it as the beginning of German countercultural pop music.Footnote ¹⁸

German Record Labels for Independent Rock Music

By the late 1960s, dedicated record labels for rock music did not yet exist in Germany, but it was not long before a new infrastructure of Krautrock-specific independent labels formed. Schlager producer Peter Meisel had no vision for handling the newly signed bands Amon Düül, Tangerine Dream, Xhol Caravan, and Birth Control. Without a clear production concept, he recorded Amon Düül’s semi-improvised performances in a chaotic session.Footnote ¹⁹ Meisel was unsure about the result and waited until the band’s offshoot project, Amon Düül II, released Phallus Dei (Penis of God, 1969). Assured by this release, Meisel finally released Amon Düül’s debut album, Psychedelic Underground, in 1969 through his major international distributor, Hamburg-based Metronome. The following year meant the beginning of a historical collaboration for Krautrock: together with Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, organiser of Essen Song Days, Meisel founded the first record label for German progressive rock music, Ohr, in 1970.

Set up in Meisel’s premises in Berlin-Wilmersdorf and using his Schlager network, Ohr offered the burgeoning new psychedelic rock scene professional music production and distribution services,Footnote ²⁰ as well as Kaiser’s imaginative marketing campaigns.Footnote ²¹ Within its first three years of existence, Ohr released thirty-two LPs and enabled countless Krautrock bands to reach an international audience, including Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Guru Guru, and Embryo. The early releases, produced in Thomas Kessler’s Beatstudio, sounded a bit raw, unlike many later releases that had internationally competitive quality, owing to the collaboration with Germany’s two primary Krautrock producers, Conny Plank and Dieter Dierks.

Kaiser signed many bands in the label’s first year, which prompted distributor Metronome to limit Ohr’s activities. Kaiser and Meisel then started another label, Pilz, distributed by the German chemical giant BASF, which had just set up the music label Mouse and a distribution system that was used for Pilz releases.Footnote ²² Pilz was supposed to release more folk-oriented music, whereas Ohr should focus on psychedelic rock, but this distinction did not hold in practice. Within the first two years, both labels had sold 250,000 copies of eighteen albums but hardly made a profit because of high production costs.Footnote ²³ Kaiser’s ambition was to raise the market share of German bands from under 1 per cent to 90 per cent in less than a year.Footnote ²⁴ Since he had to compensate for often poor artistic quality, his huge advertising and promotional campaigns took increasingly absurd turns. Towards the end of his short-lived career spanning six years, Kaiser claimed that his bands were bigger than The Beatles and played on Mars.Footnote ²⁵ Such delusions of grandeur made Meisel sever his ties with Ohr and Pilz in 1973. Many artists like Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze also wanted to pull out of their contractual obligations, which they finally achieved through lawsuits.Footnote ²⁶

In 1972, before these incidents, leading Ohr employees Bruno Wendel and Günter Körber had already left the company to set up their own Krautrock label, Brain Records, distributed by Metronome. Becoming the main competitor, Brain attracted many acts from Kaiser’s roster. In the four years between 1972 and 1976, Brain released fifty-eight Krautrock albums and sold about one million copies of records by Neu!, Embryo, Tangerine Dream, Edgar Froese, Klaus Schulze, Popol Vuh, Kraan, Cluster, Harmonia, and Guru Guru, making it the biggest German rock label.Footnote ²⁷ Körber left Brain in 1975, intending to pursue a different model; he founded the one-person company Sky Records that served a narrowly defined niche market within the blossoming rock music scene.Footnote ²⁸ After twenty-five years in business, Sky ultimately closed in 2000, having only released reissues in its final years. Brain is practically inactive but still releases albums, compilations, and reissues of its leading artists, such as Klaus Schulze, Grobschnitt, Harmonia, Birth Control, Cluster, Accept, the Scorpions, Neu!, and Jane.

One of the few German Krautrock labels left today is Bureau B, a sub-label of Tapete Records. Founded as a specialist label for electronic and experimental German music of the 1970s and 1980s,Footnote ²⁹ Bureau B regularly releases reissues of Brain and Sky, including records by Conrad Schnitzler, Hans-Joachim Roedelius, or Cluster, often with the original design, but also new releases in the Krautrock tradition. Similarly, the Grönland label, founded by German pop star Herbert Grönemeyer, spearheaded the Krautrock revival in Germany by re-releasing all long-out-of-print albums by Neu! in 2001. Box sets compiling key Krautrock bands like Harmonia or the solo oeuvre by former Can member Holger Czukay followed suit.Footnote ³⁰

Back to Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser: after his business partners Wendel and Körber left, in 1973 Kaiser started a third record label called Kosmische Kuriere (Cosmic Couriers) with his partner Gille Lettmann, distributed by Metronome. The label represented Kaiser’s New Age interests and the rather pronounced preoccupation with the mind-altering drug LSD. Its name is inspired by the term populist psychologist Timothy Leary used for LSD dealers.Footnote ³¹ Sonically the label kosmische Musik referred to releases by Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, Wallenstein, The Cosmic Jokers, and Popol Vuh. Of his three labels, it was Kosmische Kuriere that allowed Kaiser to most effectively realise his ideas of promoting alternative spiritualities as well as his vision of ‘deterritorialized, post-national cosmological identity, which involved the consumption of psychedelic drugs and the invention of new sounds, in particular through the use of the synthesizer’.Footnote ³² During his business years, Kaiser helped boost blossoming careers of groups such as Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Klaus Schulze, and Popol Vuh, but this did not save him from declaring bankruptcy in 1975. His erratic, presumably drug-influenced behaviour towards the end of his career had made him a laughing stock, before he disappeared from the music scene altogether.

His pivotal role as a visionary and promoter of Krautrock, however, cannot be overstated.Footnote ³³ In addition to founding Essen Song Days, he provided the production and distribution infrastructure for Krautrock with his three labels, which indirectly led to the conception of other influential record companies like Brain and Sky. Kaiser’s downfall, though, cannot be reduced to drugs; he was simply too ambitious in his quest to change society through pop music. With his disappearance, Krautrock had passed its zenith.Footnote ³⁴ Still, several Krautrock artists took the risk of opening their own labels. By 1977, around 100 existed, occupying 9 per cent of the market, but most eventually ended in financial disaster.Footnote ³⁵

Independent labels like Ohr, Pilz, Kosmische Kuriere, Brain, and Sky were not the only ones interested in German psychedelic rock music. For one thing, all but Pilz were distributed by Hamburg-based Deutsche Metronome, the German offshoot of a Swedish major record company. For another, major labels discovered the market potential of Krautrock. In 1971, Stuttgart-based Intercord opened a sub-label for progressive music called Spiegelei. Even more impactful was Polydor, the pop label of Deutsche Grammophon, whose sub-company BASF later became relevant as the distributor of Pilz Records.

One of the most widely reported signings in the already unconventional Krautrock practices was Faust. The outlet was sold to Polydor in 1970 by journalist Uwe Nettelbeck, who (unofficially) acted as their manager, producer, and marketing expert. Strikingly unconventional and generous, Polydor set up a top-class recording studio, providing living quarters for the entire band.Footnote ³⁶ The label had hoped for a German version of The BeatlesFootnote ³⁷ but was somewhat stunned upon hearing the results of a year’s work in the studio, heavily influenced by LSD use and experimentation with recording technology. The debut album Faust (1971) sold poorly in the British key market; it was still worse in Germany, with less than 1,000 copies sold. Their second album So Far (1972) also failed.

Krautrock in the International Market

Just as important as German major labels were German branches of foreign corporations, many of which recognised the economic potential of Krautrock even before independent labels emerged. Given that selling records without losing royalties to German partners was lucrative, foreign companies were keen on opening national branches in Germany. Before Krautrock’s emergence, American outfit Liberty/United Artists, founded in 1967 with Siegfried Loch as head of the German branch, was already involved in German rock music. Liberty released early albums by Can, Amon Düül II, and Popol Vuh, which gave artists professional structures and international distribution, and ensured affordable overseas prices, making them successful in Western Europe and Japan.Footnote ³⁸

Another important player was Virgin in Britain, initially a mail-order company specialising in importing international LPs. After Polydor had dropped Faust, Virgin CEO Richard Branson signed the band and released The Faust Tapes (1973), a compilation of unreleased recordings from the Polydor era. Neither The Faust Tapes nor the following Virgin-produced Faust IV (1974) had any major success in Germany, so Faust disbandedFootnote ³⁹ before receiving recognition in their home country for their achievements abroad. In retrospect, Faust produced some of the most influential records of the decade, considerably impacting British and American bands.Footnote ⁴⁰

Virgin was not only relevant for Krautrock because of Faust; they were also pivotal for acts like Tangerine Dream achieving major successes in Britain. Their third album for Ohr, Atem (1973), was already becoming the most commercially successful import album in Britain, also winning John Peel’s Best Album of the Year award.Footnote ⁴¹ After Tangerine Dream parted ways with Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, Virgin signed the band and released their fourth album, Phaedra (1974). As with Faust, the album did not sell well in Germany. Nonetheless, Tangerine Dream, enthusiastically received in France and even more so in Britain, became the first German band to perform at London’s Royal Albert Hall in 1975.Footnote ⁴²

Many other international partnerships existed; some were successful, some were not. British Vertigo successfully released albums by Can, Amon Düül, and Faust, but the first two Kraftwerk albums did not sell well. Kraftwerk, however, succeeded in the United States, where they were released through Mercury, EMI Electrola, and Capitol. Amon Düül also achieved a high-profile signing with American major label Atlantic to produce the double album Made in Germany (1975), which flopped incredibly.Footnote ⁴³

Krautrock was received very differently in its home country and abroad. As representative examples of the larger Krautrock movement, Faust and Tangerine Dream were commercially successful in Britain, France, Spain, Italy, Japan, Australia, and the United States, though they flopped in Germany. Demand for international touring was highest for Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Neu!, Guru Guru, Embryo, Amon Düül II, and Can.Footnote ⁴⁴ Even though record labels were right in their hope that the international success of domestic rock bands would eventually raise their appeal in Germany, this became only partly true. Popularity and sales never came close to that of other countries. In the early 1970s, less than 1 per cent of all rock album sales were by German bands; British and American records dominated the German market. While frontrunners at Ohr and Pilz sold about 15,000 records, average releases ranged between 1,000 and 3,000.Footnote ⁴⁵ Such low revenues did not allow bands to tour overseas.

However, it gave them the important ‘authentic’ or ‘underground’ identity, which would have been threatened by commercial success – a difficult position for music producers and labels considering pop music’s inherent commercial interest.Footnote ⁴⁶ Nowhere was this better demonstrated than in the downfall of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser’s business due to bankruptcy. Virgin was better positioned with Tangerine Dream, featuring synthesiser-driven anti-rock and a quintessentially ‘German’ sound.Footnote ⁴⁷ Their revenue alone exceeded that which Brain made in Germany with all of their artists.Footnote ⁴⁸ Of the many Krautrock records, peaking in 1972 with 222 releases, none reached the German charts.Footnote ⁴⁹

But the international comparison should not distract from the fact that in the 1970s, the time of the second global economic crisis, the German music market grew to become the second largest in the world after the United States. The share of German rock bands may have been comparatively small, yet the German music industry professionalised in countercultural genres, especially with Krautrock production supported by major and independent record labels.Footnote ⁵⁰ The government abolished its monopoly on managing creatives, and independent professionals like managers, engineers, studio owners, and record producers entered the scene.

Producers and Studios as Facilitators of Krautrock

Record labels and their distribution arms are essential to make music accessible beyond the local scene. Equally important are recording studios, audio engineers, and producers, without whom recorded music would not exist. In the 1960s, it was common for major labels to own studios and employ staff to produce primarily commercial Schlager music. With the emergence of Krautrock, independent studio operators, producers, and engineers, roles often held by one person, were on the rise, mirroring developments in the Anglo-American sphere. Label owners and managers like Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser, Peter Meisel, Uwe Nettelbeck, and Günter Körber could be described as producers in the broader sense because they influenced artists’ musical visions without necessarily being involved in studio work. The new independent producers, by contrast, operated technology and conducted the recording sessions.

Since they were not record label employees, their job involved many roles besides commission work: finding promising artists, producing music at their own risk, giving record licences to labels, or releasing them through their own publishing outlets. Initially, this new breed of record producers was not popular with major labels, but it did not take them long to recognise these specialists’ creative and commercial potential for niche genres, missing in their Schlager-centred infrastructure. Two Krautrock producers stood out like no others, Konrad ‘Conny’ Plank and Dieter Dierks. They shook up the German record industry and were pivotal to the quality and success of most domestic psychedelic rock bands.

Conny Plank underwent formal training as an audio engineer before leaving Saarland Broadcasting in 1966 to start working at Rhenus Tonstudio in Cologne, where he was involved in the very first recordings of Krautrock, including Klopfzeichen (1969) by Kluster and Tone Float (1969) by Organisation, who later became Kraftwerk. Interested in experimental electronic music, he advised his clients to build on Anglo-American influences but be original with it.Footnote ⁵¹ Plank worked in various studios around the country, recording Krautrock bands in the cheaper off-peak hours at night, most notably at Windrose-Dumont-Time and Star Studio in Hamburg.Footnote ⁵² In 1973, he finally opened his own studio in a former barn in rural Wolperath near Cologne, a fifty square metre former pigsty he reconstructed in a DIY fashion.

Plank’s mentality matched the counterculture zeitgeist of Krautrock. Unlike the Anglo-American understanding of a producer, Plank saw himself more as a co-producer or ‘mediator’ between musicians, sounds, and tape, not wanting to determine his artists’ music.Footnote ⁵³ Instead, he was keen to foster a democratic environment where musicians could live out their creativity. For his artistic input, Plank, in his modesty, rarely claimed credit, while other contemporaries sure did, as the example of Eberhard Kranemann shows:

According to reports, from the ideas Plank regularly played on the synthesiser, Kraftwerk chose the ones they liked; yet he was only credited as an engineer, not as producer or co-composer. Today Plank is acknowledged as ‘West Germany’s answer to Brian Eno … part producer, part collaborator, part ideas man’.Footnote ⁵⁵ With his style, which Plank described himself as ‘live dub mixing’, he intended to treat the studio as an instrument. Hence he contributed artistically to various compositions by the artists he produced.Footnote ⁵⁶ Although not an official band member, Plank had a significant impact on the music of the first four albums by Kraftwerk, as well as on Neu!, Guru Guru, and Can.Footnote ⁵⁷

In addition to his creative merit, Plank’s role as a networker and business facilitator deserves attention. Indifferent to the commercial aspect of his craft, he recorded several Krautrock bands for free, enabling Cluster to get a record deal with major label Philips.Footnote ⁵⁸ By producing on his own, Plank frequently put bands in a better position to negotiate record deals with labels.Footnote ⁵⁹ With his Kraut Musikverlag, he founded a publishing company that gave him and his clients essential business connections.Footnote ⁶⁰ When the Krautrock boom was over, Plank produced electro-pop bands like Ultravox and Eurythmics and played in his own band, Moebius & Plank. He died of cancer in 1987.

Dieter Dierks is the second eminent German Krautrock producer, who began his career as a self-taught engineer. He initially used the attic in his parent’s house, which did not suffice for long. So Dierks had a studio built in the yard. Soon the house was turned into a family-run hotel to accommodate bands, allowing them to work whenever they felt creative. Much of the music Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser released on his three labels was recorded and produced by Dierks, including Ash Ra Tempel, Can, Popol Vuh, Embryo, Guru Guru, Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze, Birth Control, and Wallenstein. From the outset, Dierks was interested in experimental music and took the curious Krautrock bands seriously. Like Conny Plank, Dierks was not driven by commercial success. What he had in mind, however, was a music production empire comprising his studio, the record label Venus Records, and his Breeze Music publishing company. By the mid-1970s, he had a state-of-the-art recording studio of his own, with custom-built equipment like a forty-track mixing console and a thirty-two-track tape recorder, which was among the best in West Germany.Footnote ⁶¹

Dierks, still expanding, enlarged the studio with three more recording spaces and a control room in the basement under the hotel section, allowing several bands to work simultaneously. He also acquired a mobile sixteen-track recording unit, used for live recordings and rental to radio and television stations. With this mobile unit, ‘Rockpalast’ nights at Essen’s Grugahalle were recorded between 1977 and 1986.Footnote ⁶² Moreover, the first album recordings of German hard rock pioneers Accept and the Scorpions, released on Brain, took place at Dierks’ studio. Today, the studio is still in high demand as one of the best-equipped in the world.

In Krautrock’s heyday, most albums were recorded at either Plank’s or Dierks’ studio. Some bands had facilities, most famously Kraftwerk with their Kling-Klang studio in Düsseldorf, and Can with their Inner Space Studio, first at Schloss Nörvenich (Castle Nörvenich), then in a former cinema near Cologne. Guru Guru, Cluster, Harmonia, and Klaus Schulze followed suit, preferring rural areas for their studios.Footnote ⁶³ The main reason for setting up a studio was to boost creativity.Footnote ⁶⁴ Having one’s own private studio was an essential part of Krautrock’s aesthetic. Access to one was beneficial because it allowed for exploration and improvisation free from time pressure and external influences like audio engineers and producers.Footnote ⁶⁵

Conclusion

Germany’s popular music industry owes a lot to Krautrock. In the 1960s, there was an infrastructure for Schlager, indeed a popular genre, but none for counterculture or youth. With the emergence and sudden proliferation of Krautrock towards the end of the decade, this changed quickly. Major labels discovered the economic potential of countercultural music, and new independent record labels helped jumpstart the international careers of countless Krautrock bands. Professionals independent of major companies and state organisations, but pivotal for Krautrock’s aesthetic and worldwide dissemination, entered the scene and made Krautrock an international success story within less than ten years. A rapidly developing, well-functioning and globally operating production infrastructure, inspired by the Anglo-American industry and yet distinct from it, contributed to the Krautrock ecosystem. Germanness is, intentional or not, the most clear-cut characteristic of Krautrock. Critical, though, for the music to be heard beyond Germany’s borders were international experiences and the business contacts of key players. Among them were record label representative Siegfried Loch and entrepreneur Peter Meisel, the genre’s two primary producers, Conny Plank and Dieter Dierks and, of course, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser. They all helped to lay the structural foundation for Neue Deutsche Welle (New German Wave), rock, and metal that followed Krautrock in the 1980s and 1990s. Krautrock’s successes of the 1960s and 1970s, made possible by independent record labels, studios, and distribution networks, encouraged, if not created, an openness towards countercultural music made in Germany.

In terms of musical style, the sizeable catalogue of music that falls under the label of Krautrock is as diverse as it is experimental. The instrumentation of Krautrock groups ranges from soloists surrounded entirely by synthesisers to standard rock formations of vocals, guitar, bass, keyboard, and drums. Krautrock songs could be shorter than the average pop hit, or take up an entire side of a vinyl record. Some critics have drawn comparisons between the genre and psychedelic, acid, punk, progressive, and art rock on the one hand, while others insist that it ‘owe[s] more to the avant-garde than to rock & roll’.Footnote ¹ In short, when it comes to musical characteristics, Krautrock is all over the map.

The sheer diversity of this genre can be seen, for instance, in a comparison of two pieces that, despite being markedly different, are both widely regarded as quintessential examples of Krautrock.Footnote ² On ‘Part II’ of Tangerine Dream’s classic 1975 album Rubycon, the track begins with a low, oscillating drone, not unlike the sound of an air raid siren that has been slowed down and set to play in an endless loop. Hollow electronic pitches weave in and out of the sonic fabric, seemingly conversing with a series of metallic hits before being drowned out by a dissonant, undulating synthetic choir. This nightmarish soundscape develops for nearly five minutes, finally giving way to a rhythmic sequencer that signals the next large section of the seventeen-minute piece, which comprises the entirety of the second album side.

By contrast, Can’s ‘Halleluwah’ (Tago Mago, 1971) opens with a rhythmic, repeated bassline and a tight, funk-like drum beat on an acoustic kit. The guitar alternates between syncopated chords and long, drawn-out pitches, making ample use of tremolo, while vocalist Damo Suzuki sings nonsensical lyrics over a melody derived from the classic blues scale: ‘Did anybody see the snowman standing on winter road / With broken guitar in his hand, onion peeling sleepy eye?’

The difficulty in pinning down a specific ‘sound’ for this diverse body of music can be traced to the history of its development. Krautrock came into existence as the result of a larger cultural movement in West Germany. Since the end of World War II, West Germans had grappled with forming a German identity not tied to their Nazi past; on top of that, American popular culture had become a dominating force, often overshadowing the elements of German cultural heritage that were still acceptable in the wake of the Third Reich’s cultural appropriation.Footnote ³

Moreover, throughout the late 1950s and 1960s and culminating in 1968, younger generations of Germans began protesting with increasing vigour against the perceived ills of their government, believing that the Federal Republic was ‘constantly threatened by the re-emergence of the Third Reich and by the possibility of a new world war and genocide’.Footnote ⁴ Musicians were heavily involved in this period of social upheaval. In addition to direct participation in these protests, artists began to search for a new sound, striving to break away from ‘bad German Music and imitations of American music’, in Dieter Moebius’ words, and create music that reflected the new Germany.Footnote ⁵ In other words, Krautrock was initially better defined by what it was not, rather than what it specifically was. Krautrock musicians began to abandon the characteristics of both Anglo-American popular musics such as beat and rock ’n’ roll, and the prevailing German style of the time, Schlager (literally, hits), endeavouring to create something ‘new, special and most of all original’.Footnote ⁶

This originality took many forms. Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, and Ash Ra Tempel often created music that featured primarily electronic instruments, experimental recording techniques, and a minimalistic approach to form and harmonies, a style often more akin to a soundscape than a song in the traditional sense. Their style, sometimes referred to as ‘Berlin School’ or kosmische Musik, influenced ambient and New Age genres. In contrast, groups like Kraftwerk, La Düsseldorf, Neu!, and Cluster embraced a sparse, mechanical sound, characterised especially by what came to be known as motorik beats in the drums (or drum machines). The result was a ‘hypnotic, piston-pumping’ style in which ‘drummers pounded out tightly-wound beats, bassists thumped pulsing notes, and zoned-out singers warbled over it all in an absurdist drone’.Footnote ⁷

All the while, other groups like Guru Guru, Popol Vuh, and Amon Düül incorporated jazz and ethnic musical styles, while Faust and Can used non-musical sounds and spliced tape recordings.Footnote ⁸ In short, while West German musicians of the 1970s largely agreed on a desire ‘to put aside everything we had heard in rock’n’roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics … the urge of saying something completely different’, as Jean-Hervé Péron from Faust put it, their idea of what that would entail varied drastically.Footnote ⁹ However, these radically different approaches to newness shared certain characteristics. Krautrock musicians embraced innovative approaches to instrumentation, timbre, the voice, texture, and form, generating a new musical vocabulary that they could call their own.

The Sounds of Krautrock

The musicians involved with Krautrock were heavily invested in sound; the goal of sonic originality informed most of their musical decisions. This began at the initial stage of the composition process. Krautrockers selected instruments that could contribute to an original style: existing instruments were played in an unusual way, while new instruments added a degree of unfamiliarity to the sound. Techniques including sampling, tape manipulation, and sequencing contributed further to Krautrock’s foreign sonic character, as did innovative recording locations and methods.

When it comes to instrumentation, Krautrock artists were less focused on the means of making their music than the ends. As David Stubbs points out, it was the ‘continued, imitative use of traditional instruments played in the received, traditional rock’n’roll manner that was most inauthentic’ to these musicians, rather than the instruments themselves.Footnote ¹⁰ Thus, while electronic sounds play a significant role in Krautrock’s style, many bands that carry this label used synthesisers and other fully electronic instruments in a limited capacity. Indeed, because this technology was both expensive and rare in West Germany in the early days of Krautrock, many groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s used traditional instruments but played and recorded them in unusual ways.Footnote ¹¹

In addition to a typical rock line-up of guitar, bass, drums, and sometimes piano or organ, Krautrockers incorporated woodwind and brass instruments as well as non-Western sounds. For example, Amon Düül’s psychedelic Paradieswärts Düül (Towards Paradise, 1970) contains bass, piano, flute, bongos, harp, African percussion, drum set, and guitar, along with solo vocals and choir. Including these atypical instruments served to untether the music’s sound from the mainstream rock and Schlager.

For the more customary instruments, like guitar, Krautrock groups used unusual playing styles and modified sounds to differentiate their music from pop traditions. Instruments were fitted with contact microphones, effects pedals, and anything else the musicians could use to alter their sound, creating a processed, manipulated timbre that was sometimes so different from the original that it was nearly indistinguishable from an actual synthesiser.Footnote ¹² The guitar in Neu!’s ‘Negativland’ (Neu!, 1972), for example, flows between choppy rhythmic patterns, screeching free-noise solos, and distorted drones, building to an aggressive, buzzing wail. Beneath it, the bass and drums play a relentless ostinato pattern that lasts almost the entirety of the ten-minute track, except for a few abrupt stops and restarts, switching between ‘off’ and ‘on’ with the cold suddenness of a track being muted.

Though the resulting collage of noise sounds akin to the manipulated electronic works of the classical avant-garde, no synthesisers are listed in the album’s liner notes: the personnel merely includes Michael Rother on guitar and bass, and Klaus Dinger on drums, vocals, guitar, and taishōgato (a Japanese stringed instrument). The combination of non-Western instruments and rock instruments played in an innovative fashion allowed Krautrockers to escape the sonic world of the mainstream even without delving into newer electronic technologies.

Despite the difficulty early bands faced in attaining them, electronic instruments would become a hallmark of the Krautrock sound. Krautrock musicians adopted synthesisers and drum machines, relatively obscure as well as expensive (at the time) instruments that provided fertile ground for sonic creativity. Some even created their own electronic instruments, allowing for a fully unique musical voice. Krautrockers now had the tools to generate an entirely new set of sounds that could serve as building blocks for the musical identity detached from tradition they sought to create.

Machine Music

In effect, Krautrock groups like Kraftwerk and Can brought electronic music out of the academic realm, taking inspiration from the experiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen and other contemporary art music composers. The majority of public exposure to synthesised sounds before the 1960s came in the form of film and television soundtracks: the theremin featured in the soundtrack to the alien invasion film The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), the musique concrète of the introduction to Doctor Who (1963–present), and so on.Footnote ¹³ Pioneered in avant-garde art music circles of the first half of the twentieth century, these instruments first became available to the general public in the mid-1960s with the introduction of the Moog synthesiser.Footnote ¹⁴

The development of the smaller and more affordable Minimoog in 1970 – the first synthesiser to be sold in music stores – resulted in a sharp increase in the instrument’s overall popularity, as it was now small enough to store and bring to recording studios or live performances.Footnote ¹⁵ However, though some Anglo-American rock groups had experimented with synthesisers, they were often played in ways that gave them a similar function to the guitar or piano, rather than in an idiomatic fashion. It was only ‘when synthesizers were freed from endeavouring to simulate analogue instruments [that] they came into their own as tools to exploit a broad and diverse field of new electronic sound timbres and textures’.Footnote ¹⁶

This idiomatic use of synthesisers became a hallmark of Krautrock, from the lush electronic soundscapes of the Berlin School to stark, sequenced patterns and sparse techno-pop. Often, synthesisers and modified sounds took precedence over traditional instruments. Tangerine Dream’s eerie album Phaedra (1974) was dominated by a Moog synthesiser; the Mello-tron, flute, and bass guitar parts were added later, almost as an afterthought.Footnote ¹⁷ Some bands even forewent traditional instruments altogether, opting for a fully synthetic line-up. Kraftwerk, after an early period of experimental rock, abandoned their flutes, guitars, and drum kits in favour of a wide array of synthesisers, including a Minimoog, ARP Odyssey, EMS Synthi-A, and Prophet-5, as well as electronic drums, vocoders, and sequencers.Footnote ¹⁸

Like synthesisers, drum machines were a new and relatively obscure addition to the palette of options afforded to Krautrock musicians. While experiments with electronic rhythm instruments dated back to the early 1930s, fully programmable drum machines were not introduced to the market until 1972 with EKO’s ComputeRhythm. However, drum machines only became a staple of 1980s electronic music with the introduction of the Roland TR-808.Footnote ¹⁹ Just as synthesisers provided the opportunity to explore new melodic and harmonic timbres, these machines allowed for a sonically different rhythm section. They are particularly present on the polished, mechanical side of the Krautrock spectrum, featuring heavily in Kraftwerk’s albums.

The spirit of sonic originality was so imbued in many of these musicians that some even created instruments of their own. Amon Düül’s Kalle Hausmann, for example, built ring modulators and other custom synthesisers for his performances on Tanz der Lemminge (1971) and Carnival in Babylon (1972).Footnote ²⁰ Kraftwerk are particularly known for their technological innovations; they used a custom-built vocoder for the albums Ralf & Florian (1973) and Autobahn (1974), and even invented an electronic drum kit with sensor pads, for which they filed a patent between 1975 and 1977.Footnote ²¹ Edgar Froese spoke of creating ‘a new musical identity’ through creating and modifying synthesiser patches, arguing that

This ‘incomparable musical basis’ was the artistic goal behind Krautrock, and the musicians involved with this genre achieved it through both the use of new electronic instruments such as synthesisers and drum machines and the transformation of the sound and style of traditional instruments, from standard rock equipment like guitars and drums to orchestral and non-Western instruments.

Vocals in Krautrock

The voice, too, was assigned a different role in Krautrock than it typically served in British and American music, both in terms of its delivery and its use of language. Krautrock singers treated vocal lines more like sound poetry, more akin to progressive and psychedelic rock than beat music or Schlager. More attention was given to the way in which the voice was used, rather than the lyrics or conventional talent; the voice served as an avenue for further sonic exploration, rather than a mere medium for lyrical expression.

Can’s Damo Suzuki, for example, infused the band’s songs with invented words, piercing shrieks, buzzing lips, and guttural groans, often singing with more of a shout than a defined pitch. On top of this experimental use of the voice, vocals were often so thoroughly manipulated that they could be mistaken for a synthesiser; this can be heard in Faust’s ‘Exercise with Voices’ (Faust Tapes, 1973), a nightmarish soundscape of processed, wordless vocals rising and falling as various instruments and noises penetrate the texture. Perhaps most famous for innovative vocal timbres among Krautrock groups were Kraftwerk, who made frequent use of vocoders to create a dehumanised, robotic effect. Kraftwerk were among the first bands to feature this technology, which had first been used in the 1971 dystopian film A Clockwork Orange; their ‘roboticisation’ of vocals would have a profound and lasting impact on popular music across the globe.

As with other aspects of Krautrock’s sound, vocal style varied widely from one musician to the next. Can’s original singer, Malcolm Mooney, sang with a rhythmic, unembellished style, while his replacement, Damo Suzuki, delivered his curious blend of English, Japanese, and invented words with a sense of breathy melodicism. Moreover, many bands did not consistently use a certain style. Faust’s vocals, for example, are widely varied. One of their songs, ‘Flashback Caruso’, comes across as folk rock, with Rudolf Sosna singing Beatles-esque lyrics over a piano-dominated jam session. ‘J’ai Mal Aux Dents’, in contrast, gives the voice a rhythmic function, with the phrase ‘J’ai mal aux dents / J’ai mal aux pieds aussi’ repeating continuously in time with the drums and guitar as Jean-Hervé Péron recites, rather than singing, seemingly nonsensical English lyrics.

Both voice lines are compressed and nasal, and are sometimes balanced fairly evenly in the mix, making it difficult for the listener to focus on one over the other. These songs appear on the same album, The Faust Tapes (1973), and are as different from the other tracks as they are from each other. In short, vocal styles varied greatly across the spectrum of Krautrock; however, their function was the same: originality. From atypical melodies and nonsensical lyrics to vocoders and studio effects, Krautrock vocals were performed with a unique style and function, creating another degree of separation between themselves and the Anglo-American and German mainstream.

Sonic Explorations

These were not the only methods Krautrockers used to create a unique sonic signature, however. These musicians were deeply interested in sound itself, and used techniques like sampling, tape manipulation, and sequencing, as well as innovative recording locations and methods, to further differentiate their music from what had come before. In the words of Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter:

Krautrockers’ sonic explorations took many forms. It was not uncommon for these musicians to incorporate recordings of themselves crushing glass, hitting sheet metal, and throwing bricks.Footnote ²⁴ Can’s Holger Czukay became known for ‘bridging the gap between pop and the avant-garde’ through his incorporations of vocals and other sounds from short-wave radio broadcasts, a practice that would pave the way for sampling practices of the 1980s and beyond.Footnote ²⁵ Likewise, bands often manipulated recordings of their own music, experimenting with playback speed, EQ, and other aspects of the base recording to add ‘musical dirt’.Footnote ²⁶ According to Edgar Froese from Tangerine Dream, recording and manipulating these sounds was not only ‘much more fun’, but also helped these artists to create ‘new sounds definitely no one else has’, again feeding into their desire for sonic originality.Footnote ²⁷

Location played a significant role in the recording process as well. Many Krautrock groups explored alternatives to conventional studios, affording them the freedom to record without interference from studio owners and employees (who were sometimes less enthusiastic about the bands’ experiments) and creating the opportunity for a different-sounding environment. The nature of these studios varied significantly. Can elected to record in a castle, Schloss Nörvenich, with nothing but ‘two stereo tape decks, four microphones, two small speakers, and a few malfunctioning amplifiers, in addition to the band’s instruments’.Footnote ²⁸ Kraftwerk, on the other hand, founded their own studio, Kling Klang, which they outfitted with a vast array of electronic equipment. The band saw the studio almost as a laboratory and considered it to be such an essential part of their sound that they eventually modified it to be fully portable and have toured with it since the early 1980s.Footnote ²⁹

Overall, Krautrock musicians’ focus on sound quality and timbre informed many of the artistic decisions they made before even composing their works. They selected instruments, performance and recording techniques, and studio locations with the specific intent of creating a unique sonic identity. This philosophy also translated to the methods with which they composed their music.

Texture as Structure

Just as they used instruments and recording equipment to create a new sonic identity, Krautrock musicians used innovative compositional methods to develop a new musical one. Form was treated with a distinctly different approach than that of standard popular music, often only loosely planned, if not entirely improvised. The structure of Krautrock tracks is generally based on changes of texture rather than common song forms or narrative lyrics. Said textures play a large role in the development of the loose stylistic categories of ‘oceanic’ and ‘machine’, which have come to be among the most recognisable qualities of Krautrock.

Musical form provided another avenue for the differentiation of Krautrock from mainstream popular practices. Krautrock musicians sought to ‘get away from the A-B-A format in music’, as Guru Guru’s Mani Neumeier puts it, as part of the process of ‘mak[ing] some sort of music that has not been there before’.Footnote ³⁰ Indeed, few Krautrock songs follow any semblance of this verse–chorus format. This may be due in part to the emphasis on vocal timbre over lyricism. The verse–chorus form is largely based on lyrical content: choruses contain catchy, unchanging refrains with memorable musical material – the song’s ‘hook’ – while verses advance the song’s narrative with different lyrics and, usually, subdued instrumental parts.Footnote ³¹ The vague experimentalism of Krautrock vocals is not conducive to this type of songwriting. Instead, Krautrock form is largely derived from musical texture, which, in turn, involved certain performance practices specific to this movement.

Sean Albiez, in his study of the ‘sonic futurscape’ of electronic music during the height of Krautrock and beyond, outlines two larger categories of the electronic avant-garde in popular music: ‘machine rock’, which embraces a sense of kineticism and motion, and ‘oceanic rock’, which embodies a sense of stasis and expansive spaces. Both, importantly, involve movement: machine rock represents the time spent moving, while oceanic rock expresses the moments of stillness in between.Footnote ³² These textural styles align to an extent with the subsets of Krautrock belonging to the Berlin and Düsseldorf Schools, respectively.

The term Berlin School refers to an oceanic variety of Krautrock commonly used by West Berliners Klaus Schulze, Manuel Göttsching, and Tangerine Dream, among others. These artists tended to create music of an ambient nature, with drones, slow or non-existent tempi, and gradual shifts in harmony, texture, and timbre. Sequenced patterns created motion, while sweeping melodies and non-musical sounds could be layered above the drones to add colour and timbral shifts. Oceanic Krautrock is overwhelmingly electronic, and is particularly associated with the use of the Mellotron, an electronic instrument akin to an analogue sampler that produces choir-like sounds; orchestral instruments were sometimes used as well. Rock-associated sounds like guitar, drums, and vocals seldom make an appearance. Albiez describes the overall feeling of oceanic music to be ‘contemplative, resting but sonically and texturally still searching for the new’;Footnote ³³ it is expansive, but not always serene, embracing a sense of the sublime.

This style is exemplified in much of Tangerine Dream’s oeuvre, particularly their works in the mid to late 1970s. Their album Phaedra (1974) is considered to be a hallmark of the Berlin School.Footnote ³⁴ The title track epitomises the oceanic. It begins with an eerie, breathy synthetic drone, evoking feelings of the deepest expanses of outer space. A sequencer enters the mix, barely audible at first, sprinkled with high-pitched hollow tones. The piece builds, the sequencers gradually increasing in volume, pitch, and speed; processed noises and synthesised patterns build layer upon layer into a cacophony of sound. Eventually, it collapses into a nightmarish soundscape of indeterminate noises and melancholy electronic melodies, fading away after nearly twenty minutes.

While the kosmische Musik of the Berlin School conveys a sense of the unknown expanses of the universe, the ‘machine music’ of Düsseldorf groups like Kraftwerk and Neu! has a highly controlled, mechanical quality. A significant component of this was the motorik drum beat first pioneered by Can’s Klaus Dinger. Motorik’s beat is straight, unembellished, and in 4/4 time, almost metronomic in its consistency and sparseness. Other groups, like Kraftwerk, utilised drum machines or sequencers to this end, but the result was the same: a consistent, disciplined march towards an unknown destination. On top of this rhythm, a bassline establishes a groove, over which additional synthesisers and vocals are layered.Footnote ³⁵ The style also embraces machine-like timbres and sounds: non-electronic instruments and vocals are often heavily processed, and mechanical sounds frequently contribute to the texture. Furthermore, machine music features a significant amount of repetition: rhythm and basslines are often ostinatos, while the lyrics and motifs played over them are constantly reiterated.

Kraftwerk are perhaps the best-known example of machine music. Their ‘Trans Europa Express’ is built upon a dry, sequenced beat, over which a motif of short, rising synthesiser chords repeats. Over the course of the thirteen-minute song, the rhythm and basslines do not change, pushing the music along with the controlled insistence of a moving train. In addition to the rising chord motif, three other sounds appear throughout the song: a short synth-strings melody (which, along with the initial motif, is sometimes transcribed to the minor mode), a higher-pitched electronic drum pattern, and vocals. The lyrics, which mostly comprise repetitions of the song’s title, are delivered rhythmically and without melodic contour, coming across as mechanical even when the band’s signature vocoder is not used.

Across the spectrum of Krautrock, texture, rather than lyrics or established musical forms, informed the music’s structure. Sections were determined by the addition or removal of certain sounds, a modular approach far removed from the verse–chorus model.Footnote ³⁶ ‘It’s components, it’s conceptual’, stated Froese of this approach. ‘There’s development, gradual. Whereas in classical music there is drama. That’s not our thing.’Footnote ³⁷ This modular structure and gradual development was not necessarily planned; indeed, many Krautrock bands relied on aleatoric practices and improvisation, or, as Tangerine Dream’s Thorsten Quaeschning prefers to describe it, ‘real-time composing’, while creating their albums.Footnote ³⁸

This was structured to varying degrees. Can’s pieces were largely improvised, but with a semi-planned structure, similar in some ways to jazz improvisation.Footnote ³⁹ It differed, however, in its willingness to break away from traditional formal practices, as discussed by Holger Czukay:

After recording a jam session, Can would then overdub and manipulate the initial recording. Tangerine Dream’s works were even more improvisatory: according to Peter Baumann, all their works were written spontaneously in the studio, without even a predetermined structure. ‘It was intuitive’, he stated in an interview. ‘I can’t remember there ever being a big discussion about the music itself. It just fell into place.’Footnote ⁴¹ This practice was fairly common among Krautrock groups.

Even after a track was created and released, many Krautrockers were open to the idea of modifying and re-releasing it, allowing for multiple versions of a musical concept. Kraftwerk say their compositions are ‘endless scripts’, open to change and improvisation.Footnote ⁴² Indeed, their songs are subject to near-constant reworking, most recently in the two box sets Der Katalog (2009) and 3-D Der Katalog (2017). Many of Tangerine Dream’s live albums contain pieces that are radically different from their original versions (as well as works that have never been included in their studio albums); moreover, they have released several remixes of their existing material, such as the dance-style Dream Mixes (1996). Froese staunchly defends this process, stating that ‘[n]othing on the planet has an immortal value, nothing will survive forever. … [T]he artist must have the freedom of choice to destroy his own art or at least rebuild structures and change the whole composition in order to pursue a new train of thought.’Footnote ⁴³

This laissez-faire approach to form at every stage of composition allowed, once again, for great variety among Krautrock pieces. Some tunes, like Kraftwerk’s ‘Transistor’, are just one or two minutes long; indeed, almost half of the tracks on the album from which it came, Radio-Aktivität (1975), are shorter than three minutes. Others, like a great deal of Klaus Schulze’s works, last fifteen to twenty minutes or longer, to the point that several Krautrock records consist of just one track on the A- or B-side.

Through these innovative approaches to form and texture, Krautrockers developed a musical style that was thoroughly divorced from popular practices of the past. They eschewed traditional approaches to musical form, leaving much of the music’s development to chance and spontaneity. The structure that does exist within these pieces, moreover, is modular, distinguishable by changes in texture rather than through a lyrical narrative or verse–chorus format. These textures were likewise unique, making use of their already-innovative choices of instruments and timbres to create the sublime soundscapes of oceanic rock or the automated kineticism of machine music. However, despite their endeavours to break from tradition, their music was not created in a vacuum. Krautrock was influenced, to certain extents, by other styles of music, even if they utilised aspects of these styles in different ways.

Musical Influences

Musicians of the Krautrock movement were united by a desire to create something that was sonically unique, a stark departure from the musical styles that dominated German culture at the time. However, they were not entirely devoid of musical influences, regardless of whether this was desired. The pioneers of Krautrock came from a wide range of musical backgrounds. Some were cooks and carpenters who picked up their instruments out of casual interest, while others had completed conservatory-level training, studying with the pre-eminent avant-garde composers of the time. Before founding the groups that would become flagships of the Krautrock scene, many played in different styles, from free jazz to beat rock to skiffle (a melding of blues and folk styles); moreover, some had developed an appreciation for musical styles from different parts of the world.Footnote ⁴⁴ Many elements of this wide palette of musical styles come through in Krautrock, but the most prominent are non-Western styles, avant-garde art music, and other experimental popular styles.

Many artists of the Krautrock movement borrowed heavily from non-Western musical traditions. Can frequently incorporated Afro-Cuban rhythms and basslines, while Neu! attributed their emphasis on repetition to Pakistani music.Footnote ⁴⁵ Bands sometimes even sampled musicians and everyday sounds from other countries; Agitation Free’s Malesch (1972), for instance, contains recordings of an Egyptian market in addition to jams inspired by Middle Eastern cultures. Beyond this, many Krautrockers incorporated non-Western instruments, as discussed earlier.

In the case of classical music, most Krautrock musicians derived inspiration from contemporary composers, rather than the ‘lengthy Germanic classical tradition’ which was considered to be limited in its capacity to inspire originality.Footnote ⁴⁶ This is not to say that there was no borrowing from this extensive repertoire: some works, such as Manuel Göttsching’s Inventions for Electric Guitar (1975) or Popol Vuh’s Hosianna Mantra (1972), utilise traditional classical forms, while others, like Klaus Schulze’s ‘Wahnfried 1883’ (a nod to Richard Wagner) or Kraftwerk’s ‘Franz Schubert’ seem to emulate the styles of the composers they reference.

By and large, though, Krautrock has far more in common with the experimental styles of the mid-twentieth century. Their experiments with tape music and sampling are connected to the works of Karlheinz Stockhausen and György Ligeti, with whom some of them had studied, while the focus on repetition, modular forms, and drones, which feature so heavily in Krautrock, relates closely to minimalist composers like Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and Philip Glass. However, other Krautrockers are ambivalent about this connection, feeling a stronger kinship with other experimental popular genres. The vast array of musicians and bands to whom they have credited influence includes Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, and The Velvet Underground, all of whom were pioneers of art rock, free jazz, and other similarly experimental genres. Though there are at times stark differences in the styles and practices of these groups and Krautrock – not unlike the variety found within Krautrock itself – they shared a common goal of innovation and originality.

Despite their goal of musical originality, Krautrock musicians were influenced to a certain degree by other styles. Some, like non-Western musics and avant-garde classical techniques, were incorporated into Krautrock, while others, like art rock and free jazz, were inspirational in their similar attitude towards music-making. How-ever, it could be argued that even the genres that Krautrockers rejected – not only traditional classical music, but also Schlager and Anglo-American rock – influenced the development of Krautrock’s unique sound.

For it was these styles that created the need, in these musicians’ eyes, for such innovations in the first place. Krautrock’s negative reaction to these mainstream genres created a new space, one that was open and dynamic, and could be filled with any style. This music is not at all uniform in its instrumentation, musical content, or style, but there is one unifying factor: it was something entirely new.