“We had to start from zero.” “We wanted to start over at zero.” “It wasn’t an intellectual approach, more an anarchic one: just starting over at zero.”
Spoken by the saxophonist Peter Brötzmann, the composer Irmin Schmidt and the guitarist Lutz Ludwig Kramer, these assertions from the newly translated oral history “Neu Klang: The Definitive History of Krautrock” explain the high stakes driving Germany’s counterculture in the decades following World War II.
After the unthinkable, Germany’s youth inherited a “country in ruins, and thus a ruined culture” (says Schmidt), a partition between the democratic West and the Soviet Union, a global fear of all things German, an identity crisis and a question: how to respond to the crimes of their parents?
All easily forgotten when you’re listening to the buoyant and life-affirming music that generation produced in the 1970s. Kraftwerk, Can, Popol Vuh and their peers — a diverse movement often reductively called krautrock — raised the bar for electronic experiments and collaborative democracy in popular music, and helped set the stage for punk, industrial music and techno.
But oral histories convince through mutual witness, and many of the 66 players and observers that Christoph Dallach interviewed for this book achieved their neu klang — their “new sound” — by fleeing Germany’s authoritarian past. First published in German in 2021, a translation of “Neu Klang” by Katy Derbyshire reveals to Anglophone listeners a generation of musicians wading through the legacy of fascism.
“When I started school we still had to say ‘Heil Hitler’ for two days — and all of a sudden it turned into ‘Guten Morgen,’” says the pianist Alexander von Schlippenbach. For the drummer and electronic music pioneer Harald Grosskopf, whose father had been a Nazi officer, “My fight with him became the major conflict of my life” and “was probably what ended up taking me to krautrock.”
Despite Germany’s movement to de-Nazify the work force in 1945, Schmidt, a keyboardist and founder of the powerhouse Can, was expelled for outing former Nazis in his high school. As for Holger Czukay, a Can founder who played bass, “I never really knew my father; he was definitely a Nazi.” Jaki Liebezeit, the band’s drummer, explains its formative instinct: “What we did then with Can had a lot to do with clearing away that past.”
In Dallach’s retelling, Can comes across as the poster child of German cooperation. (The two founders of the utopian electronic group Kraftwerk, the movement’s best-known act, are not interviewed in the book.) “Any form of dictatorship horrified me,” Schmidt says. Though not a commune like the invigorating and sinister band Amon Düül II, Can shared decisions and all songwriting credit, even for the flights of improvised language by its Japanese vocalist Damo Suzuki.
Can would record many hours of groove-based improv, then splice the best portions together on tape, a technique allowed by the astonishingly precise funk drumming of Liebezeit, who kept time like a deck of cards shuffling in slow motion. In its cult albums and live bootlegs, no one seems to solo. All play equally.
It was a far cry from Germany’s musical menu in the ’60s, which is discussed here in terms of the country’s underdog status. “Schlager was so popular,” says the guitarist Günter Schickert, referring to the ubiquitous brand of musical songbook, because after the war “there was no other German music left.”
As for classical, “music lessons seemed to me like some Nazi trying to force me to do things,” recalls Michael Hoenig, a sometime member of the group Tangerine Dream, which rivaled Pink Floyd for immersive synthesizer soundscapes. Schmidt, who first trained as a conductor and composer under Karlheinz Stockhausen, dropped his education for “a new start” that would “reclaim our own history.”
Though copied worldwide, allegiance to American and British rock — the startup capital for krautrock — required a level of bravery in “Neu Klang” that is uncommon in typical sex-and-drugs histories of rock. When the guitarist Kramer started skipping haircuts, a former Nazi general told him that “a boy with hair like that belongs in the crematorium.”
As with Kent State in Ohio, Germany’s countercultural lines were drawn when the police killed the student Benno Ohnesorg in June 1967, at a protest in West Berlin. The shooting spurred years of anti-authoritarian youth movements, both peaceful and militant.
Even the gunshot, heard by several in this book, registered as a sonic event. “It was a sound no one knew in Germany anymore, because nobody had firearms,” Hoenig says. “It suddenly exposed the violence of the people at the top.”
The mania of those years shines through harder groups like Faust, the communards who milked Polydor Records for enormous advances while they recorded some of the brattiest and most melodically questioning rock of the decade.
Faust did this while holed up in the rural village of Wümme, where the group was once raided — naked — by armed border guards suspecting the morally deviant musicians of terrorism, recalls Jean-Hervé Peron in the book, giving a compelling picture of political paranoia in Germany’s provinces.
Though the capital, West Berlin, had the seminal club Zodiak Free Arts Lab and eventually the ultracool expat scene of David Bowie, it was also an “island situation,” according to the synthesizer maestro Klaus Schultz, and a place to “wither and die,” per the composer Dieter Moebius, because of the wall built in 1961 to separate it from the Soviet-controlled East.
One refugee from the East was Hans-Joachim Roedelius, a classically inflected experimenter on keyboards who had been imprisoned for escaping to the West, where he helped found Zodiak. With Moebius, he left Berlin for rural Forst, where — calling themselves Cluster, and aided by krautrock’s Phil Spector, Conny Plank — they produced pastoral “sound paintings,” as Roedelius calls them in the book, with synthesizers, drum machines and formally rigorous tape effects that attracted the discipleship and collaboration of Brian Eno, who had left the British group Roxy Music in search of more process-oriented art music.
Even as they gorged on British and American rock, these German players describe a certain remove that echoes the political ostracism and international occupation they recall growing up around. “The German experimental bands made us feel superior to people who only listened to international rock,” admits the record executive Bernd Dopp.
Isolation from American blues structures is part of the stateless charm of their music. “We weren’t into pain,” Hoenig says, “we were interested in projection.” Says Michael Rother, the minimalist guitar choogler of early Kraftwerk, “In those days it turned my stomach when someone played a blue note.”
Though an avowed Rolling Stones fan, Rother escaped the Anglo model with his quietly triumphant, rhythmically tantric “forest of guitars,” as he calls them, in major keys that today seem without introspection or precedent. For this his vessels were Neu!, his duo with Klaus Dinger on seemingly motorized drums, and Harmonia, his quiet and candy-bright supergroup with Cluster.
The catchall term “krautrock” — with its unkind wartime prefix — came from Britain, where these bands found their first fan base, some through Richard Branson’s Virgin Records. (In Germany, says Peron, “people absolutely hated us.”) As a prank, Faust called one 1973 song “Krautrock.” It’s the musical equivalent of Velcro, except groovy.
But are these tunes German? In the book, Eno defines by description. “German music,” he says: “it’s economical, spare, austere, focused.” Roedelius takes the opposite view: “Our sound wasn’t German, it was universal.”
Nationality is a constant question in Dallach’s revelatory and propulsively arranged book, and it sent me running back to these bands — to their sparkling melodies, infinite grooves and rigorous ethics. Since the Holocaust there had been other beginnings from “zero” in the country’s art — see the Zero Group in Düsseldorf — but if another movement courted popular music with such guile and enchantment, then, as the Germans say, I know it not.
Read More: A Newly Translated Oral History Reveals Krautrock’s Antifascist Roots
