Non-fiction corner: A newly translated oral history reveals Krautrock’s antifascist roots

By Walker Mimms

NEW YORK: “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 Brotzmann, 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 Duul 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 rivalled Pink Floyd for immersive synthesiser 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.”