Year Zero
In 1945, German culture hit what critics called Stunde Null: Hour Zero. The country’s music, art, and national identity had been so contaminated by the Nazi regime that the postwar generation faced a void. No tradition to continue, no heritage to claim. American rock and roll filled the gap for a while, but by the late 1960s, a generation of West German students, artists, and dropouts decided they were done imitating. They would build something from nothing.
The spark came in September 1968 at the Internationale Essener Songtage, a five-day festival spread across Essen that was Europe’s largest gathering for popular music. Frank Zappa headlined, but the real story was further down the bill. A Munich art commune called Amon Düül played the festival, then split in two on the spot. The musically ambitious faction broke off as Amon Düül II. That same year in Cologne, two former students of Karlheinz Stockhausen, Holger Czukay and Irmin Schmidt, formed Can. In Berlin, Conrad Schnitzler and Hans-Joachim Roedelius opened the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in a rented backroom along the Landwehr Canal in Kreuzberg. It lasted barely a year. From its ashes came Tangerine Dream, Kluster (later Cluster), and an entire Berlin wing of electronic experimentation.
Nobody planned a movement. There was no manifesto, no shared label, no headquarters. The bands were scattered across West Germany: Düsseldorf, Cologne, Munich, Berlin, Hamburg. What they shared was a refusal to sound like the Rolling Stones and an openness to anything that didn’t.
The Name
The word comes from “Kraut,” the wartime slur for Germans. Its first documented use in a music context was a 1971 UK advertisement from Bacillus Records promoting German rock. Some sources credit BBC DJ John Peel, who championed the music in Britain, though he may have simply popularized an existing joke. The German press initially used it as a putdown. The bands mostly hated it. But it stuck, partly because nothing else captured such a scattered, contradictory scene, and partly because Amon Düül had already titled a track Mama Düül und Ihre Sauerkrautband Spielt Auf. When a genre names itself after sauerkraut, you don’t argue.
Studios and Methods
Can set up in Schloss Nörvenich, a medieval castle near Cologne, lining the walls with egg cartons and old mattresses for sound insulation. They called it Inner Space Studio. Czukay recorded with just two two-track tape machines and three microphones: two shared between vocalist Damo Suzuki and drummer Jaki Liebezeit, the third placed in the center of the room. Sessions ran sixteen hours a day, with Czukay editing marathon improvisations into structured pieces after the fact. The approach yielded Tago Mago (1971), a double album assembled from months of continuous recording.
Faust took a different path. Their producer Uwe Nettelbeck convinced Polydor Records to bankroll a converted schoolhouse in the village of Wümme, outside Hamburg, and equip it with a Studer eight-track recorder and a custom mixing desk built by engineer Kurt Graupner. The recording light stayed on permanently. Two years of tape-loop collages, found-sound experiments, and hypnotic repetition produced hundreds of hours of material. Their 1971 debut cut it all into a musique concrète jigsaw.
Florian Fricke of Popol Vuh was one of the first musicians anywhere to own a Moog III synthesizer. He used it to record Affenstunde (1970) and In den Gärten Pharaos (1971), two of the earliest electronic albums in any genre. Then he rigged the Moog to a tape relay keyboard, creating a device that produced spectral choir-like tones. Werner Herzog heard it and hired Fricke to score Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972). Fricke eventually lost interest in electronics altogether and sold his Moog to Klaus Schulze in 1975.
In Düsseldorf, Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider started Kraftwerk in 1970 with an empty room on Mintropstraße near the Hauptbahnhof. They built their own PA from plywood bass horns and cast aluminium mid-range horns, and when they couldn’t find a drummer, they bought a cheap drum machine and ran it through echo and filters for their second album. That room became Kling Klang Studio, and it never stopped evolving.
The Motorik Pulse
If krautrock has a single defining invention, it’s the motorik beat. Klaus Dinger, who had briefly played with Kraftwerk before forming Neu! with Michael Rother in 1971, came up with it during four nights of recording at Star Studios in Hamburg with producer Conny Plank. Dinger never used the word “motorik.” He called it lange Gerade (long straight) or endlose Gerade (endless straight): a steady, forward-driving 4/4 pattern that replaced rock’s syncopated swing with something mechanical and hypnotic. You hear it first on Hallogallo, the opening track of Neu!‘s 1971 debut. It sounds like driving on the Autobahn at night with no destination. Bowie heard it and never recovered.
The Hidden Member
Conny Plank deserves his own section. Born in 1940, trained at the Rheinische Musikschule in Cologne under Stockhausen, Berio, and Pousseur, Plank engineered or produced records for nearly every significant krautrock act: Kraftwerk’s early albums, all three Neu! records, Cluster, Harmonia, Guru Guru, Ash Ra Tempel. In 1974 he built Conny’s Tonstudio in a converted farmhouse in Wolperath outside Cologne. He treated the mixing desk as an instrument, and was so central to Neu!‘s sound that writers have called him the band’s third member. After krautrock, he produced D.A.F., Eurythmics, and Killing Joke before dying of laryngeal cancer in 1987 at forty-six.
Radiation
Brian Eno visited Harmonia (the supergroup of Neu!‘s Michael Rother with Cluster’s Roedelius and Dieter Moebius) at their studio in the village of Forst in September 1976, bringing a four-track recorder and a VCS3 synthesizer. He stayed eleven days. Then he went to Berlin to make David Bowie’s Low. The line from Forst to Low to Heroes to Joy Division to all of post-punk is direct and traceable.
Kraftwerk’s pivot from freeform experimentation to precise electronic pop on Autobahn (1974) pointed another direction: toward synth-pop, techno, and hip-hop. Afrika Bambaataa sampled Trans-Europe Express for Planet Rock in 1982. Detroit techno founders Juan Atkins, Derrick May, and Kevin Saunderson all cited Kraftwerk as a primary influence. Manuel Göttsching of Ash Ra Tempel recorded E2-E4 in 1984, a single fifty-eight-minute piece on sequenced guitar and drum machine that became a foundational record for Balearic beat and electronic dance music.
The sound never stopped radiating. Stereolab, Tortoise, Radiohead, Deerhunter: the motorik pulse and the willingness to let a groove run until it becomes a trance state remain active forces in music. Krautrock was never a genre so much as a permission slip.
Essential Listening
- Can – Tago Mago (1971)
- Neu! – Neu! (1972)
- Kraftwerk – Autobahn (1974)
- Tangerine Dream – Phaedra (1974)
- Faust – Faust IV (1973)
- Cluster – Zuckerzeit (1974)
- Amon Düül II – Yeti (1970)
- Popol Vuh – In den Gärten Pharaos (1971)
- Ash Ra Tempel – Ash Ra Tempel (1971)
- Harmonia – Musik von Harmonia (1974)
- Klaus Schulze – Timewind (1975)
- Can – Future Days (1973)