A Newly Translated Oral History Reveals Krautrock’s Antifascist Roots

“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.”