May 11, 2021

Krautrock － Germany’s “sauerkraut experiment”

After the Second World War, Germany — the starting point of both world wars and the defeated side — entered a bleakness without precedent, yet those same conditions became the soil in which new work sprang up.

The word Krautrock does not fully cover German music of the 1960s and 70s. At first the term was only a broad label that some British music journalists applied to West German experimental music of that era. It takes “kraut” from “Sauerkraut”, the German word for pickled cabbage, and was used to represent the music made by German experimentalists. In fact the bands that “created” Krautrock fused psychedelic rock, ambient music, electronic music and even improvised jazz into an experimental practice, and Krautrock performances were sometimes improvised on the spot.

Where did Krautrock's experimental spirit come from? In part it drew on the social movements of the time, such as the German student movement of 1968; students' anti-establishment thinking and their questioning of politics and aesthetics left a deep mark on artists working across media in Germany. Filmmakers such as Wim Wenders, Rainer Fassbinder and Werner Herzog used the image to critique the social climate. Film fed music in turn: Popol Vuh wrote a soundtrack for Herzog's “Aguirre, the Wrath of God”, and this exchange between makers in different media pushed each of their practices forward, which in turn encouraged Krautrock. At first Krautrock was the work of independent makers writing on their own, who called themselves “music workers” rather than musicians. Using different sounds and instruments — from an ordinary drum kit to a radiation detector — any device that made sound could serve as an instrument. Some groups of the Krautrock era even described their music as “music made by people who do not know music”.

Behind Krautrock lies not only a rare experimental spirit but the postwar German youth's sense of unsettled freedom, and the unease that came with it. Rather than write the rock music then popular around the Anglo-American axis, they stood on a European music of their own, and went on to influence later post-rock, post-punk and experimental work. Krautrock's makers still keep to a free approach and have left behind a body of interesting work. Here are a few tracks: