Krautrock Eruption E-Book

Wolfgang Seidel

• Herausgeber: Ventil Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 232

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Krautrock as an escape from post-war Germany "Krautrock Eruption" is a rousing counter-narrative to the usual depictions of Krautrock, written by Wolfgang Seidel, member of Conrad Schnitzler's band Eruption and co-founder of Ton Steine Scherben. Seidel's groundbreaking book, which includes unique historical photographs, paints a vivid picture of the old Federal Republic of Germany, with all of its contradictions and struggles. What is now celebrated as Krautrock emerged in this environment, and at the time was an attempt to contribute the soundtrack to the revolution. As a fly on the wall, Seidel recounts the squats, demos and first concerts of bands such as Cluster, Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel. Just as precisely and vividly, he recapitulates the influence of minimal music composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, the origins of many Krautrock musicians in jazz and the role of the synthesiser. Wolfgang Seidel delivers a captivating account on Krautrock that dispels many of the founding myths of the first genuinely German pop culture, which above all did not want to be German. In addition, the book is supplemented by a discography of the 50 most important Krautrock records, written by music journalist and Krautrock expert Holger Adam. Translated from German by Alexander Paulick (member of influential Düsseldorf based avant-garde band Kreidler).

Leseprobe

First published in German language 2016 by Ventil Verlag

ISBN print 978-3-95575-233-0

ISBN epub 978-3-95575-643-7

© 2025 Ventil Verlag UG (haftungsbeschränkt) & Co. KG, Boppstr. 25, D-55118 Mainz, [email protected]

Use of this material, in full or in part, is only permitted with expressly agreement of the publisher. All rights reserved.

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www.ventil-verlag.de

Wolfgang Seidel

KRAUTROCK ERUPTION

An Alternative History of German Underground in the 60s and 70s

With a commented discography of selected krautrock records by Holger Adam

Translation by Alexander Paulick

Wolfgang Seidel was born in a West Berlin backyard in 1949. He survived the first half of the 1960s thanks to science fiction novels he bought with his meager pocket money and the music broadcast by the Allied broadcasters AFN and BBC. Music that was a promise that there had to be more and better things out there than post-war Germany. Seidel was one of the founders of Ton Steine Scherben in 1970. Since the mid-1980s he has worked in Berlin as a graphic designer and is active as a drummer and electronics engineer with Alfred Harth, among others, in improvised music.

Holger Adam is one of the co-editors of German magazine testcard – Beiträge zur Popgeschichte.

CONTENTS

We have to get out of here … • Protecting the youth • If you don’t behave, you’ll be sent to a home … • Signals of rebellion • A happy family • A roof over their heads • This is our house • Weeds from the ruins • As long as the name starts with The • From beat to krautrock • Cosmic music • Avant-garde and electronic music • Karlheinz Stockhausen • The sound of kraut – the Ruhr region • Frankfurt • Hamburg • Munich • Everywhere & nowhere • West Berlin • Noise and infinite spaces • Synthetic music • The motorik beat • Jazz • Free jazz • Totally free music • Speechless • Beat-Club, re-education and Sexpol • Intermedia and song days • Underground? Pop? Nein! Gegenkultur! • Drawing a clear dividing line … • The enemy in your own bed • The true, the beautiful, the good … • Art & artificiality • Rebirth of Germany • Krautrock forever • Future Days

Agree to disagree – A selected krautrock discography

As a child in the 1950s, I was fascinated by my aunt’s portable radio, which must have once belonged to one of the US soldiers stationed in West Berlin. It looked different to the radios I knew from other family living rooms, which had a polished wooden casing, golden decorations and gold brocade concealing the loudspeaker. Those radios looked like old-fashioned pieces of furniture and hid their technology like something dangerous that you wouldn’t want to have in your own home. In contrast, my aunt’s radio was a cross between an American road cruiser and a spaceship from one of the science fiction films that hit the cinemas in the 1950s. A huge display showed the shortwave band with the names of distant places, and a world map with time zones was in the flipped-up lid. The radio was the promise that there was a world out there, a world outside the grey, enclosed West Berlin where I grew up. The radio not only proudly presented itself as an object of advanced technology, it also made it clear that the places I longed for could be reached via this technology. This longing was not limited to the earth. Listening to shortwave at night, in a room lit only by the glow of the valves and the magic eye of the receiver, not only brought voices from distant places, ships and aeroplanes – shortwave reception, with all its interference, also conveyed a sense of the distance between transmitter and receiver. The strange sounds seemed to connect the listener with the stars.

WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE …

Few phrases summarise the attitude to life of young people in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s better than this one: “We have to get out of here!” Out of a Germany that demanded one thing above all else from young people: to keep their mouths shut and adapt smoothly to the discipline of school and work (and, for young men, military service, which was reintroduced in West Germany in 1955). And this within a country in which the last traces of the consequences of that sort of discipline had only just been cleared away, and the leading personnel in business, politics, administration, the judiciary, and the military were largely identical to those before 1945. Even the minor authorities, the teachers, instructors, and heads of families, were largely moulded by the same ideology, which demanded submission and conformity from young people. This applied to both West and East Germany. As a young person, you only had one wish: to get out.

For young people in the West, there were several ways to escape the disciplinary grip on body and mind. You could drop out completely and wander around Europe as a drifter with a sleeping bag and a few books, heading north in the summer, where the air and love were freer, and chasing the sun in the winter, heading south. You could study philosophy for 40 semesters and avoid any economic exploitation. You could move to a rural commune, although you could only rarely live off the land. In most cases, you had to make a living from what you earned in the city or what your parents sent you. Or you could escape to drug paradises. Either with the help of the latest products from the Sandoz chemical laboratories into the vastness of the cosmos – not only because of the general enthusiasm for space travel. The future was still terra incognita, free of all identitarian attributions and prefabricated lifestyles. Another way out was to leave German normality behind with the medicine chest of a romanticised Orient. However, this harboured the risk of not only unintentionally connecting with obscure gurus, but also with a romantic anti-modernism, which was not entirely free of the misery from which one wanted to escape. Those who were serious about it made their way to the promised land of India and Afghanistan. As a rule, however, the hard labour in the poppy fields was left to the locals.

The years 1967/68 were something of a watershed in terms of drug use, as with many other things. Previously, stimulants had been the drug of choice for young members of the working class and lower middle class, for whom social advancement in the golden age of Rhineland capitalism seemed to be guaranteed. You could dance the entire weekend away on this stuff, and celebrate your own small part in the economic miracle. With the rapid politicisation of youth, the question of the drug of choice also became a political issue. Alcohol and amphetamines were regarded either as narcotics or performance-enhancing drugs, and were accordingly viewed critically. On the other hand, so-called mind-expanding drugs were seen as a way of overcoming capitalist normality, with its cycle of production, wage labour and consumption. At the beginning of the 1970s, when it became clear that the resistance was greater and the leaden years of the hunt for terrorists cast their shadows ahead, the use of narcotic drugs increased. The back-to-back deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison could have been more than a coincidence, or they were perhaps a symptom of this shift in climate. There was also a fair amount of recklessness involved. “Once you tell a lie, you’re never believed.” The authorities had told so many frightful stories about all the horrors that would follow that first joint, but which never materialised, so even justified warnings were thrown to the wind.

Another sign of the fatigue that followed the optimistic decade of the 1960s, was the shift from the anti-authoritarian movement to the formation of left-wing parties that followed the old model of the Leninist cadre party. While heroin was a problem for young people who otherwise hardly had much to expect from life due to their social background, membership of one of these “workers’” parties was more for middle class children. They wished to escape their privileged background and become members of one of the communist parties working for the benefit of the proletariat and world revolution. These groups disbanded at some point because the revolution failed to materialise, and there were hardly any proletarians who had enough trust in their bosses’ children to join in the first place.

But before that happened, everything seemed possible. Published in 2014, We Thought We Could Change the World is the title of a volume of interviews with Peter Brötzmann, one of the most radical musical rebels of the 1960s. The sentence reflects the mood of a time that would later be labelled “’68”. It had already begun a few years earlier. There is no cut-off date for this development, neither for its beginning nor for the fading of the spirit of optimism, which turned 180 degrees in the second half of the 1970s with the slogan “No Future”.

The desire to get out gripped a youth that could have actually found it easy to get in. Precarious employment and the Hartz IV benefits scheme were still decades in the future. You didn’t have to worry if your A-level average was worse than a 1.5. Turbo A-levels and bachelor’s degrees were unheard of, and even skilled workers could look forward to their future in a terraced house with an adjoining party cellar with some peace of mind. While social mobility was as low as it is today until the 1950s, unusual opportunities for advancement opened up for a few years. This was due to gaps left by the war, which made labour a scarce resource that companies had to compete for. Added to this was the technological push, which demanded highly qualified personnel. The demands of critical young people for training reforms thus coincided with certain needs of the economy. If you were young back then, you didn’t have to worry about your future. If you were young and left-wing, you were sure that the future would eventually bring a worldwide revolution. And until then, you could always go out and get a job.

Left-wing debates, which had previously centred on the exploitation of wage earners, increasingly focused on the question of the alienated life. Not that traditional exploitation had disappeared, but it had been outsourced to guest workers and the Third World. For the skilled German worker, the future looked rosy, with a building society savings contract and a regular income, two weeks holiday in Italy, a terraced house, a wife and two children. The only existential question was the decision: Opel or Ford? It was precisely this secure life, happiness through consumption, that young people were fleeing from. They mistrusted the family idyll, which demanded unquestioning conformity as the price for material security. One reason for this mistrust were the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt, which brought to light the horror of the extermination camps. The fact that it had taken almost 20 years for the first legal reappraisal to take place also turned this development into a generational conflict, which lent additional energy to the debate. Added to this were the anti-colonial struggles, which raised the question of the extent to which the prosperity of the First World was based on poverty and oppression in the Third World. This culminated in the protests against the war in Vietnam and the military dictatorships in Latin America, where the leading power of the West, which had been seen as a democratic role model, took brutal action against these ideals. At the same time, the USA remained the place of longing that it had been since the wave of emigration in the 19th century. It was also the source of the cultural and political ideas that articulated young people’s mistrust of the world they found themselves living in.

Leaving the false family idyll meant, quite practically, moving into a shared flat or commune. People hoped that life in a collective would bring them relief from the psychological wounds and moulding caused by the nuclear family. When the bourgeois citizen heard the word commune, they thought of the worst thing they could imagine after the abolition of private property: free love. Even if love was not as free as the young men and women had hoped, gaining control over their own bodies was a driving force behind this movement. The squares – with their bodies petrified by discipline, who could only escape their armour with a dirty joke at the bar or through an act of violence – were a repellent example to young people. Wolfgang Staudte portrayed them so harshly in his 1951 film adaptation of Heinrich Mann’s novel Der Untertan, that the film was banned in West Germany for years and was only released after being shortened. The fact that the completely un-emancipatory and temporary breakdown of discipline among the citizens, was usually only possible through alcohol meant that young people avoided the locals at the bar and their latent aggression, preferring to reach for a joint rather than a bottle. This oppressive atmosphere can still be felt in Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s early films, such as Katzelmacher, or in Peter Fleischmann’s Jagdszenen aus Niederbayern.

Breaking out of traditional gender roles was another door to the outside world. Even before 1968, a new self-confidence had developed for women as a result of their improved economic situation and the introduction of the contraceptive pill. Young women deliberately celebrated this as a provocation and self-empowerment. The fight over skirt length (short) and men’s hair length (long) could become rather violent. At the minimum, angry citizens were already uninhibitedly slobbering their violent fantasies into television microphones. What began as individual protest, led to the emerging women’s movement. It combined feminism with a radical critique of capitalism, and demanded far more than just legal or economic equality.

The easiest way out was with a record player or a radio. The record player was better, because the dominance of German popular music on the radio was unbroken until the end of the 1960s. If you ask people whose youth landed in the decade between 1962 and 1972 about their favourite music, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones usually come out on top. Songs that became memorable had titles that were programmatic: “Break On Through (To the Other Side)” by The Doors, “My Generation” by The Who, or “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by The Rolling Stones. But even songs whose lyrics offered no impetus for a rebellious statement, such as The Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”, were still a clear incitement to rise up, thanks to the raw power of their guitar riffs. This was enhanced by the androgynous dandyism of The Kinks, who represented the exact opposite of the proper, soldierly man.

Film was another door to the outside world (probably the most important one before the beat music wave), but you couldn’t do more than imitate the dress code and poses of the stars. The beauty of music, on the other hand, was that you could enjoy it actively. With the arrival of the first Beatles and Stones records, bands were formed everywhere and emulated this sound. In the beginning, for most of them it was purely a leisure activity, but it was only towards the end of the 1960s that the fun was combined with the discourses of the new left, and being in a band became a vehicle for the dream of non-alienated labour. This marriage of music and politics was not a matter of course. Nor was it something that most of the musicians had consciously intended. The political message was something that the fans projected onto it. The reaction of the state, schools and parents also contributed to the politicisation of pop music. Having fun, especially having fun being different, was an offence in a country shaped by a conformist ideology.

The first clashes between young people and the police had no specific political cause. They were Bill Haley’s performances at the end of the 1950s, The Rolling Stones’ concert at the Waldbühne in West Berlin in 1966 and the Schwabing riots in Munich in 1962, which were triggered by the expulsion of a group of street musicians by the police. Several thousand young people took part in the ensuing street battles with the police. There were also clashes between beat fans and state power in the GDR, where the repressive authorities cracked down with all their might. After that, music that ran counter to the prevailing ideology could only exist in the underground – where the word underground was more than just an advertising label. The old left had great difficulty understanding the new youth movement. The authoritarian communist parties in the East were suspicious from the outset of any grassroots movement that was not under their control. And the fact that these parties had severed their ties with the artistic avant-garde in the 1930s took its toll on them. Instead, a concept of culture was proclaimed that was nationalistically charged, culminating in Ulbricht’s statement that there was no need for any “foreign Yeah Yeah”. The GDR’s state radio committee called for the promotion of “national intonation”. This had nothing to do with Adorno’s critique of the culture industry. It drew on the national resentment and anti-Americanism of the old educated classes, and acted as the custodian of “good Prussian virtues” while the West was denounced as an American colony. The propaganda success with the bourgeoisie, hoped for as allies, was limited, and the GDR lost the youth for good.

PROTECTING THE YOUTH

Anyone who does a bit of television archaeology and watches a pseudo-documentary crime series with plenty of local colour, such as Stahlnetz from the early 1960s, will notice one thing missing in them: young people. There are children and unready, mostly awkward young adults. Youth as an increasingly longer, independent phase of life with its own cultural expression had not yet been invented. When young people did appear, it was as halfwitted delinquents, seduced by bad, mostly American role models – almost as a criminal offence in their own right. They were characterised by an unsoldierly posture, a desire to consume and, above all, flippant answers with which they challenged the authorities. Another recurring feature was the use of Anglicisms in music, clothing and language, almost as if they were the second wave of GIs bringing the occupying regime into schools and families.

The desire for dissidence was a reaction to a discipline and a graveyard calm that, when encountered today in German films or television productions from the 1950s, seems almost comical. For those affected, it was not. As a young person, you were subject to constant monitoring and were only really unsuspicious if you remained invisible. The “Law for the Protection of Youth” contained numerous restrictions on freedom of movement. It reflected the mindset of orderly Germans, who saw young people as a threat or felt they needed to be protected from such – which amounted to the same thing. The law came into force in 1952 and was partly characterised by the spirit of Heinrich Himmler’s “Police Ordinance for the Protection of Youth”, which had been in force until then. The Nazi decree of 1943 stated: “Due to the changed living conditions caused by the war, the following is decreed for the protection of youth (…): §1) Keep away from public streets and squares or other public places during the hours of darkness – Minors under the age of 18 are not allowed to loiter on public streets and squares or in other public places during the hours of darkness.” And in paragraph 5, the fun for young people came to a complete end: “Minors aged 16 to 18 are only permitted to stay in rooms where public dance parties are held and to participate in public dance parties indoors and outdoors if accompanied by a parent or guardian or their authorised representative until 11 pm.”

The name of the ordinance was cynical, as the young people to be protected were conscripted into the Wehrmacht when they reached the age of 18. This not only put an abrupt end to youth; for many, life ended just as suddenly a few weeks later in a trench somewhere in the Soviet Union. Accordingly, there was a great need to savour what little youth they possessed and to ignore the rules. Then came the post-war years, in which life only slowly returned to normal. First, the rubble had to be cleared away and the bare necessities for survival organised. Children and young people were largely left to their own devices, with huge fields of rubble as their playground. This freedom and the independence they discovered was soon to be taken away from them again.

IF YOU DON’T BEHAVE, YOU’LL BE SENT TO A HOME …

The harshest measure for disciplining young people was being sent to a home, or a boarding school for the children of the upper classes. But there is nothing cosy about this kind of home. They were prisons for children and young people, where they were sent at the request of their parents – “If you don’t behave, you’ll be sent to a home!” – or at the instigation of the youth welfare offices. There, children and young people were disciplined with physical violence, locked up and used for involuntary unpaid labour. In addition to exploitation as cheap labour, there were also numerous cases of sadistic violence and sexual abuse. There was no monitoring of the admissions practice or of these homes, 70 percent of which were run by the major churches. The fact that this system, to which around 800,000 children fell victim, was able to function until the 1970s, was due to the definition of antisocial behaviour and difficulty of education adopted from National Socialism. It was not only the ideology that was adopted. The authoritative personnel responsible for institutionalisation, and in the homes themselves, were often the same as they were before 1945. They simply carried on, sometimes in the same buildings that had served as prisons or camps during National Socialism, with inmates who had to wear the same prisoner clothes. Ulrike Meinhof undertook her research into youth homes in 1971, as seen in the television film Bambule, which promptly disappeared into the archives for 20 years. Her look beneath the surface of the Federal Republic of Germany, which celebrated itself as an economic miracle nation, may have contributed to Meinhof’s radicalisation and her path to the Red Army Faction. It was not until 2012 that the German government managed to recognise, not even half-heartedly, the injustice caused by the repressive system of these homes. The reform of residential care in the 1970s was the result of the “home campaign” of the anti-authoritarian movement, which not only denounced home care from the late 1960s onwards, but also supported young people who escaped from institutions.

“As long as your legs remain under my table …” was one of the slogans used to discipline youngsters. It was particularly effective for pupils and students who had no income of their own. Those who were doing a vocational training programme didn’t have it much better, because “apprenticeship years are not master years”. Most apprentices were employed in small businesses, where they were above all one thing: cheap labour. The standard of training was poor unless you were lucky enough to have found an apprenticeship in a large company with its own training workshop. There was only a minimal apprenticeship payment, which often had to be handed over to the parents except for a meagre amount of pocket money. In Clemens Kuby’s 1972 film Lehrlinge (with music by Ton Steine Scherben), the protagonist of the story sums up the situation: “At work I’m not allowed to say anything, and at home I have to keep my mouth shut.”

SIGNALS OF REBELLION

In Germany, the economic recovery from the consequences of the war was so rapid that the term “economic miracle” was soon being bandied about. However, the ideological structures and their practical and legal effects on everyday life remained in place. The ideological struggle even seemed to intensify the more this ideology came into conflict with economic development. The common term for the political and counter-cultural movements of the 1960s is student revolt – but this is misleading. Even the magical date of ’68 is only partially accurate. In the same way, the shooting of student Benno Ohnesorg by a West Berlin police officer on the 2nd of June 1967, could be seen as the decisive date upon which a long-in-the-making development reached a critical mass. The fact that students played an important role in the protest and modernisation movements also had to do with the change in the number and composition of the student body, into which more children of upwardly mobile workers and employees were moving. The number of students enrolled at universities had tripled. The opposition to authoritarian structures had already started in the years before 1968 and was supported by young workers for whom the central issue was not the war in Vietnam, but their own living conditions at school and work. In 1968 there were fierce clashes with the state in Bremen over a planned fare increase for local public transport, in which the works councils of the shipyards and steelworks also showed solidarity with the demonstrators.

If it had purely been a student protest at the time, it would all be long forgotten today. Striking students do not have the same social and, above all, economic impact as striking workers. Although the dreamed-of revolution failed to materialise, some things did change: there was criminal law reform, shorter working hours, legal equality of the sexes, and the abolition of Paragraph 175, which criminalised homosexuality. Above all, everyday life and the way people treated each other changed. If you compare street scenes, clothing, and body language in old films from the 1950s and early 1960s with scenes shot after 1970, you get a sense of how profound these changes were; even if they often happened with a lot of resistance, compromise and, primarily, agonisingly slow legal implementation. The fact that this was possible at all was due to a coalition of schoolchildren, apprentices, and students that had not previously existed and who communicated mainly through the medium of music. Even if reality lagged behind, the ideal was a youth without class distinctions, listening to the same bands and wearing the same jeans. In Beat in Liverpool, one of the first books on this new youth culture, the authors Juergen Seuss, Gerold Dommermuth and Hans Maier write that the youth “in their protest behaviour, is a society divided into often hostile groupings, yet is almost classless in its approach. Although it can be roughly said that the intellectual beatniks and layabouts often come from the upper and middle classes, the mods and beat fans often from the lower middle class, and the rockers from the working class, the exceptions and points of contact between these groups are so numerous, and the behaviour towards established values so similar, that any such classification becomes rather questionable.”

In the fight against authoritarian structures and repressive sexual morals, pupils, apprentices, and students found themselves in the same position. Together, they developed forms of action that gave this movement the necessary impetus. In addition, the early 1970s saw the largest strike movement in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany, which was not only