Life
The Jewish influence on Germany’s post-war avant grade music
This new portrait of Krautrock shows how the country’s rare Jewish survivors were central to its development
April 16, 2025 12:36
This new portrait of Krautrock shows how the country’s rare Jewish survivors were central to its development
April 16, 2025 12:36Krautrock, the avant-garde rock and electronic movement that emerged in what was West Germany in the late 1960s, occupies a unique position in pop music. It’s the only non-Anglosphere form accorded first-rank status by the curators of that realm.
In Kraftwerk, it provides the sole act from outside Britain and North America deemed of equal impact to Bob Dylan and the Beatles. Even Abba, recipients of very belated critical adoration, are not thus acknowledged – despite, or perhaps because of, the enormous influence they and their Scandi-pop descendents have wielded upon the mainstream. Krautrock, on the other hand, has influenced the Cool Kids, whose would-be-cool fanbase make up the custodians of the canon. (As a headline from satirical website The Onion once put it: “History Of Rock Written By The Losers”.)
Yet Krautrock, while acclaimed, is also fetishised as a kind of other music, a form of exotica. It straddles the notional border between Western and world music, and its narratives have until now been determined by English-speaking enthusiasts. The name itself is testimony to this: coined disparagingly in the early 1970s by the British, who have unironically deployed it ever since. Imagine a genre called, say “Dagopop” or “Frogbeat”.
Krautrock Eruption serves as a refreshing corrective. Musician Wolfgang Seidel was there from the start, and his account of the movement and its origins has a sly astringency that shrivels its attendant myths, both English and German. In doing so, it also serves as a proxy cultural history of post-war Germany – which is where the non-Krautrock-obsessive reader may find it most of interest, because even a fan of the music might be overwhelmed by its barrage of scrupulous detail.
Recha Freier, founder in 1933 of Youth Aliyah, was a patron of the movement’s godfather, Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose mentally ill mother had been “euthanised” – that is, murdered in the gas chambers – and who often performed his work in Israel
Seidel’s warts-and-all portrait shows a generation of musicians who, far from nursing a patriotic desire to fashion a new Germany, wanted chiefly to escape their present one, upon which the dead hand of Nazidom still lay with crushing weight. Key to this story were Germany’s rare Jewish survivors. Recha Freier, founder in 1933 of Youth Aliyah, was a patron of the movement’s godfather, Karlheinz Stockhausen, whose mentally ill mother had been “euthanised” – that is, murdered in the gas chambers – and who often performed his work in Israel. The television show Beat Club, providing a vital platform to the bands, was the brainchild of Ernest Bornemann, who had fled to England in 1933. Kraftwerk co-founder Florian Schneider’s mother had been perpetually afraid that the Jewish ancestry concealed by her own mother would be discovered. In yearning to metaphorically escape the past, Krautrock was often abetted by those who had done so literally.
Krautrock Eruption: An Alternative History of German Underground in the 60s and 70s
By Wolfgang Seidel, translated from the German by Alexander Paulick
Ventil Verlag