From ‘Autobahn’ to ‘Trans-Europe Express’ … how the electronic pioneers helped shape a new
Germany and changed the history of pop
Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter once told a journalist that his group’s 23-minute-long song about car travel “Autobahn” was an attempt to answer the question: “What is the sound of the German Bundesrepublik?” The autobahn system is, Uwe Schütte writes in this engaging critical introduction to the band, a “deeply ambivalent German monument” because it was a pet project of Adolf Hitler.
Schütte sees Kraftwerk’s
music as “a contribution to the political, cultural and moral rebuilding of Germany” after the second world war. Their records obliquely approach history, and the process of constructing a future-oriented nation, by focusing on the material aspects of its everyday life: roads, nuclear power, trains, computers. The group enthusiastically embraced Germany’s place in the European project, in songs that addressed the continent’s interconnection (“Trans-Europe Express”) and were often recorded in a number of European languages.