What is Krautrock? Germany’s Electronic Music History
Krautrock history from 1968-1985: Can, Kraftwerk, Neu!, and how post-war Germany rejected rock to invent electronic music’s future. The definitive guide.
When Kraftwerk’s Autobahn reached No. 5 on the US Billboard 200 in March 1975, nobody knew what to make of it. A 22-minute instrumental about driving on German highways? Sung mostly in German? With robots replacing guitars? This shouldn’t have worked. Rock music in 1975 meant Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, not synthesizers mimicking car engines.
But Autobahn wasn’t trying to be rock music. It was something post-war Germany had been building toward since 1968, a complete rejection of Anglo-American musical traditions in favor of something genuinely new. What British journalists dismissively called “krautrock” was actually a cultural revolution disguised as experimental music.
Most people discovering krautrock today start with Kraftwerk’s pristine electronic pop or maybe Neu!’s hypnotic grooves. What they don’t realize is these artists were part of a broader movement that asked a radical question: What happens when you make music with zero connection to blues, jazz, or rock and roll? When you start from actual zero?
This is the complete story of how West Germany rejected its musical inheritance, ignored Anglo-American rock entirely, and accidentally invented the blueprint for electronic music, ambient, techno, post-punk, and basically everything that came after. It’s about what happens when you’re too ashamed of your cultural past to look backward, so you create something that only looks forward.
By the end, you’ll understand why a generation of German musicians rejecting their parents’ crimes created sounds that still define music fifty years later, and why isolation might be the most powerful creative tool there is.
Post-War Experimentation: 1968-1972
Escape from Year Zero
West Germany in 1968 was a country still processing trauma. The Nazi past loomed over everything, creating what cultural critics called “Stunde Null”, Hour Zero, the idea that post-war Germany needed to rebuild culture from nothing. For young Germans coming of age in the late 1960s, this created a unique problem: they couldn’t embrace traditional German culture (too tainted by the Third Reich) and they refused to simply copy Anglo-American rock (cultural imperialism).
As Dieter Moebius of Cluster and Harmonia explained: “We were a lot of the times on the streets instead of studying. As young people we were not very proud to be German. We were all tired of listening to bad German music and imitations of American music. Something had to happen.”
The radical student protests of 1968 created space for this “something.” When student Benno Ohnesorg was shot by police on June 2, 1967, and activist Rudi Dutschke was nearly assassinated on April 11, 1968, German youth culture exploded. Communes formed, experimental art collectives emerged, and musicians began asking what German music could sound like if it ignored everything that came before.
That same year, 1968, saw the foundation of the Zodiak Free Arts Lab in Berlin by Hans-Joachim Roedelius and Conrad Schnitzler, which became ground zero for the psychedelic-rock sound spreading through Germany. Originally krautrock bands gave their records away for free at Free Art Fairs, part of the broader “Free Art” movement rejecting commercialism.
The Pioneers Who Rejected the Blues
Can formed in 1968 in Cologne, founded by Irmin Schmidt and Holger Czukay, two former students of avant-garde composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Schmidt had traveled to New York and discovered the minimalist experiments of Terry Riley, Steve Reich, and La Monte Young, realizing rock music could be something completely different. With drummer Jaki Liebezeit (who developed the steady, machine-like “motorik” beat) and guitarist Michael Karoli, Can created something nobody had heard before.
Their 1969 debut Monster Movie featured vocalist Malcolm Mooney’s intense, improvised performances over extended jams that felt more like free jazz than rock. But it was 1971’s Tago Mago with new vocalist Damo Suzuki that exploded all boundaries, 18-minute tracks like “Halleluhwah” combined funk grooves with avant-garde experimentation, creating hypnotic rhythms that predicted everything from post-punk to techno.
Jean-Hervé Peron of Faust explained the approach: “We were trying to put aside everything we had heard in rock ‘n’ roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics. We had the urge of saying something completely different.”
