In Germany these days, Kraftwerk are considered something of a musical national treasure. But it wasn’t always like that. For a long time, homegrown bands were ignored in Germany – at least until they made it big outside the country, says Uwe Schütte, author of the 2020 Penguin-published book, Kraftwerk: Future Music from Germany.
“From the 70s to the 90s, Germans first ridiculed the Düsseldorfers, then ignored them,” Schutte told the Listener.
People didn’t understand the band that had started off as an art project. At one stage, Kraftwerk members had to explain to a German radio journalist why their track Autobahn didn’t mention the fact that there were a lot of accidents on the autobahn.
In the band’s earlier years, it was even more problematic. When Kraftwerk first appeared, there were concerns that they might be resurrecting Nazi symbolism three short decades after the end of World War II. The group’s appearance – neatly dressed with slicked-back hair – their use of red and black and 1930s imagery, the fact they sang in German, as well as their rejection of the hippie aesthetic of the 1960s were all cause for suspicion in a country desperately trying to disassociate from a murderous past.
In fact, the way Kraftwerk dressed and the visual imagery they presented were part of their holistic concept of music and art, which included machine-made music and drew inspiration from art movements such as Dada, Bauhaus and Constructivism. In interviews, band members clarified that what they were doing was reclaiming Germany’s post-war identity.
“After the war, German entertainment was destroyed,” one of the founding members, Ralf Hütter, explained to an American journalist in 1975. “The German people were robbed of their culture, putting an American head on it. I think we are the first generation born after the war to shake this off, and know where … to feel ourselves.”
Schütte says early interviews with the band were “peddling Teutonic clichés when interviewed by Anglophone journalists in a calculated attempt to create a unique identity”.
It was also a rookie mistake that meant that, “in Germany, they also regularly had to emphasise they had no Nazi leanings in order to avoid those kinds of misunderstandings”.
Obviously, German fans have long since figured it out. These days, they don’t even seem to mind that Kraftwerk perpetuated the image of “the cold German” as precise, austere and unfeeling.
In 2021, the group became the first German band inaugurated into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in the US, something that had local media breathless with tributes.
When tickets for the group’s only show in their home country this year went on sale in March, all 16,000 sold out in 24 hours. In Düsseldorf, visitors can go on Kraftwerk tours and the band is studied in tertiary institutions. Even so, Kraftwerk scholar Schütte thinks his compatriots still don’t completely get it. “I think the Germans themselves have never fully understood and acknowledged the immense, incredible influence that Kraftwerk has had on the development of electronic pop music.”
Make short werk of it
Famously interview-shy Ralf Hütter, who founded Kraftwerk with the late Florian Schneider in 1970, answered just two questions that the Listener emailed via his NZ promoter about still being in the band today. Something may have got lost in translation … or possibly a robot was involved.
Given Kraftwerk’s long life and influence, what is it like being part of a group that has been in existence for 50 years or more. And one whose aesthetic hasn’t changed all that much in that time?
With my partner Florian Schneider we set up our electronic Kling Klang studio in Düsseldorf in 1970 … and we started the Kraftwerk multi-media project … and produced all the Kraftwerk catalogue albums 12345678.
Could this tour be seen as something of a celebration of all that history and if so, how will the performances reflect that?
Every Kraftwerk concert is a live performance in sound and vision. My lyrics from The Robots: “We’re charging our battery and now we’re full of energy.”
“Kraftwerk is the soundtrack of my life …”
