When it comes to krautrock, it’s impossible not to mention the war

In recent years, sensitive music critics have attempted to replace krautrock with kosmiche as the consensus term for the wild and wonderful music that exploded out of West Germany during the 1970s: Can, Neu!, Cluster, Faust. A word that literally translates as herb-rock, cooked up by glib Brits who had read too many war comics, lacks a certain gravitas, and nobody would describe Tangerine Dream or Kraftwerk as rock anyway. The Hamburg journalist Christoph Dallach opens his invigorating oral history with a spirited argument about the label, but sticks with it anyway. So krautrock it remains.

In this story, it is impossible not to mention the war because no country in the world has been less at ease with its recent past than Germany. ‘We wanted to understand and compensate for it with our music,’ says the free-jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann. Teenage rebellion against parents meant something very different when those parents had served on U-boats or the Eastern Front. Those too young to remember the rallies and air raids themselves grew up around teachers and neighbours who used to be Nazis but didn’t like to talk about it.

Thus, saturated in trauma, shame and denial, the krautrock generation talked about the necessity for a cultural zero hour long before punk did. With barely any German heritage to build on, a resistance to emulating Anglo-American rock’n’roll and no conventional commercial ambitions, they designed their own futures. As Can’s titanic drummer Jaki Liebezeit puts it, they were ‘making something out of the cultural poverty of a total breakdown of civilisation’. There really was nothing to lose.