: Wolfgang Seidel
: Krautrock Eruption An alternative history of German underground in the 60s and 70s
: Ventil Verlag
: 9783955756437
: 1
: CHF 11.60
:
: Pop, Rock
: English
: 192
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
Krautrock as an escape from post-war Germany 'Krautrock Eruption' is a rousing counter-narrative to the usual depictions of Krautrock, written by Wolfgang Seidel, member of Conrad Schnitzler's band Eruption and co-founder of Ton Steine Scherben. Seidel's groundbreaking book, which includes unique historical photographs, paints a vivid picture of the old Federal Republic of Germany, with all of its contradictions and struggles. What is now celebrated as Krautrock emerged in this environment, and at the time was an attempt to contribute the soundtrack to the revolution. As a fly on the wall, Seidel recounts the squats, demos and first concerts of bands such as Cluster, Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel. Just as precisely and vividly, he recapitulates the influence of minimal music composers such as Steve Reich and Philip Glass, the origins of many Krautrock musicians in jazz and the role of the synthesiser. Wolfgang Seidel delivers a captivating account on Krautrock that dispels many of the founding myths of the first genuinely German pop culture, which above all did not want to be German. In addition, the book is supplemented by a discography of the 50 most important Krautrock records, written by music journalist and Krautrock expert Holger Adam. Translated from German by Alexander Paulick (member of influential Düsseldorf based avant-garde band Kreidler).

Wolfgang Seidel was born in a West Berlin backyard in 1949. He survived the first half of the 1960s thanks to science fiction novels he bought with his meager pocket money and the music broadcast by the Allied broadcasters AFN and BBC. Music that was a promise that there had to be more and better things out there than post-war Germany. Seidel was one of the founders of Ton Steine Scherben in 1970. Since the mid-1980s he has worked in Berlin as a graphic designer and is active as a drummer and electronics engineer with Alfred Harth, among others, in improvised music.

WE HAVE TO GET OUT OF HERE …


Few phrases summarise the attitude to life of young people in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s better than this one: “We have to get out of here!” Out of a Germany that demanded one thing above all else from young people: to keep their mouths shut and adapt smoothly to the discipline of school and work (and, for young men, military service, which was reintroduced in West Germany in 1955). And this within a country in which the last traces of the consequences of that sort of discipline had only just been cleared away, and the leading personnel in business, politics, administration, the judiciary, and the military were largely identical to those before 1945. Even the minor authorities, the teachers, instructors, and heads of families, were largely moulded by the same ideology, which demanded submission and conformity from young people. This applied to both West and East Germany. As a young person, you only had one wish: to get out.

For young people in the West, there were several ways to escape the disciplinary grip on body and mind. You could drop out completely and wander around Europe as a drifter with a sleeping bag and a few books, heading north in the summer, where the air and love were freer, and chasing the sun in the winter, heading south. You could study philosophy for 40 semesters and avoid any economic exploitation. You could move to a rural commune, although you could only rarely live off the land. In most cases, you had to make a living from what you earned in the city or what your parents sent you. Or you could escape to drug paradises. Either with the help of the latest products from the Sandoz chemical laboratories into the vastness of the cosmos – not only because of the general enthusiasm for space travel. The future was still terra incognita, free of all identitarian attributions and prefabricated lifestyles. Another way out was to leave German normality behind with the medicine chest of a romanticised Orient. However, this harboured the risk of not only unintentionally connecting with obscure gurus, but also with a romantic anti-modernism, which was not entirely free of the misery from which one wanted to escape. Those who were serious about it made their way to the promised land of India and Afghanistan. As a rule, however, the hard labour in the poppy fields was left to the locals.

The years 1967/68 were something of a watershed in terms of drug use, as with many other things. Previously, stimulants had been the drug of choice for young members of the working class and lower middle class, for whom social advancement in the golden age of Rhineland capitalism seemed to be guaranteed. You could dance the entire weekend away on this stuff, and celebrate your own small part in the economic miracle. With the rapid politicisation of youth, the question of the drug of choice also became a political issue. Alcohol and amphetamines were regarded either as narcotics or performance-enhancing drugs, and were accordingly viewed critically. On the other hand, so-called mind-expanding drugs were seen as a way of overcoming capitalist normality, with its cycle of production, wage labour and consumption. At the beginning of the 1970s, when it became clear that the resistance was greater and the leaden years of the hunt for terrorists cast their shadows ahead, the use of narcotic drugs increased. The back-to-back deaths of Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison could have been more than a coincidence, or they were perhaps a symptom of this shift in climate. There was also a fair amount of recklessness involved. “Once you tell a lie, you’re never believed.” The authorities had told so many frightful stories about all the horrors that would follow that first joint, but which never materialised, so even justified warnings were thrown to the wind.

Another sign of the fatigue that followed the optimistic decade of the 1960s, was the shift from the anti-authoritarian movement to the formation of left-wing parties that followed the old model of the Leninist cadre party. While heroin was a problem for young people wh