TITLE:

2014 Grammy Awards cause a Nazi scandal?

 

By Christos Tsanakas,

Author

 

LEAD:

Kraftwerk, the famous “Techno-fathers” from Düsseldorf, will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2014 Grammy Awards Ceremony. But such an honor is risky business. Because Kraftwerk’s provocative references to the Third Reich were never innocent or accidental and not clearly a moral lesson of history.

 

MAIN TEXT:

Undoubtedly the most important pop band of the computer age, Kraftwerk changed the music world drastically as we knew it, with their mid-1970’s transformation from a well hidden secret of the German Kraut-rock underground to seminal music prophets of the future. Is there anyone who has never heard of the “Autobahn” single? And if he thinks he has not, the robotic sounds and futuristic oracles of Kraftwerk are spread all over the place, haunting even the newest electro-pop hits as handy software facilities or lively globalized tradition. Probably on purpose, the Lifetime Achievement Grammy Award 2014 is being given to both Kraftwerk and The Beatles. If the Beatles influenced catalytically and better than any other the evolution of the “perfect pop” melodic songwriting, commanded an unparalleled paradigm that crossed all barriers and lifted pop music to a new level of recognition and artistic achievement, Kraftwerk -for many, the technically advanced Beatles of the Techno Era- did exactly the same to the electronic pop universe. Indeed, they put their indelible stab to the evolution of the hyperkinetic (funk) electronic pop, blessed it with an unbelievable hi-tech status of art perfection, and “trapped” with their private music canons the field of all the upcoming danceable futuristic styles, i.e. electronica, trance, jungle, hip hop etc. To be more specific, Kraftwerk, with their harsh but sensual robotic rhythms and the epic but rhapsodic melodic hooks in emblematic albums like the “Trans Europe Express” (1977), the “The Man Machine” (1978) and the “Computer World” (1981), timelessly influenced from Africa Bambaata and Depeche Mode, to Daft Punk and Bjork, to cut the long list short. Unfortunately, their scientific stylistic abilities and genius musical statements are heavily shadowed by a series of distinctive and completely enigmatic references to the criminal history of the Third Reich! Those references, sometimes obvious, others obscure, have remained naggingly blurred and unexplained all these years, starting from the very first album of Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider (the two “brains” of Kraftwerk), titled “Tone-Float”, released in 1968 and signed as Organisation. Organisation was a pre-Kraftwerk avant rock hippie group with minimum artistic impact but with an obvious trend-setting potential in the fields of proto-industrial, experimental and alienated snobbish music. And this is exactly the ideological birthplace, the starting point of a very dangerous and debatable “nostalgia” for the dark years of Hitler’s evil glory. The question that remains unanswered all these years from Kraftwerk’s part is this: in their case, do we really have to deal with a forbidden nostalgia or with some kind of an artistic criticism to the German society of a never forgotten past? Please, let me show you all the detected exhibits and discuss the most significant semiotic facts, in order to help you make up your own mind in clarity and without prejudices about Kraftwerk’s questionable political mentality and cultural concerns.

 

All the evil signs

 

Starting from the very beginning, Organisation (the cultural meeting point for Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider) was a Third Reich civil and military engineering group in Germany, founded by Fritz Todt, an engineer and senior Nazi figure. The organization was responsible for a huge range of engineering projects both in pre-World War II Germany, in Germany itself and occupied territories from France to the Soviet Union during the war. In the pre-war period from 1933 to 1938 Todt’s primary office was that of General Inspector of German Roadways and his primary responsibility was the construction of the Autobahn network (the notorious German highways, very important infrastructure for the invasion to East Europe). In 1938 the Organisation Todt was officially founded and until February 1942, when Todt died in a plane crash, he was named Minister for Armaments and Munitions and the projects of the Organisation became almost exclusively military, using “slaves” extensively from the concentration camps as workers... In the next two albums, titled after their artistic name, Kraftwerk tried to describe -by musical means- their motherland, Germany, as a bombed and burnt to the ground civilization (in the LP “Kraftwerk” you really hear the bombs dropping and exploding!), which under numb movements is carefully being reconstructed and well operating again in a new level of capacity (the LP “Kraftwerk II” has a sad and dreamy feeling of mute suffering and distant hope for an emotional victory and an industrial superiority). After another, strangely charming, LP of bionic exotica fantasies, filled with drum machines and dreamy vocoder, the notorious “Ralf und Florian” (1973), Kraftwerk remembered the technical miracle of the German Autobahn network, releasing their classic album “Autobahn”, making a hit-single and occupied USA with an extensive tour during 1975. “We are manipulating the audience” declared Ralf, “When you play electronic music you have the control of the people in the room and it can get to an extent where it’s almost physical” (Interview with Lester Bangs, Creem, Sept. 1975). Hitler’s dream was to manipulate the German society to an extent where it’s almost metaphysical. And one of his most effective decisions in this direction was to realize the Autobahn Project, giving jobs to millions of unemployed Germans. Kraftwerk used an old small Volkswagen (Beetle) to collect sounds from the German highways in order to build their new epic motoric songs, driving Hitler’s “cheapest car, for all the people”, officially called the Volkswagen Type 1, a mobile propaganda. But radio was the main tool that gave a takeoff to Nazi propaganda and it has been argued that it was the Nazis who pioneered the use of what was still a relatively new technology as a tool of genocide. “It would not have been possible for us to take power or to use it in the ways we have without the radio”, Goebbels proclaimed. Continuing the radical flirt with the cultural heritage of Nazism, Kraftwerk built a whole album, the “Radio Activity” (1977), around this power of the radio as a principle weapon in the propaganda war, as a means of manipulating public sentiments. Kraftwerk put a lot of effort to find an original war time radio set for the album’s sleeve image. Not any kind of radio, but the specific limited range short-wave device that had been developed under the strict direction of Joseph Goebbels (head of Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda) to prevent users from tuning into broadcasts from outside Germany. The power that comes from the control of information resurfaced later on the “Computer World” LP (1981). In the meantime, Kraftwerk released the groundbreaking album “Trans Europe Express”, bringing to mind the huge railway system of transporting soldiers to the East Front and Jews, Romani, homosexuals and communists to the concentration and extermination camps.

After that, Kraftwerk made their most obviously Nazi-friendly optical statement, posing on the “The Man Machine” album’s sleeve image as severe robotic dummies dressed in red shirts with black ties, having a short military hair cut too, following in this way a classic fascist stylistic protocol. Surely, this was one of the most provocative and enigmatic promo-photo in music history, perfectly announcing the ultra cold robotic futuristic songs of the LP, a commanding “Germanic” soundtrack for a totally controlled collective world, effectively absorbed the personal free will.

And what do they have to say about all those in question “historic” references? Only one thing was cleared out by them through the years: "We cannot deny we are German, because the German mentality, which is more advanced, will always be part of our behaviour” (Interview with Lester Bangs).

           

Personally, I believe that such a disputable case, causing lack of confidence and starting the fire of a Nazi-scandal, must convince the respectful committee of the GRAMMY AWARDS to rethink about its own decision to honor Kraftwerk with a Lifetime Achievement Award.

 

Christos Tsanakas

01/13/14

Athens

Greece