Driving, Driving, Driving on the Autobahn

Alan Dein takes to the road to explore the social and cultural resonances of Kraftwerk’s Autobahn.

The music begins the way journeys begin: with a clunking car door and churning ignition, before rolling onwards on a warm rhythmic throb - a 23-minute conceptual road-trip of swerves and curves, gentle gradients and blaring horns, tarmac-rumbling rhythms and doppler-shift effects that simulate the sensory whoosh of passing vehicles.

Kraftwerk's lyrical paean to the possibilities of freedom via the German motorway system is fifty years old. It was released in late 1974 and became popular worldwide in 1975. These were years in which a new West Germany was being created, one in which a more overt reckoning with history was possible, and in which a new characteristically German culture could be asserted, free from -- and implicitly in opposition to -- that history: new art, writing, cinema, and, with Kraftwerk, among others, music.

The autobahn wasn't an innocent choice of subject for Kraftwerk. It connected them back to the 1930s, when the autobahn system was begun and became an integral part of the infrastructure of the Third Reich. After the war it became a symbol of the West German 'economic miracle'. Beginning in darkness, the autobahn could be conceived as a road that drove towards progress and optimism.

'Wir fahren, fahren, fahren auf der autobahn': 'We’re driving, driving, driving on the autobahn.'

Alan Dein is on the autobahn as well – driving, driving, driving – in Kraftwerk’s wake, and tuned in to the cultural world of West Germany in the 1970s.

Featuring: Berthold Franke, cultural historian Daniel Miller, musician and founder of Mute records Emil Schult, artist and sometime member of Kraftwerk

With grateful thanks to Dietmar Post and Uwe Schutte.

Photograph shows Emil Schult and Alan Dein. Behind them is Schult's painting, used as the original cover of Kraftwerk's Autobahn album.