Book Review: Karolina Watroba: Mann’s Magic Mountain: World Literature and Closer Reading

Abstract

musicians’ decision to settle in the rural idyll of Forst in Lower Saxony, sometimes going into the granular detail of specific tracks. Yet, while most contributors rightly emphasise Krautrock’s musical innovativeness, Jens Balzer makes a powerful case for seeing it as a highly conservative movement, arguing it was almost exclusively dominated by white, heterosexual men with an upper-middle-class background, and often sought to cultivate and reappropriate German cultural traditions (reflected in the choice of such band names as Hölderlin, Novalis, and Ougenweide). Finally, in examining the legacy of Krautrock, Jeff Hayton traces the evolution of punk as it developed in West Germany in the late 1970s and early 1980s and its connections to Krautrock, noting that the generation against which punks were revolting was precisely the ’68ers (although surely not only them); Alexander Carpenter explores how, despite its ‘Teutonic heaviness’, the experimental aesthetic and anti-rock ethos of Krautrock helped shape the sound of British post-punk music; and in a fascinating chapter, Marcus Barnes investigates how Krautrock transcended Germany’s borders and (so to speak) travelled from Düsseldorf to Detroit and its musical nightclub scene of house, techno, hip-hop, etc., via the influence of free jazz. According to Mike Banks, Kraftwerk’s key track Nummern is nothing less than ‘the secret code of electronic funk’: it was ‘the perfect urban music because it was controlled chaos, and that’s exactly what we live in’ (cited p. 290). This remark clearly hints at Krautrock’s continuing relevance today, as does another aspect. For Barnes argues that the notion of ‘universal funk’ pervades Krautrock and the music it inspired, suggesting it shows how, ‘beyond superficial physical identity such as gender, nationality, racial categorisation, and other such limiting signifiers of identity, music is a vehicle for the human experience’ (p. 291). In this sense, then, Krautrock fully deserves the label of kosmische Musik that Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser introduced in the 1970s, and this confirms the link drawn – perhaps surprisingly – by Schütte in his introduction between the astral metaphor found in Arnold Schönberg’s string quartet no. 2, op. 10 (with its incorporation of a line from the poem Entrücking by the Symbolist poet Stefan George and its reference to ‘air from another planet’) and the ambition of Krautrock to produce music that is truly kosmisch, experimenting with ‘previously unheard, otherworldly sounds [. . .] not in a fantastic neverland or an unattainable, distant future, but here and now, as a harbinger of things to come’ (p. 11). As Louis Pattison recently observed in the online music publication Bandcamp Daily (in an article celebrating the continuing creativity and activity of many individuals associated with the genesis of this experimental movement some 50 years ago), ‘the pioneers of Krautrock are still chugging away’; and this excellent Companion should prove an invaluable resource for anyone wishing to explore or rediscover the previous (or the next) half-century of what Kraftwerk called ‘Music Non-Stop’. Boing Boom Tschak!