The EconomistMay 16th 2020 Europe 43W
ho speaksfor Europe? Henry Kissinger’s question has never
found a satisfactory answer, but a literalist might turn to the
press room of the Berlaymont building in Brussels. Here, day after
day, well-groomed spokespeople for the European Commission
calmly field questions from a potpourri of journalists in antiseptic
surroundings, slipping smoothly from one language to another as
they address the finer points of telecoms regulation, border irreg-
ularities or fisheries law. (At least they did, before covid-19 struck.)
It is hard for such a bloodless organisation to find appropriate
cultural expression. The eu’s anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy”,
satisfies its leaders’ self-regard but is an ill fit for a club with little
hold on public affection. Better, surely, to turn to Kraftwerk, the
German electronic group, the death of whose co-founder, Florian
Schneider, was announced last week. Kraftwerk’s albums from the
mid-1970s to early 1980s may have reinvented pop, spawning half a
dozen genres and helping define the digital age. But they were also
perfectly in tune with the construction of contemporary Europe.
Kraftwerk were too dedicated to the craft of sound to incorpo-
rate into their music anything so banal as a vision. But parts of
“Trans-Europe Express” (1977) project a certain idea of Europe. “Eu-
rope Endless” sets a vaguely decadent description of a borderless
continent (“Parks, hotels and palaces...”) to a stately, arpeggiated
synth-line. Eight years later the Schengen agreement made this re-
ality. The album’s title track chronicles a continental rail journey
atop a rhythm emulating the sound of wheel on track. These were
themes then almost untouched by contemporary rock music.
To be sure, theirs was a decidedly “old Europe”, centred on the
Rhineland, where Schneider and Ralf Hütter, his co-founder, had
grown up, with the Netherlands and Belgium just across the border
and France not much farther away. The romantic sojourn sketched
in “Trans-Europe Express” starts on the Champs-Élysées and
makes it no farther east than the Café Hawelka in Vienna. Kraft-
werk never played communist East Germany (though they did
make it to Hungary and Poland in 1981). Nor could their music al-
ways hope to escape the gaze of the Stasi, says Olaf Zimmermann,
who ran an electronic-music radio show in the gdr. The rebel yells
of Bruce Springsteen or Mick Jagger anyway held more appeal to
those living under communism’s yoke than the stiff beats of fourwealthy, clean-cut straights from Germany’s far west.
Indeed, it was precisely those foreign assumptions about what
rock music should be that Kraftwerk sought to shake off when they
emerged from Düsseldorf’s small avant-garde in 1970. Simply to
adopt a German name, to sing in German and to devote an album to
the national leisure pursuit of driving effortlessly on the autobahn
marked the group out as eccentric, perhaps dangerously so in a
country still grappling with the horrors of its recent history.
As Kraftwerk shed their hirsute Krautrock roots for precision-
engineered synthesised music, predictable jibes followed. “The fi-
nal solution to the music problem?” scoffed the New Musical Ex-
press, tastelessly, in 1975. But their European reference points—
Russian constructivism, the Belle Époque, Bauhaus’s fusion of art
and technology—pre-dated Nazism. Indeed, this “retro-futurism”
was the answer to Kraftwerk’s problematic heritage, notes Uwe
Schütte, author of a book on the band. Rather than seek liberation
via Anglo-American individualism, they would raid Europe’s past
for points of reference that could help assemble a better future.
To hear Kraftwerk cycle through their universal, collective
themes—man’s relationship with technology, broadcast commu-
nications, mobility—often in several languages, is thus to hear
pop music re-engineered for an entirely fresh set of concerns.
Owen Hatherley, an author, calls it “a kind of electronic Esperanto”.
This is the soundtrack of the eu, anonymous elites knitting to-
gether a continent, unafraid of complexity, grounded in a quiet op-
timism. Like officials fine-tuning directives in airless Brussels of-
fices, Kraftwerk shunned publicity, instead indulging their sonic
perfectionism from inside their secretive Kling Klang studio in
Düsseldorf. Only once, by remixing their 1975 hit “Radio-Activity”
to reflect their conversion to the anti-nuclear cause, did they take
anything that might be called a stand. Otherwise they preferred il-
lumination to fulmination. Many bands seek to change the world.
For Kraftwerk, the point was to describe it.It’s more fun to curl fruit
Which Kraftwerk tune should Brussels adopt? If “Europe Endless”
might sit unhappily with countries that have fallen victim to Euro-
peans’ occasionally expansive sense of borders, what about “The
Telephone Call” (1986), repurposed to celebrate the eu’s success in
reducing roaming charges; “The Robots” (1978), to honour the ex-
cellent performance of Eurocrats who “are programmed just to do
anything you want us to”; or “Numbers” (1981), a recital of digits in
more languages than even Frans Timmermans, the commission’s
polyglot vice-president, can muster, set to a savage electro beat?
Perhaps the moment has passed. Eventually, as the world
Kraftwerk had divined overtook them, the music fizzled. Their dis-
appointing last album, from 2003, was devoted to cycling. Europe,
too, moved on: widening, deepening, now fracturing. Yet it is a
pity Kraftwerk never found the chance to explore the themes that
shaped the continent in this century: cheap air travel, just-in-time
supply chains, mobile technology (“Pocket Calculator”, a hymn to
the creative possibilities of hand-held devices, gets halfway there).
Schneider left Kraftwerk in 2008. Since then the group, basical-
ly Mr Hütter and three friends, has toured continuously, thrilling
fans with spectacular visuals. On May 16th, before the virus struck,
Kraftwerk were to join the festivities for Beethoven’s 250th birth-
day in Bonn as they marked their own 50th anniversary. They were
said to have been taken by the symbolism, as well they might: Eu-
rope’s official bard and its unofficial man-machine troubadours,
united in celebration of the continent that made them possible. 7Charlemagne Real life and postcard views
Kraftwerk built modern Europe. The rest of us just live in it