In the Guardian, I came across a piece entitled “‘A road trip like no other’: my epic drive on Kraftwerk’s Autobahn” by one Tim Jonze, associate editor of culture. It’s a long and rambling essay about Jonze travelling to Germany on the trail of the band Kraftwerk and their song “Autobahn”, which also includes driving on the Autobahn. If you want to listen to the Kraftwerk song, the three and a half minute single version (and the one you’ll hear on the radio) is here and the full twenty-three minute version is here, if you want to torture yourself or really like Kraftwerk (I don’t, but more about that later).
If you’re German and the Autobahn is not some kind of mythical experience for you, but just a way of getting from A to B, the whole piece is rather silly. Indeed, I normally don’t even use the word “Autobahn” in English (unless referring to a specific Autobahn), but prefer the more generic “highway” or “motorway”, because that’s what an Autobahn is, a multi-lane road optimised for long distance, higher speed traffic. Just because Germans were the first to come up with the concept – and as Tim Jonze correctly points out, the Autobahn network was planned during the Weimar Republic and not invented by Hitler, though the bulk of the early construction happened during the Third Reich – doesn’t mean it’s unique to us. Many countries have similar highway networks and indeed there are places where a German Autobahn seamlessly turns into the Dutch or Belgian or Austrian or Swiss or Danish or French or Polish equivalent.
Tim Jonze starts his essay by waxing lyrical about Kraftwerk and their importance as pioneers of electronic music. Now I don’t dispute that Kraftwerk were important pioneers of electronic music. That said, I never liked Kraftwerk. Part of it may be that I’m just a little too young to appreciate them – the “Autobahn” song came out when I was one and a half years old. And by the time I was old enough to actively appreciate music, synthesizers and electronic music were no longer as new and innovative as they had been in 1974. In fact, the time of my musical awakening were the 1980s, the heyday of synth pop. It’s a clear case of the pioneers being eclipsed by those who came along later and did the thing better.
However, as Tim Jonze finds out when he is wandering in the footsteps of Kraftwerk in Düsseldorf or at least tries and is frustrated by the lack of memorial plaques or historical markers or locals caring about the band, I’m not the only German person who doesn’t like Kraftwerk very much. Most Germans don’t. Kraftwerk is a very clear case of a German band that’s more popular outside Germany. Rammstein is another example and to a lesser degree the Scorpions.
A large part of the reason for this are the lyrics. Whenever I heard Kraftwerk songs on the radio growing and occasionally saw the band on TV growing up, I always thought, “That song is so stupid.” Because the monotonous lyrics of Kraftwerk songs do sound stupid, when you actually understand them. Now Kraftwerk obviously doesn’t have a monopoly on stupid lyrics sung in German – not in the country that gave birth to “Da Da Da” by Trio (which nine-year-old Cora thought was as stupid as any Kraftwerk song and which also became an unlikely worldwide hit). However, if you look at the Trio live performance on the popular music show Hitparade, you can see that they’re clearly taking the piss.
BTW, I just checked if Kraftwerk ever performed on Hitparade – the show only played German language songs, so they would have been qualified – and they did in 1978, singing “Wir sind the Roboter”. Bonus points for poor baffled host Dieter Thomas Heck trying to explain what a vocoder is. In retrospect, I feel sorry for Dieter Thomas Heck, who only wanted to present sappy German Schlager music – there’s a reason Hitparade only featured songs sung in German, namely to keep anything too modern and newfangled out – and found himself faced with increasingly strange music and performers.
Unlike Trio and many of the other weird bands and performers that baffled Dieter Thomas Heck on Hitparade, Kraftwerk didn’t seem to have the slightest sense of humour. Indeed, looking at the vintage photos of the band accompanying the Guardian article, my reaction was they look like “Spießer”, stuffy bourgeois arseholes (and Tim Jonze confirms that the founders were basically rich kids, because otherwise they couldn’t even have afforded the pricy synthesizers). And that’s probably why many Germans never liked them and preferred the anarchic punk and German New Wave bands. It’s telling that when Tim Jonze asks people in Düsseldorf about Kraftwerk, everybody instead mentions the local punk band “Die Toten Hosen”, whom I personally also vastly prefer to Kraftwerk. Check out “Hier kommt Alex”, which was inspired by A Clockwork Orange and almost seems like a counter-argument to Kraftwerk. Not to mention that in later years, Kraftwerk was more notable for lawsuits and legal disputes with former members and producers than for their music.
However, Tim Jonze doesn’t just traipse around Düsseldorf on the trail of Kraftwerk, he also wants to experience the Autobahn itself. Cue the deep sigh that a British or American or generally foreign tourist wanting to experience the Autobahn usually elicits among Germans. Because frankly, a lot of them are menaces who drive too fast without being used to it, in cars they’re not familiar with and on stretches of Autobahn or under conditions where driving extremely fast is not a great idea.
And indeed, Jonze’s first attempts to capture that Autobahn experience occur on various Autobahnen in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region (his trip started in Düsseldorf after all), which will certainly give him an Autobahn experience, but not the one he craves. Because as I explain here and here, driving through the Ruhrgebiet and the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region is not very pleasant, because the area is extremely densely populated, so the Autobahnen are fairly narrow (and all named A-fortysomething), there are a lot of intersections and junctions, it’s very confusing and there’s often a lot of traffic. Indeed, Tim Jonze decided to start his Autobahn adventure on the A555, a regional highway link between Cologne and Bonn that’s a whopping twenty kilometres long, though it is the oldest Autobahn in Germany. opened in 1932 (not counting the AVUS in Berlin, which started out as a race course before being integrated into the Autobahn network). Not that you’d notice, because the original Autobahnen of the 1930s have been expanded, rebuilt and paved over so often by now that no trace of the originals remains.
And if you want to drive very fast, forget about it, because due to being so densely populated and so busy, almost all the Autobahnen in the entire Rhine-Ruhr metropoltitan region have a speed limit of 100 or 120 kilometers per hour, in some areas even less. Because as Tim Jonze quickly found out, even though there theoretically is no upper speed limit on the German Autobahnen, many of then actually do have a speed limit for reasons of safety, traffic, noise protection or road construction zones.
This is maybe as good a time as any to talk about speed limit or lack thereof which apparently is a large part of the myth surrounding German Autobahnen in the rest of the world and in parts of German society as well. The Green Party demands the introduction of a speed limit on German Autobahnen with nigh religious fervour – it’s as much a fetish for them as nuclear power is for the conservative CDU and immigration is for the far right AfD. Like most religious fetishes, it’s also silly and has little connection to reality.
For starters, large parts of German Autobahn network already have a speed limit. And even if there is no speed limit, this doesn’t necessarily mean that you can drive as fast as you want to, because there’s usually other traffic and also quite a lot of traffic jams. If there’s a truck in the right lane going 80 kilometers per hour, a car pulling a camping trailer in the middle lane going 100 kilometers per hour and a car in the left lane overtaking the car with the trailer at 130 kilometers per hour, guess what? You’re driving 130 kilometers per hour in the left lane, even if you want to go faster. And believe me, this happens a lot, especially if one truck overtakes another truck and a long line of cars piles up behind.
But even if the road or at least the left lane is clear and there’s no speed limit, most people actually don’t drive 180 or 200 kilometers per hour or more. For starters, going at such high speeds is expensive, because it consumes a lot of fuel. It’s also not very pleasant, especially if you’ve got a smaller or older car, and potentially dangerous. Personally, I usually drive between 120 and 130 kilometers per hour when there’s no speed limit. I may go up to 140 kilometers per hour occasionally while overtaking another vehicle. And yes, I have gone faster on occasion – usually when trying out a new car – but I find everything above 160 kilometers per hour actively unpleasant.
Most drivers are like me and rarely go faster than 120 to 130 kilometers per hour. Quite a few rarely go faster than 100 kilometers per hour. You do have chronic speeders who race down the left lane at 180 or 200 kilometers per hour or even more, flashing their headlights at any car that dares to get in their way. However, these people are a minority. Most of us also think they’re arseholes. Oh yes, and if you introduce a general speed limit, the very people who are the most likely to drive extremely fast are also the most likely to just plain ignore speed limits.
If you want to drive as fast as the car will go – because you’re trying out a new car or just want to know what it feels like – your best bet is picking a stretch of Autobahn that’s not very busy and rather boring. A27 eastbound after Bremer Kreuz or A28 westbound after Hasbruch service station work well, as does the stretch of A1 between Bremer Kreuz and Hamburg. Pick a quiet time – no rush hour and preferably a Sunday, when there are almost no trucks about. Six or seven AM on a Sunday morning in June, when the sun is already up, is perfect. In general, make sure the weather is good – no rain, frost or snow – and that it’s daylight. Wait until the road ahead is clear as far as you can see (and it should be a straight stretch of road, no bends or hills which impede the view), change onto the left lane and hit the accelerator. But get ready to decrease speed and or brake, if anything shows up on the horizon. Even you think it’s far off, trust me, at such a high speed it’s not.
This is also where the problem with foreigners driving on the Autobahn comes in. They’re often driving an unfamiliar car, they’re not used to high speeds and also don’t know where and when it’s reasonably safe to go fast. See Tim Jonze starting his Autobahn adventure in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan area, where it’s definitely not safe to go fast (and not allowed either). At one point, Jonze also opens the driver’s side window, while going 150 kilometers per hour, which makes me wonder if he’s fucking crazy.
What’s even more hilarious is that while Kraftwerk were on the road a lot in the 1970s, travelling from gig to gig, usually on the Autobahn, often by night, their car was a Volkswagen Beetle. Tim Jonze has apparently never driven a Volkswagen Beetle, but I have, because my parents had one in the 1970s and early 1980s. So I know that they couldn’t go any faster than 130 kilometers per hour and the car started rattling like crazy at approx. 100 kilometers per hour. The Beetle‘s successor, a 1980 Volkswagen Jetta, which I continued to drive until 2008 (I wanted to keep it to hit the thirty year mark, when a car is considered a historical vehicle in Germany and gets a special licence plate, but unfortunately the Jetta fell apart two years before), capped out at 160 kilometers per hour and also started to rattle like mad at anything above 130 kilometers per hour. So Kraftwerk were travelling at the relatively leisurely pace of approx. 100 kilometers per hour in a Volkswagen Beetle, when they wrote the “Autobahn” song.
Apparently, one of the Kraftwerk guys said in an interview that the “Autobahn” song was inspired by a roadtrip from Düsseldorf, where the band was based, to Hamburg, with the more industrial sounds early on in the 23-minute version supposed to evoke the hammering of the Ruhrgebiet (the “heartbeat of steel”, which Herbert Grönemeyer famously sang about in his ode to his hometown “Bochum” in 1984, imitated by a drumset in that song), while the gentler sounds of flutes and other acoustic instruments were supposed to evoke the rural Münsterland, all of which just made the “Autobahn” song a lot more interesting than it ever was before, though not interesting enough to subject myself to 23 minutes of Kraftwerk. Coincidentally, my favourite musical evocation of the hammering of steelworks is “Allentown” by Billy Joel from 1982, which is actually a song about the dying of the coal and steel industry in Pennsylvania and about the “heartbeat of steel” going silent forever. I’d never heard of Allentown, when I first heard that song, but I immediately knew what it was about, especially since the Ruhrgebiet was facing the same issues as the Pennsylvania rust belt in the early 1980s. Coincidentally, if you watch this footage of Billy Joel performing “Allentown” live in what was then still Leningrad during his groundbreaking tour of the Soviet Union, you can tell that the young people in the audience (try to spot the totally not obvious KGB agents in the audience) know what the song is about as well, even though they likely didn’t understand the lyrics and I don’t think they understood that what happened to Allentown and the Ruhrgebiet was coming for them, too.
Since he already is in the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region anyway, Tim Jonze decides to go in search of the Ruhrgebiet and its heartbeat of steel and has the same experience I had during my trip to Castrop-Rauxel. That Ruhrgebiet is gone and what’s left are museums and monuments. Tim Jonze actually mentions going to Castrop-Rauxel and visiting the Zollern Mine museum. The Zollern Mine museum is actually in Dortmund, not in Castrop-Rauxel, but then the cities do tend to bleed into each other in the Ruhrgebiet. It’s also close enough to Castrop-Rauxel that I may pay it a visit sometime, either when I’m in town for next year’s Toyplosion or just as a cool roadstrip destination.
Since the “Autobahn” song was inspired by a trip from Düsseldorf to Hamburg, Tim Jonze decides to drive that route for the true Autobahn experience, which is certainly a better choice than bopping around the Ruhrgebiet on a succession of A-fortysomethings, since there actually are stretches of Autobahn where you can go very fast, should you so wish. Coincidentally, Jonze’s route also pretty much parallels my trip to the Los Amigos convention in Neuss earlier this year. In fact, one of the dashcam videos that Jonze embedded in his article shows Neuss as a destination on a road sign.
Since I made the same trip (twice if you count my trip to Castrop-Rauxel) this year, I was of course interested in Tim Jonze’s description. He writes:
I pass green fields and red-brick farmhouses, remote churches and towering wind turbines. This is flute-solo country.
Actually, that’s the Münsterland or rather the stretch of the A1 between Kamener Kreuz (which Jonze totally fails to mention in spite of the distinctive ADAC monument of angels carrying a full-sise rescue helicopter) and Osnabrück and beyond. And yes, the description is pretty accurate, though it also matches much of the rural stretches of the Autobahn network in North Germany. Coincidentally, these are also the stretches where there’s no speed limit and it’s possible and reasonably safe to drive fast. At another point, he also mentions awe-inspiring valleys, which likely refers to several viaducts between Münster and the Ruhrgebiet, an area where you get mountains and where the A1 crosses various valleys. The most impressive one is probably at Hagen, where the A1 crosses the Ruhr valley and gives you a beautiful view of several mountains topped with ruined castles, monuments and observation towers.
Tim Jonze completely fails to mention the 33-kilometer monster construction zone between the exits Bramsche and Lohne/Dinklage, most likely because that very much not the Autobahn experience he’s seeking, though the frustration of endless construction zones that seem to take years to finish, only to start over from the beginning again, is very much an Autobahn experience, too. Coincidentally, he also fails to mention the nigh constant traffic jam before the Weser bridge in Bremen (which is in dire need of repairs, so one lane has been closed to traffic and the speed limit reduced to 80 kilometers per hour, which tends to cause traffic jams all the way back to junction Stuhr in the south and the intersection Bremer Kreuz and beyond in the North. It’s a constant source of frustration for those of us in Bremen and surroundings, especially since two other bridges across the river Weser are also currently closed for construction work in a case of seriously terrible timing.
But then, Tim Jonze probably did not experience that particular traffic jam, because he mentions that the sun started to set as he approached Bremen. He writes:
As it turns out, the sun is starting to set as I approach Bremen. Its reflection looks glorious in my wing mirrors, while ahead of me the leaves on the trees are bathed in a brilliant red light.
There’s a photo, too, which looks like it was taken somewhere around the exits Groß Ippener or Wildeshausen North, where the A1 runs through the woodlands and fields of the nature park Wildeshauser Geest. For me, this usually signals “I’m almost home” because my exit from the southbound direction is Delmenhorst-East a.k.a. Groß Mackenstedt, the next exit after Groß Ippener. Coincidentally, I never quite understood the reason why the exit Groß Ippener exists, because it literally spits you out into the middle of nowhere. The region around Wildeshausen has been inhabited since Neolithic times and the A1 roughly follows a road that’s thousands of years old. The massive Visbek Bride Neolithic tomb is so close to the A1 that you can hear the trucks and cars thundering by.
Tim Jonze then writes about letting the beat of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” (he must have the song on a loop, because he’s been driving three hours or more by now) carry him towards “the shimmering lights of Hamburg”. Of course, if he’s in Groß Ippener, Hamburg is still more than an hour away and the shimmering lights he sees are either the signs of Autohof Groß Mackenstedt or the giant illuminated IKEA and Kibeck (a German rug and carpet retailer) signs at the exit Brinkum or the lights of the industrial estate at the exit Bremen-Hemelingen.
There’s some dashcam footage of driving towards Hamburg after nightfalls embedded in the article, but it’s too brief to make out exactly where this is. It might be just before the Bremer Kreuz intersection or it might be near service station Grundbergsee (which Jonze would have no reason to mention, since he likely has no idea what happened there on the night of August 17, 1988 and why I still avoid that place like the plague) or even as far north as exits Rade (where my Dad and I once spent an hour stuck in a broken down car waiting for the repair service) or Hollenstedt.
That said, I’m pretty sure I know exactly what “the shimmering lights of Hamburg” refer to. It’s the sight that greets you when you emerge from the Elbtunnel (which is on Autobahn A7, not A1 and was not finished until 1975, a year after the Kraftwerk song came out) and suddenly there’s Hamburg stretched out in front of you and to the right there is a majestic span of the iconic Köhlbrand suspension bridge. It’s a view I’ve loved ever since I first saw it as a very young kid and the reason why I always pestered my Dad “Can we go through the Elbtunnel please?” It’s also a view that’s best enjoyed when you’re not behind the wheel and don’t have to deal with the dense traffic and permanently gridlocked Hamburg. Coincidentally, now I’m an adult I understand why my Dad hated driving through Hamburg so very much, to the point that he once paid for a more expensive plane ticket, so I could fly from Bremen rather than Hamburg.
So is Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” the best song for a roadtrip on the Autobahn? No, and it’s not even close. Because Germany has generated a remarkable number of songs about driving and roadtrips. Specific Autobahnen, intersections, exits or sometimes Bundestraßen (two-lane highways) are often mentioned in the lyrics and the songs are about truckers, bikers, hitchhikers and drifters. In particular, there are a lot of trucker songs, because Germany is located smack in the middle of Europe, which means there are a lot of truckers. Some artists specialised in trucker songs such as Gunter Gabriel, here singing “Er fährt ‘nen 30 Tonner Diesel” (He drives a thirty ton diesel truck) from 1974, an ode to all the truckers whose home is the Autobahn, or the Hamburg band based country band Truck Stop who referred to driving, truckers and the Autobahn in many of their songs such as “Ich möcht’ so gern Dave Dudley hör’n” (I would love to listen to Dave Dudley) from 1978 about the pain of being on the road with only terrible music on the radio, or “Die Frau mit dem Gurt” (The woman with the seat belt) from 1977, which references a 1970s public safety post about an attractive naked woman wearing nothing but a seat belt (I couldn’t find the poster online, though I clearly remember seeing it) or “Der Trabi und der Truck” (The Trabi and the Truck) from 1990 about the German unification and roads and country becoming one (“Trabi” is short Trabant, the iconic East German car brand) or “Der Wilde, Wilde Westen” (The Wild Wild West) from 1980, which insists that the Wild West begins at Maschener Kreuz just before Hamburg, where the A1, A7 and A39 intersect. Maschener Kreuz is infamous for traffic jams, because this is where the two main north-south routes not just for Germany, but for all of Europe, intersect. It’s also where the band’s recording studio was located, “directly by the Autobahn” (it’s not specified which one). The studio closed in 2014 BTW.
“Der letzte Cowboy” (The Last Cowboy) by Thommie Bayer from 1979 is another German country song or rather a parody of country songs about a drifter, the titular last cowboy, who hails from Gütersloh and pretends he’s living in a western, a Marlboro commercial or Easy Rider. It’s a great, both hilarious and melancholic and also great for singing along on a long drive. “Im Wagen vor mir fährt ein junges Mädchen” (There’s a young girl in the car ahead of me) by Henry Valentino and Uschi from 1977 is about a male driver who decides to follow a pretty girl in a small car (specified to be a “duck”, i.e. a Citroen 2CV) going slow on the right lane of the Autobahn. The scenario is creepy, but the song knows it and switches between Valentino as the male driver following the young woman and fantasizing about her and Uschi as the young woman who is understandably creeped out by some old dude following her and finally takes the wrong exit to get away and hide from the guy. The rhythm and the chorus match the leisurely pace of the young woman’s Citroen 2CV, which like the Volkswagen Beetle couldn’t go much faster than 100 kilometers per hour. Henry Valentino was 49, when he performed that song. He died earlier this year, aged 96.
“Eine Ladung Weihnachtsbäume” (A load of Christmas trees) by Tom Astor from 1986 is a holiday song that tackles the downside of the trucker life. It’s about a trucker who is told to ferry a load of Christmas trees to West Berlin just before Christmas (which in 1986 meant passing through East Germany and braving the border controls and lengthy lines twice) and then doesn’t make it back home in time to celebrate Christmas with his own family. There’s also the tear-jerky “Teddybär 1-4” by Jonny Hill from 1979 about a trucker who befriends a disabled and lonely kid via shortwave radio (six-year-old Cora loved that song) or the equally tear-jerky “FFB” (licence plate sign for the town of Fürstenfeldbruck in Bavaria) by the Spider Murphy Gang from 1989, which is about a guy who picks up a female hitchhiker on the A3 from Frankfurt on Main to Munich, whose dreams of life in the big city didn’t pan out and so she just wants to go home to Fürstenfeldbruck. But she never gets there, because going 180 kilometers per hour in the fog by night isn’t a great idea.
However, not all German roadtrip songs are about Autobahnen. Occasionally, you also get songs about Bundestraßen, two-lane highways, which are an alternative for long distance motorised traffic, if there is no Autobahn, if it’s closed due to a traffic jam or accident or simply if you don’t want to take it. Bundesstraße B96, which runs through the far east of Germany from Zittau on the Czech and Polish border to Sassnitz on the island of Rügen, may not be an Autobahn, just a two-lane Bundesstraße, but it has generated not one but two songs, “Straße nach Norden” (Street to the North) by Günther Gundermann from 1998 and “B96” by Silbermond from 2015. Both songs handle the decline of the East German industry after the unification, though in different ways. Gundermann, who was a former bulldozer driver and East German working class bard, explicitly sings about the death of the old industry, mass unemployment and newly built modern factories springing up like spaceships. Meanwhile, Silbermond singer Stefanie Kloß, born in 1984, sings about growing up post unification in the void left behind by the death of the old industry in a village on the B96 at what was then (and probably still is) the end of the world.
In 2005, Element of Crime (a German band in spite of the English name) created a musical monument to the Bundesstraße B75 with their song “Delmenhorst”. The song is about a man escaping an estranged love by moving to the town of Delmenhorst, where nothing reminds him of his lost love and no one cares if he’s cool or hip. It doesn’t mention the road directly, but it literally is about driving down the B75 from Bremen to Delmenhorst (where it ends and becomes Autobahn A28) and mentions landmarks along the way such as the river Ochtum, a creek behind Huchting which runs into the river Ochtum (the creek is named Vareler Bäke, but even many locals don’t know this) as well as the drinks mart/liquor store Getränke Hoffmann, which actually closed ages ago, but is still immortalised in the song. Element of Crime singer/songwriter Sven Regener hails from Bremen (Neue Vahr Süd, to be precise – used to live right around the corner from my cousin) and knew the road, though he moved to Berlin in the early 1980s (hence the reference to the long gone Getränke Hoffmann). The B75 is an elevated four lane road on the Bremen to Delmenhorst leg, but the speed limit is 60 kilometers per hour, going up to 80 kilometers per hour behind Huchting, because it runs through densely populated neighbourhoods, so the rhythm of the song matches the leisurely pace of driving along the B75, when the road is clear. It often isn’t, because it’s one of the main commuter routes into and out of Bremen, which is also probably why it’s called “the road of the damned” at one point in the song.
A lot of German roadtrip and Autobahn song are somewhat melancholic, but “Ich will Spaß” (I want to have fun) by Markus from 1982 is basically about the joy of driving very fast. And yes, it’s pretty much about the kind of arsehole who tries to harass other drivers off the left lane, but there’s simply so much joy in the song – something which a lot of German New Wave songs had, which is also why they felt so fresh and new, when they burst onto the scene in the early 1980s. Just look at those joyful kids hopping around the Hitparade stage. Also, I totally had the skirt and blouse combo that the female keyboarder wears. Many years ago, that song was on the mixtape I had in the tapedeck of my car radio (until radio and tape were stolen, when someone broke into my ancient Jetta, while it was parked underneath the B75 in Grolland). If that song chances to come on, while I’m in my car, believe I’m going to sing along very loud.
And since we’re on the subject of the German New Wave, that movement generated a remarkable number of science fictional songs and of remarkably rude songs, but it generated a few roadtrip songs, too. In addition to “Ich will Spaß”, there’s also “Irgendwie, Irgendwo, Irgendwann” (Somehow, Somewhere, Somewhen) by Nena (who was the girlfriend of “Ich will Spaß singer Markus at some point) from 1984, which not only perfectly captures the teenage desire to get away from their restrictive life and escape to someplace better, but also has the line “We’re driving on fiery wheels through the night into future”. Also check out that amazing video, which is full of SF imagery and features mummies, time travel, ninjas, Indiana Jones style archaeological adventures, Mad Max visuals, cars and Nena looking a lot like She-Ra’s frenemy turned lover Catra.
Kraftwerk are assured their place in musical history for their pioneering use of electronic music. But Germany has many bands and artists who are much better.
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