Melanie Schiller

'Fun fun fun on the Autobahn' – Kraftwerk challenging Germanness

Post-war Germany is often described in terms of a “loss of identity” and “cultural vacuum.” From this void emerged bands with the desire to re-formulate Germanness musically, like Krautrocks most influential band Kraftwerk, who in their enigmatic song “Autobahn” rhetorically reclaim authority for what it means to be German. By sonically, visually and linguistically touching upon issues of collective memory and the confines of national space, time, and identification, Kraftwerk effectively not only introduce the key questions of nation building as a plurivalent discourse and participate in a performative construction of a national narrative, but simultaneously also challenge the notion of a monolithic Germanness. Drawing on Homi K. Bhabhas concept of “nation as narration,” I analyze Kraftwerks multimodal work of art “Autobahn” as a national narrative along the lines of spatiality, temporality and subjectivity, and argue that it dismantles a monolithic Germanness, while pointing to the nation as a non-linear process with an open-ended present.