Benno Ohnesorg News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

Neu Klang, Christoph Dallach’s oral history of krautrock, shows how rebellious teens invented a new sound amid the ashes of war

From rock ’n’ roll to jazz, blues and grunge, musical movements have often been born out of human conflict. The devastation of the Second World War – more than 75 million dead; Coventry, Dresden and Warsaw reduced to rubble; ordinary people consigned to a lifetime of suffering with PTSD – was followed by an unprecedented cultural revolution.

Fifty years ago, German rock groups including Neu!, Can and Kraftwerk created an eclectic sound that had never been heard before. It remains as exhilarating as ever.

Rio Reiser was a poet, rebel, rock star and a cult figure of the leftist resistance in Germany. A square in Berlin's district of Kreuzberg has now been renamed after him.

THE IMAGES MOST ASSOCIATED with the German filmmaker and artist Dore O. are of a woman, face-up like Millais’s Ophelia, drifting phantasmally over ocean waters, her body a gauzy projection superimposed onto a blue backdrop of restless movement. The woman is twentysomething Dore herself in her second film, Alaska (1968), a supple succession of beachy still shots and double exposures whose femininity and softness feel deceptive. Staccato editing rhythms and a menacing drone agitate these ethereal visions. And is the woman fading, or coming into view? The images now carry an awful prescience in...