One of the most ambitious ruptures inaugurated by punk was the break with previous historical continuities: ‘No Future’ urged youths to reimagine current and potential opportunities, but it also declared the past invalid for contemporary developments. Yet, despite such rhetoric, punk in West Germany looked back to Krautrock for inspiration and influence. From bands as diverse as S.Y.P.H., der Plan, D.A.F., die Krupps, and others, German punks turned to Can, Neu!, Faust, Tangerine Dream, and Kraftwerk – and the engineering talents of Conny Plank – to help them develop ‘new’ sounds, rhythms, and lyrics. Krautrock is often dismissed as irrelevant to German musical developments, drawing more interest abroad than back home in Germany. Except, as the case of punk indicates, both musically and practically, Krautrock deeply influenced punk efforts at pioneering new German popular musical advances. By examining the continuities and ruptures between Krautrock and German punk, this chapter shows how the former was a critical influence on later German musical developments, and how punk drew on past musical antecedents as they revolutionised German popular music and sought to emancipate German society.

How can we judiciously tell the many continuous, discontinuous, overlapping, persistent, and simultaneous, tales that constitute German history?Taking as an example James J. Sheehan’s engagement with the question: “what is German history?”, the introduction argues that the conceit inherent in the question is the belief that a unitary history must exist, even when the decades of scholarship Sheehan inspired indicated that it does not.In actuality, German history can only ever be regarded as an aggregate of Germans’ histories, and it is critical that we begin by recognizing that a great many of the people who lived those histories did so without regarding difference and unity as antinomies or hybridities as problems. Adopting that position has a number of advantages.It not only allows us to better understand the actions of the great variety of people who thought of themselves and were regarded by others as German during the modern era, it also helps us to gain a better understanding of the roles Germans and German things have played in the history of the modern world.

Chapter 5 compares the colonies’ opinions about the Nazi Party in Germany and its bid for transnational vösch unity, which I label “(trans)National Socialism.” The Menno Colony’s communal understanding of Germanness made vösch propaganda about Hitler’s “New Germany” unappealing. They rejected all forms of nationalism as worldly attempts to thwart their cultural-religious isolationism. The refugees of Fernheim Colony, by contrast, shared little communal unity owing to their diverse origins and looked to Nazi Germany and its overseas aid organization, Volksbund fä Deutschtum im Ausland (VDA), for inspiration. They believed that the highest goal of vösch unity was promoting communal unity, and created a youth group, called the Jugendbund, and a newspaper called Kämpfende Jugend. Resembling other German–speaking communities in Latin America, the two colonies – which seemed identical to visiting Nazi observers ’ held vastly different interpretations of völkisch nationalism at the height of the Nazi bid to establish transnational German unity in Latin America. Latin America, for its part, presents a unique context for studying the Nazis relationship to Auslandsdeutsche because it held the allure of being the last prospect for German cultural and economic expansion, but was impossible for the German state to invade.