This chapter on definitions, concepts, and the context of Krautrock exercises different modes of theorising the music. First, the chapter analyses the origins of the term and considers different semantic connotations. Second, the chapter traces the reception of its sounds during and after its heyday (1968 to 1974) and both inside and outside of Germany. Third, the chapter attempts to define musicological characteristics of Krautrock in relation to other musical forms. In the last section, the chapter illustrates how national and transnational identity as well as spatiality can serve as concepts that connect Krautrock’s history, identity formation, and overall politics.

The leitmotif of both American and British Krautrock reception in the 1970s was the continuing popularity of German stereotypes and clichés, with the music press coverage in both countries differing only in nuances. It was not before the end of the decade that those ascriptions and stereotypes slowly started to fade away; by then, in a broad consensus among critics and pop journalists, the ‘future sounds’ of Krautrock were widely regarded as a transformative contribution to pop music and culture. The shift in the Anglo-American music press’s understanding of Krautrock in the 1970s suggests that Krautrock’s mission to create a new and transnational cultural identity, for themselves and for West Germany, can ultimately be considered successful; British as well as American observers clearly placed Krautrock outside the Anglo-American realm of pop music, viewing it as a distinct West German phenomenon detached from pop music’s Anglo-American roots. In addition, and as a result, Krautrock’s soundscapes and performative elements were perceived as the first fundamental contribution to pop music from outside the Anglo-American sphere.

The Introduction first considers the enthusiastic reception of Krautrock in Britain, comparing it to the limited contemporary interest in Germany and locating the origins of a homegrown pop music in the desire to develop a pop musical countermodel to the hegemony of Anglo-American pop and rock music. Then the trajectory of Krautrock’s rediscovery beginning in the mid-1990s is traced; first, the renewed media interest from the 2010s onwards, which has resulted in several journalistic books on both the movement in general and on individual bands; next, the concomitant academic research on Krautrock that accelerated in the mid-2010s and continues apace. The Introduction further discusses the neglect of female voices in the received Krautrock narrative und critiques essentialist attempts to reduce the highly heterogenous movement. Rather, the Introduction proposes understanding Krautrock as the specifically (but not exclusively) German variety of a ‘sound of revolt‘ thriving in the politically charged period from the late 1960s to the mid-1970s. By considering German experimental music as an attempt to give voice to the longing for a better future, the conclusion links Krautrock to Ernst Bloch’s utopian philosophy.