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A sweeping history of the men and women who transformed postwar Germanyand created a musical genre that revolutionized rock and roll and gave birth to hip-hop. West Germany after World War II was a country in shock estranged from its recent history, and adrift from the rest of Europe. But this orphaned landscape proved fertile ground for a generation of musicians who, from the 1960s onwards, would develop the strange and beautiful sounds that became known as Krautrock. Eschewing the easy pleasures of rock and roll and the more substantive seductions of blues and jazz, they took their inspiration from elsewhere the mysticism of the East the fractured classicism of Stockhausen the grinding repetition of industry the dense forests of the Rhineland the endless winding of Autobahns.