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‘A road trip like no other’: my epic drive on Kraftwerk’s Autobahn

Fifty years ago, the electronic pioneers released a 23-minute song about a road – and changed pop music for ever. Our writer hits the speed-limit-free highways of Düsseldorf and Hamburg in search of its futuristic brilliance

The only trace of Kraftwerk I’ve seen so far on this whole trip has been in a Cologne brauhaus stuffed with vintage music contraptions – put a euro in the slot and you can watch a duo of accordion and tuba-playing puppets perform the band’s biggest hit The Model. The poet and painter was a star pupil of the legendary German Fluxus artist Joseph Beuys who had been professor of monumental sculpture at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art before a sit-in protest he was leading resulted in him being escorted from the building by police and subsequently fired. Elsewhere, a proposed extension to the A100 in Berlin has led to protests by ravers and environmentalists – the fact it threatens the future of several nightclubs in the east of the city is grimly ironic given Kraftwerk’s influence on the dance scene that has thrived there.

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