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by the Rock Against Racism movement, which positioned Punk
away from its flirtation with fascist imagery, not least by emphasiz-
ing its connection with Reggae. Throbbing Gristle also played with
imagery from the Nazi era, in particular in their fascination with
death camps such as Auschwitz, while Joy Division was named after
the Nazi label for the groups of prostitutes culled from the inmates
of such camps. Apart from its capacity to provoke and to excite
adolescent fantasies, this use of fascist imagery can also be read as
anticipating, and even welcoming, the coming shift to the right
in Britain and the United States and elsewhere. Germany was also
of interest to English and American new wave and Punk musicians
because of the experimental and avant-garde nature of its home-
grown music scene. Since the late '
s there had been a deliberate
attempt by some musicians in Germany to create a distinctly
German pop music, as a counter to pop and rock's traditional
Anglo-American hegemony. This involved performing songs in
German and looking for sources of influence outside the blues and
folk traditions. Among such sources were John Cage and LaMonte
Young as well as the German avant-garde composer Karlheinz
Stockhausen, who had been experimenting with different tech-
niques to create music since the
60
s, including the use of tape and
other electronic methods. One of Stockhausen's former students,
Holger Czukay, was sufficiently impressed by developments in rock
music in the late '
1950
s to start a group with one of his own students,
Michael Karoli, and a friend, Irmin Schmidt. The group were known
as The Can, and later just Can. At the same time a number of other
German bands were looking to create an authentically German
psychedelic sound, including Tangerine Dream, Psy Free and Amon
Düül I and Amon Düül II (the last two were the result of a split in
the original Amon Düül, a politico/musical commune and band).
Later they were joined by others such as Popol Vuh and Faust. This
mixture of counter-cultural politics, psychedelia, technology and
Stockhausen, became known as
Kosmische Musik
in Germany and
60
