Krautrock, Faust, and the new German identity

Krautrock was the name given by British followers to German experimental music that emerged in the postwar era. It was not a name widely embraced by German musicians. It encompassed a large trend in popular music, where German musicians were combining what they knew of American rock and roll with their own classical musical history (Stockhausen's experiments with electronica, for instance) to create something new. As one Faust member put it, "We were trying to put aside everything we had heard in rock 'n' roll, the three-chord pattern, the lyrics. We had the urge of saying something completely different." Various bands, including Tangerine Dream, Faust, and Kraftwerk, incorporated the avant-garde styles of the classical music world, which were playing with electronic sounds to create music that interacted directly with space, into a new approach to music that both utilized rock and roll and eschewed it.
A quote about Faust: "These teutonic vampires injected angst, like burning lava, into a sound that was deliberately fastidious, repulsive, incoherent." I'm not sure how accurate this is, but Faust is a remarkable band. They really exemplified the mish-mash experimental style of West German music at the time, combining rock and electronica into a unique German sound and perspective on music's effects. With a surrealist bent, they were not afraid to push the envelope with 14 minute long songs that were mainly drumming (Schempal) or that used guitars, tambourines, and electric drills in a looped, pulsating beat that is oddly fascinating (Krautrock). The song Krautrock starts out simply and just builds and builds on itself with new instrumentation and rhythms. Faust is one example of a band that took Western music and made a German movement out of it, coming as they did at the confluence of new developments in German classical music and in the German political sphere.
History of Rock Music: Faust
Krautrock