Blackbox #10

Every Friday at 4 pm, there is a free guided tour (in German) through the exhibition (except 22 April 2022). Registration is not required. The number of participants is limited.

Under the term “Krautrock” the music of the West German subculture of the 1970s rose to international popularity. In the exhibition at the Bröhan Museum, around 80 concert posters stemming from a private collection paint a vivid picture of the music scene of this turbulent decade.

“Krauts” was a common swearword for Germans during World War II. By the beginning of the 1970s, the record industry used “Krautrock” as a catchword for its advertising campaigns. The events of 1968 had also helped German music to take off in a new direction – everything was called into question, everything was to become new and different. Musicians and bands refused to accept standardized ways of living. The dissociation from established forms and a joyful kind of self-realization led to anarchic sound experiments. Some bands would look for direct confrontation with the political system.

Accomplished designers, such as Jürgen Spohn, Reinhard Hippen, Karl Oskar Blase, Holger Matthies, Jürgen and Falk Rogner, Günther Kieser, and Emil Schult, created iconographic posters of great visual power. However, concert posters were often made – with the defiant courage of the self-taught – by the artists themselves. Documents of the time with a unique aesthetic were thus created, serving as the subject of an exhibition for the first time.

Curators: Dr. Tobias Hoffmann, Gerd Siekmann
Advertising motif: collage of posters from the Sammlung POPDOM Siekmann, design: Gerwin Schmidt

An online guided tour of the exhibition with curator Gerd Siekmann (in German) is available on our YouTube channel: