Kraftwerk's 'Computer World', left-wing terrorism, and the rise of surveillance states

Interpol and Deutsche Bank/ FBI and Scotland Yard

In March 1975, Gudrun Enslinn was staring through the bars of her jail cell window at the cold, sparse afternoon outside. She had just finished a conversation with her lawyer - a conversation that had been recorded by the Federal Criminal Police Office of Germany, or Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), breaching significant constitutional rights held in the young democratic nation. But these were no ordinary times, and Enslinn was being held on terrorism charges.

Three years prior to this conversation with her lawyer, Enslinn had been arrested in Hamburg for her role in the jail break of a left-wing terror group leader, Andreas Baader, and the bombing of a department store in Frankfurt. She was awaiting a trial that would come to shape the future of German society itself, as it threatened to pull itself apart over the containment of a near constant terror threat.

The Red Army Faction (RAF) that Enslinn and Baader helped create had formed in the wake of radical left-wing revolutionary movements across Germany and Europe after the Second World War. Baader and fellow member Jan-Carl Raspe were neighbours of Enslinn at the Stammheim prison in Stuttgart, jointly awaiting trial for a litany of terror acts committed in response to an increasing slide towards corporate capitalism in the western world and new frontiers of attempted imperialism - such as the war in Vietnam.

The three would all be found dead in their cells by October 1977 in an apparent joint suicide pact following six months of chaos which saw the RAF-led murders of Germany’s attorney general, a banking chief executive, the president of the German Employers' Association - and the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane.

The German population was forced to consider whether it was worth handing over private details to a new national database in a bid to prevent crime and a continued terror threat. These were the conditions and inspiration for ‘Industrielle Volksmusik’ band Kraftwerk to lay down their seminal album in 1981: Computer World.

An album like no other before it, Computer World not only pushed sonic and technological boundaries but its conceptual matter is one the greatest predictions of a future society ever made. Computers proliferating through every segment of society in almost every country in the world - from romance to policing - was not obvious in the build up to 1981.

The album title track, even now in 2024, provokes feelings of a dystopian alien future, where personal data is stored in computers and shared by the world’s biggest organisations. At the time, this sentiment was only shared by a concerned few, while the majority found it hard to imagine such a world. 

The eerie synthesiser that stretches over the verses creates an otherworldly effect, a computer world unsure of itself and its place in time - but there is hope. Taking the synths up to a higher key and maintaining a pulsing bass and drum tempo (widely considered the forerunner to electronic music templates), Kraftwerk tells us to approach this new era with caution, but not necessarily despair. Now that we’re living in it, with all the good and bad that has come from computing technological advancements, it’s clear the inimitable seers were ready to take their government’s actions at face value, and believe them.

Business, numbers/
Money, people

On a surprisingly cool summer’s day in Berlin in July 1937, the chief executive of International Business Machines (IBM), Thomas Watson Snr, had just left a meeting with Adolf Hitler. Watson had an Order of the German Eagle medal in one hand that Hitler had just given to him and a headache of a problem as he left the International Commerce Conference. He had just been effectively rewarded for IBM’s provision of computational hardware that allowed the Nazi party to identify and round up Jews, Roma peoples, and any other deemed undesirable people - and kill them. He was Hitler’s man now.

The Nazi party had been hoping to mandate a census for some time after taking power and in 1933 an understanding of who and where their perceived enemies could be located, as well as an estimation of fit men for a potential war footing, was everything Hitler needed to advance his fascist policies. They finally got their wish with the IBM designed punch cards, which helped store ethnicity and religious data, among other traits, about Germany’s 65 million strong population.

In a groundbreaking book released in 2001, investigative reporter Edwin Black, makes the case that Nazi party could not have achieved its merciless extermination of millions of people without the help of the US-based computer firm in IBM and the Holocaust. Black goes further and claims IBM maintained business associations with the Nazi government well after it had declared war on the US in 1940 through a Polish subsidiary which leased punch card machines used to "calculate exactly how many Jews should be emptied out of the ghettos each day", and to transport them efficiently on railways leading to the camps.

Black is clear the Holocaust would have happened with or without IBM’s input. But the idea that they would have been able to murder Jews on the scale they did, and as efficiently, is put forward through the example of census data collection. The Nazis ordered censuses in both the Netherlands and France soon after they were occupied. 

In the Netherlands, out of “an estimated 140,000 Dutch Jews, more than 107,000 were deported, and of those 102,000 were murdered - a death ratio of approximately 73 percent.” In France, where the punch card system was not as effectively used, of the estimated 300,000 to 350,000 Jews in German-occupied zones, 85,000 were deported, giving France a death ratio of “approximately 25 percent."

IBM has never denied or accepted the allegations put forth by Black. The company has said documents pertaining to that era in Poland and Germany were destroyed, but also stated that IBM had started losing control of its business in Germany beginning with Hitler's rise to power in 1933.

Just under 50 years later, Kraftwerk’s band members would arrange a factory visit to IBM’s German headquarters in Dusseldorf, around 10 kilometres from the Kling-Klang studio where Computer World was recorded, to find out about the new home computers being developed and draw inspiration for their new album.

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Ralf Hütter and Florian Schneider, the minds behind Kraftwerk’s output, said they were the generation of “no fathers” in Germany - the generation that followed the horrors of the Second World War and the Nazi party’s rise, rule and decline. Naturally this generation was wary of census storage and data capture by a government.

No surprise then, that a German nation living with scars of a past that had seen its population sorted into categories and exterminated would rail against similar storage of details and identification, such as the one proposed in the 1981 census. Plans for that census had been brewing for some years, as computational technology developed and the German state’s battle with left-wing extremists shaped policy. A desire by the conservative government and Chancellor at the time, Helmut Kohl, to initiate the first census in the nation in 10 years saw widespread protests as the population feared a new age of government and corporate surveillance through the collection of its data.

Hütter and Schneider were also wary, and correct, about a rise in corporate dominance in everyday life too, as well as the role it would play in personal data privacy. Our modern, modest attempts to prevent data collection by every company we interact with on every digital store online has become increasingly futile. We have become the emotionless individual computer files Kraftwerk predicted, so much so that our tastes, fashion senses and even behavioural patterns have become predictable.

Hütter told NME in 1981: “Working with computers all the time you become very much aware of how the control thing works and could be done – specially in Germany, where computerization of control organisations is very big. 

“There are stores and societies which control your financial situation so the whole computerization gets more like a 1984 vision. Our idea is to take computers out of context of those control functions and use them creatively in an area where people do not expect to find them.”

Crime, travel/
Communication, entertainment

It was overcast and threatening to rain in Wiesbaden in the early evening of September 5, 1977, and BKA president Horst Herold had just gotten off the phone with one of his officers. Hanns Martin Schleyer, head of the German Employers' Association, and a former SS soldier, had just been kidnapped by the RAF.

Upon hearing the news of Scheleyer’s kidnapping, Herold raced to his PIOS system (People, Institutes, Objects, Things) to input the new information and begin a computerised clue sheet of how to find the perpetrators. This was a new approach to criminal detection - Horst had been inputting data into the PIOS machine for years by this point and had enough information to lay a dragnet - a metaphorical net of data used to hone in on someone’s location -  in the hopes of capturing the criminals.

Herold believed his PIOS machine would herald a new frontier of crime fighting - crime prediction and control. He demanded a reformation in the police service by “scientification” and wished to eliminate the human elements from criminal procedure, and ultimately, from criminal law entirely. His futuristic belief was that criminal proceedings should be “exclusively based on scientifically verifiable, measurable material evidence.”

The new techniques would revolutionise the approach to policing worldwide, using elaborate datasets to try and predict crime before it had even happened. The BKA chief famously said during a meeting with the Bundestag Committee that his new idea of prevention would mean “reaching the crime scene ahead of the criminal.” But his system could not have predicted the events at the end of 1977, events that cost him his job and saw five people dead in the space of 48 hours, events that would come to be known as the ‘German Autumn’.

Following a protracted and controversy-ridden court case, in April 1977 the RAF members in Stammheim prison were finally convicted of a string of crimes, including murder, and sentenced to life in prison. In retaliation, RAF members on the outside would go on to murder Siegfried Buback, the attorney-general of West Germany, who was shot and killed in an ambush near his home. Three months later Jürgen Ponto, the head of Dresdner Bank, was shot and killed in his house in a kidnapping that went wrong, before the kidnapping of Schleyer.

To the RAF, Schleyer was a perfect representation of all that was wrong in Germany as a leading capitalist and example of Nazism enduring in powerful positions. But the group’s plan to use him in a prisoner exchange for those held in Stammheim was doomed to fail - around six hours after the businessman had been abducted the government decided they would not negotiate with terrorists. Not to be deterred, the RAF ramped up the pressure after holding Schleyer captive for more than a month - the group enlisted four members of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) to hijack a plane en route to Frankfurt from Mallorca, carrying 82 passengers.

The hijacking lasted an unfathomable four days, as the plane landed and refuelled in five different countries, with just the co-pilot operating, as the lead pilot had been shot dead by the hijackers. On October 17, 1977, in Mogadishu, Somalia, the PLO members gave the German government a deadline to release the RAF members in Stammheim prison or they would set the plane on fire with the passengers still inside - they had even gone as far as to douse them all in flammable spirits. Meanwhile, a German special forces unit had arrived at the airport to collaborate with the Somalis. An impressive tactical manoeuvre saw the German unit silently climb onto the plane and blow the doors open, explosions elsewhere had distracted the PLO members and separated them from the passengers. The four men were shot and every passenger was saved, as well as the co-pilot. Once Schleyer’s kidnappers learned the plane hijacking had failed, they killed him and left him in the boot of a car. Ironically, Horst’s PIOS system had allegedly identified Schleyer’s location in the days after his kidnapping but a computer glitch meant that it was not acted on.

The final act of the German Autumn came back in those cells at Stammheim prison, where the conversations between RAF members and their lawyers had been recorded. Following the news that the plane hijacking had ultimately been unsuccessful, the imprisoned RAF members committed one final act of rebellion: Baader was found with a headshot wound in his cell, while Raspe and Enslinn had both hanged themselves. Revolutionary activists in Germany, as well as the RAF, maintain these were executions by the state, but the widely accepted theory remains that it was suicide.

Computer world/
Computer world

It might be strange to think that these dark moments and themes contributed to Computer World. The ethereal, light-hearted and ponderous nature of the album suggests something less despondent than emerging state surveillance and widespread murder. Just as Computer World predicted a future of computer-driven soft control by government agencies and enormous corporations, Computer Love, the fifth track on the album, imagines a world in which you might make a “data date” with the help of your computer and a loneliness adjacent to this computer-connected world. The prescience of Kraftwerk strikes again to mirror the modern world we have made for ourselves.

And much like the fears of the computer age advanced in 1981, we face another panic in the rapid development of artificial intelligence technologies. Elections, art, especially music, jobs and public trust are all vulnerable from the threat of this emerging technology. The lesson from Kraftwerk is to keep an eye on who wants to use it.