The autobiography of Wolfgang Flür and how Kraftwerk failed to make use of this uniquely creative and gifted and all-around wonderful individual.

For claiming to have left Kraftwerk behind and moved on, Wolfgang talks of very little else, and for someone claiming not to be bitter he is surprisingly fierce, gets upset over the silliest things, takes hearsay as proof and doesn't check sources, referring instead to his "pixel-perfect" memory. Apparently there are some dead pixels in it -- his grasp of years and numbers is slightly worse than J.K. Rowling's. A year more or less wouldn't matter, if the big points he is trying to make hadn't depended on _his_ chronology, which is significantly at odds with actual history. A couple of examples:

* Wolfgang makes a big point of hearing The Who's "My Generation" at the age of 16. In reality, he was 18 when it was released -- a non-trivial age difference, especially given where and when he heard it.

* Wolfgang is _very_ offended by the poster campaign for _The Mix_. How can his former bandmates be so insensitive? Have they no shame, to portray themselves as robots with artificial arms, when there is a civil war going on in Bosnia where children are getting their arms blown off for real? However, when the single "The Robots" and the album _The Mix_ were released (by which time the press photos of the robots had circulated for several months already), the war in former Yugoslavia hadn't even started in the first place and wouldn't spread to Bosnia for nearly another year.

I don't claim to find Ralf and Florian very sympathetic after some of their actions over the past few years, but Wolfgang doesn't really make a good impression here, as a person or as a writer. The book is rather badly written (or maybe just badly translated), scarcely proofread, full of contradictions and factual mistakes; still, in all its bonkerosity, it is interesting for the serious Kraftwerk fan, as long as you don't take it as Truth. ( )

As a lifelong Kraftwerk fan, this was a must-read. The book proved to be a fascinating insight into the world populated by one of the most secretive and innovative bands in music history. Schneider and Hutter turn out to be far from cold, emotionless robots. ( )