THE IDEA OF GERMAN country music is so absurd it pretty much has to be good, and "Kantrie," as it's known here, is. While their historic contribution to rock music, aside from experimental seventies groups like Can and Kraftwerk, can be summed up with the words Scorpions and Nena, Germans now wile away their hours doing strange and wonderful things with banjos and lap steel guitars. Perhaps it's country's affinity with waltzing and yodeling that gives this undeniably musical yet stereotypically arrhymthic people a leg up. Or perhaps it's the lessons learned from generations of GIs and expats. In any case, Kantrie sounds are hauntingly familiar yet somehow all their own, an alternative country to rival that of American cowboy bohèmes like Will Oldham and Smog.

The roots of Kantrie go back about a decade or so, not to Bavaria (the German equivalent of Texas), but to the seedy waterfront of Hamburg and throughout the industrial badlands of Düsseldorf and environs. The aesthetic was pure DIY, with atonal Johnny Cash cover bands playing one-off gigs for beer and the glory of having stood atop an eight-by-eight-foot provisional stage. The tunes were easy to learn and you could dance to them: No matter how terrible the picking, the grinning always took care of itself. Since execrable German-language trucker anthems had always been part of MOR radio here, it was only a matter of time and effort until enthusiastic fan-promoters could sell the best young country-inspired music to young ironists in their twenties and thirties. Kantrie is no longer confined to living rooms and ramshackle boozers with names like "Rüdiger's Swing Dance Inn." Last week alone, you could hear small-time German acts like COW, Gerry Lee and the Wanted Men, and Hank McCoy on a riverboat on the Rhine, or the bands Tenfold Loadstar and Fink in Berlin's Maria am Ostbahnhof, a club normally reserved for international star DJs and American indie-rock deities.

Those skeptical of the idea of Krauts sawin' fiddles and blowin' harmonicas should get the XXS-Records compilation Land of the Kantrie Giants and be converted. Country is much more diverse than noninitiates realize, and nowhere is the full musical spectrum -- bluegrass, Texas swing, rockabilly, cow-punk, foot-stomping folk, beer-soaked weepers, Ennio Morricone-esque soundtracks, Calexico-inflected Mexicali blues, Neil Youngian barroom trash -- better represented than here. The bands sing in English (except Fink), have no qualms about combining traditional instrumentation with synthesizers, and alternate between originals and unlikely covers of, among others, the Beastie Boys, Johnny Paycheck, the Smiths, and the Dead Kennedys. Original highlights here are Butterscotch's banjo-driven sing-along "Still Wonder Why," Tenfold Loadstar's starkly minimalist ballad "Tracks," and the expat Hank McCoy's "Where Do We Go this Time," a love song of the tragically beautiful Charlie Louvin or Merle Haggard variety. High praise indeed, but the bands deserve the comparison, as even Nashville seems about to recognize. Gerry Lee and the Wanted Men have been booked later this year for the Grand Ole Opry -- a pretty big hootenanny for a band from Köln.

That Kantrie is infinitely better than the dross being churned out in Nashville these days goes without saying, yet it's still perplexing that a bunch of darn furreners should be so successfully mining such a traditionally American vein. The answer is that country, despite the current American emphasis on marketability and the genre's perennial jingoist pose, is essentially a homemade music that, precisely for that reason, remains open to local reinvention from the Muddy Mississippi to the Rotten Rhine, wherever there are heartaches to be sung and whiskey to be spilled on the floor. You can make country, but -- regardless of what Shania Twain's sales figures say -- you can't fake it. Americans can, for a change, learn a down-home lesson from Europe, a lesson in frontier integrity and inspiration.