Kraftwerk co-founder’s electronic gear and ephemera set to go up for auction

In the history of 20th century music and art, there are few more important examples than Kraftwerk, an electronic pop band founded in Germany in the 1970s by Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter. Creatively repurposing rigid technologies, forging new sounds that can be integrated into countless musical forms, proposing useful ways of thinking about the divide between humans and non-humans – all this is part of the overall oeuvre of Kraftwerk, which began as a radical post-war German enterprise and grew into an international pop culture phenomenon.

While Kraftwerk continued to tour and stage innovative multimedia shows under Hütter’s guidance, Schneider died in 2020 at the age of 73. Now, some of his various art tools are up for auction.

The Florian Schneider Collection auction presented by Julien’s Auctions will be held on November 19 at the Musicians Hall of Fame and Museum in Nashville (online bidding is now open) and will include musical equipment such as synthesizers, vocoders and flutes, as well as other lots such as a 1964 Volkswagen van and a road bike ridden by Schneider in the Kraftwerk video for the song “Tour de France.”

Highlights include the EMS Synthi AKS suitcase synthesizer (estimated at $15,000-$20,000), said to be the first synthesizer Kraftwerk acquired in the early 1970s and also used on their 1974 album highway. A flute from the ’60s (est. $8,000 to $10,000) represents Schneider’s time with original Kraftwerk band The Organization and the formative years of Kraftwerk itself, when he electronically manipulated the flute’s sound in search of new timbres and tones. Then there’s the Volkswagen van (est. $15,000 to $20,000), which is part of the fire department’s fleet, as evidenced by the phone on the dash and the rear-facing seats in the back.

While Kraftwerk’s musical influence has been enormous, the band has also attracted attention from the art world, including a memorable retrospective curated by Klaus Biesenbach at the Museum of Modern Art in 2012, which included eight nights of concerts (one for each of the band’s major albums) and an exhibition of related material at MoMA PS1. “They didn’t invent robots for nothing,” Biesenbach said at the time. “They are artists who take away themselves to replace themselves.”

He continues: “Kraftwerk’s art is about the tension between the human condition and technology. It’s about how machines can change human lives.”