The history of 20th-century music and art holds out few paragons more important than Kraftwerk, the electronic pop group founded in Germany in the 1970s by Florian Schneider and Ralf Hütter. Creative repurposing of rigid technologies, forging new sounds that would insinuate themselves into countless forms of music, positing useful ways of thinking about human/non-human divides—all of these were part of the total work of art that was Kraftwerk, which started as a radical postwar German enterprise and grew into an international pop-culture phenomenon.

While Kraftwerk continues to tour and play innovatory multimedia shows under Hütter’s direction, Schneider died in 2020 at the age of 73. Now, some of his various tools of art are being put up for auction.

Organized by Julien’s Auctions and scheduled for November 19 at the Musicians Hall of Fame & Museum in Nashville (and open for online bidding now), the Florian Schneider Collection Auction features musical equipment including synthesizers, vocoders, and flutes as well as other offerings like a 1964 Volkswagen van and a road bike ridden by Schneider in the video for the Kraftwerk song “Tour de France....