Florian Schneider

Origins and early life

Florian Schneider was born Florian Schneider-Esleben in Öhningen, on Lake Constance, on 7 April 1947, the son of Paul Schneider-Esleben, one of the leading architects of post-war Germany, and of Evamaria van Diemen-Meyerhof, a writer whose father, Justus Meyerhof, was a Jewish textile manufacturer and sportsman of Düsseldorf; under the Nazi laws his mother was a 'half-Jew', and his father married her in 1946 against the will of his own father, a convinced Nazi.

Work and career

This fiche records that one grandfather, and no more. Trained as a flautist at the Düsseldorf conservatory, he met Ralf Hütter there in 1968, and in 1970 the two founded Kraftwerk and the Kling Klang studio, where the flute gave way to synthesizers, drum machines and vocoders and where a new music was assembled: Autobahn in 1974, twenty-two minutes of the hum of the motorway that became an improbable hit on American radio, then Radio-Activity, Trans-Europe Express in 1977, The Man-Machine in 1978 and Computer World in 1981.

Kraftwerk's clean, repetitive, machine-made pop, performed by four men in identical suits who preferred to be replaced by robots, became the source of synth-pop, techno, electro and hip-hop — Afrika Bambaataa built Planet Rock on Trans-Europe Express — and Schneider, the group's sound engineer and its most silent member, was the designer of its voices.

Later years

He left Kraftwerk in 2008, recorded once more, on the ecological single Stop Plastic Pollution in 2015, and died of cancer in Düsseldorf on 21 April 2020, shortly after his seventy-third birthday.