Читать книгу Kippenberger - Susanne Kippenberger - Страница 8

Оглавление

CHAPTER ONE

PARENTS AND CHILDHOOD

“He was running away.”

The answer came before I even asked the question: How did it happen that he went and stayed with you when he was so young, just nine years old? His first long trip away from home, going with total strangers all the way from deep in the Ruhr on the western edge of Germany to deep in the Bavarian Forest in the east, near the Czech border—what was that like?

“He couldn’t wait,” she says.

He wasn’t coming to see her—he was leaving where he was.

Our parents and Wiltrud Roser barely knew each other. Our mother had written a letter to the artist just six months earlier, the first of many that would travel from Essen to Cham. “Dear Wiltrud!” she started the letter—to a woman she didn’t know, and didn’t know anything about except that she illustrated beautiful children’s books. All she knew was Waldemar, Roser’s illustrated dog.) “I’m addressing you by your first name because it’s right either way: I don’t know if you’re a Miss Roser or Mrs. Roser, and you’d be offended (actually you probably wouldn’t be, but you might be) if I wrote the wrong one.” Our mother definitely didn’t want that, since she wanted something else from this stranger: a picture. She wanted to surprise our father for Christmas with a family portrait just like the one in Waldemar. He might well have come up with the same idea himself—“that happens to us a lot, that we plan the same surprises for each other”—and if so, Wiltrud should say yes to her and no to him.

Instead of a photograph for Wiltrud to copy, she sent short descriptions:

Dad: broad-shouldered and stocky

Mom: no distinguishing characteristics, like all mothers

Barbara (“Babs”): 11 yrs old, thin, bangs, strawb. blond short hair, freckles & a very critical look

Bettina: 10, strong, long dark blond pigtails, maternal, head usually tilted

Martin (“the Boy”): 8, short hair, lots and lots of freckles

Bine (Sabine): 6, short and stumpy, blocky head like Dad, light blond pigtails & an electric socket in the middle of her face

Little Sanni (Susanne): 4, dark blond pigtails, clever

“Will you do it? It would be great! We are such a crazy and fun family that we would probably give you a ton of material for more children’s books.” Our mother wrote that she had already met many Munich artists in similar fashion and had become friends with them. “I think you’d be a good fit with us too.” Would Wiltrud ever have the chance to come to Essen for a visit?

Wiltrud Roser drew the picture, which still exists, and she came to our house for an artist party. The next morning the two women sat at the breakfast table coming up with plans for everything Wiltrud should do in the big city: plays, museums, and more. And then our mother said she didn’t know what she was going to do, Martin simply refused to go to school anymore. He was sick, too. “Incredibly pale” is how Wiltrud Roser remembers him. He was suffering from what our mother called the proletariat sickness or Ruhr anemia: a sallow, bloodless face. “The sky was yellow in the Ruhr”; the chimneys in Essen still spewed smoke then—fresh-washed clothes were black if you left them hanging on the clothesline for a few hours.

In Bavaria, the sky was blue.

“Why doesn’t he come with me?” Wiltrud Roser said. She had a son, too, just a year younger than Martin, and the school year was almost over anyway.

“Martin, would you like to come home with me?” she asked him when he came into the kitchen.

“When do we leave?” he answered.

So that was that. No more plays, no museums, no shopping trip to the big city—Martin was determined and didn’t give Wiltrud any peace. They left the next day for practically the outermost reaches of the German world, a little town where teachers and students were often transferred as punishment.

Our family as drawn by Wiltrud Roser

The address couldn’t have been more perfect: 1 Spring Street (Frühlingstrasse 1). He liked the old house with all its nooks and crannies, right on the Regen River, with a sawmill out back—a giant, adventure-filled playground. It was a house like ours: cold in temperature but warm in every other way, full of pictures and books, with little wooden figures standing around everywhere, even in the bathroom. Albrecht, the father, was only a distant figure—he worked as a puppeteer in Stuttgart; the aunt was a Chiemsee painter; Wiltrud worked on her picture books; the grandmother took care of the children. Martin did what he would so often do later in life: he got other people to work for him, hiring Wiltrud’s son Sebastian to do his homework. His grades in math and writing improved, though only temporarily—school remained torture for him and for everyone around him. The boys spent a lot of time with Wiltrud in her studio, each one busy with his own picture. One time, “with a fabulous gesture,” Martin swept everything in front of him off the tabletop.

“Martin, what are you doing?!”

“Making room.”

And, she thought, he was right. Other people might have called it naughty. She called it kingly. “He was never bad, just kingly: bossy but generous.”

He sat for her as a model, too, and our mother said that when the book with those drawings came out, he showed it “to everyone, whether they wanted to look at it or not.”

Martin was “terribly easy to take care of,” a darling boy, and Wiltrud, a short woman with short hair, cheerful and sassy and always a straight talker, was certainly right for him. At eighty she can still laugh about the gaudy kitsch in the Cham Catholic church. She has lived in Cham her whole life, in her parents’ house at the edge of a small town, but has few ties with the locals. She just lives there.

She told me that Martin wasn’t homesick, “not at all,” but that he made presents for his sisters the whole time he was there. Martin stayed six weeks; it seemed like months and months to her. And at the end of the stay he went back to Essen just as eagerly as he had left.

The thank-you letter that our mother sent to Wiltrud Roser sounds euphoric: Martin regaled the family with his stories, like the one about Vicar Bear and his cane, until we cried with laughter. “Already on the first morning he danced the polka, around to the right and around to the left, in his long nightshirt, it was a scream. He can sure dance, and paint too!” He’d been painting what he had seen in Bavaria, including Sebastian (“it couldn’t have been any more like him”) and Vicar Bear (“who looks terrifying”). “His stay with you was so good for him, in body and mind and spirit, that I can’t thank you and everyone else in Cham enough.”

Delight over his scholastic progress didn’t last long, in any case. After summer vacation Martin went back to school in Essen-Frillendorf to repeat third grade. Everything was like the old days again, and soon he would be sent off to a boarding school in the Black Forest, and from there to the next boarding school, and so on.

The Rosers were his first “second family,” and he kept in contact with them. Cham was the beginning of his life far away from home. One of his most haunting self-portraits is called Please Don’t Send Home : Martin peers out like a little runaway child, with no home any more, imploring the viewer to take him in because there is no going back. He wanted to move forward, get ahead, achieve something, conquer ever-new territory.

Still, according to his friend Michel Würthle, there was one place among all the many places in his life where he was always happy to return: “Childhood. The family house. Mama and Papa.”

OUR PARENTS

A person doesn’t create himself out of nothing, after all.

—MK

[Did your parents play a part in your personality?] Massive, massive, massive. I have to admit it. A huge part.... Both parents. Both extremes.

—MK

They fell in love with each other through writing. Writing letters.

Actually, they had already known each other for a long time: they were in the same dancing school without really noticing each other. Their parents moved in the same circles in Duisburg. And long before he received letters from her himself, he had read her letters.

It was during the war, in Hungary, and the doctor in his regiment, one Wiechmann, always showed him what she’d written. Wiechmann didn’t know what to make of the dry letters and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting anywhere with her. The young lady just wouldn’t catch fire. Our father gave him good advice but it didn’t help.

Later, after the war was over, our father’s father invited her over to dinner—not without thinking, perhaps, that she might make a good match; he would have known that as a manager at Deutsche Bank. After a stroll in the woods, our father took her to the streetcar: “the only thing I remember was her unusual way of walking. She just galumphed along.” He found it touchingly awkward. And that was that, until he wrote to congratulate her on her recent graduation from medical school, just to be polite. She wrote to thank him for his thanks, “and from that bungled thank-you-no-thank- you ” arose an exchange of letters.

He gently accused her of maybe being too cold to the other man, Wiechmann, and our mother got furious: she had only written to him on the front in the first place out of pity! But then, wounded in his masculinity, this Wiechmann had started insulting her, accusing her of being a “sexless workhorse”—her, Dr. Lore Leverkus, a young doctor who had just started her first job at the Göttingen Clinic for no salary because the paid positions were reserved for the men returning from the war. “I don’t care to answer letters like that.”

The two of them debated the meaning of love and discussed art. She told him about Beethoven concerts she had heard, live or on the radio, and he told her about the pictures he was painting and the classes he was taking. “A ten-page letter two or three times a week,” our father said later, “no one can withstand that.” For his twenty-sixth birthday, March 1, 1947, she typed up their letters, bound them, and gave him the volume, illustrated with the little pictures he used to send her to accompany his words. She wrote as the dedication “You for me and me for you.” And next to the dedication was a bookplate he had drawn for both of them to use: someone sitting in an armchair and reading a newspaper that said “Lore” on one side and “Gerd” on the other.

They called each other “Little Man” and “Little Mouse.” She sent him care packages with oatmeal, bacon, textbooks, ribbons, brushes, and Rilke poems. He, a mining student in Aachen, sent her stockings, and also work: reports to type up and send on to the senior office. He sent her drawings and watercolors, which she tacked to the wall of her room. Whenever he painted, “burning with zeal,” he forgot everything, including the stove he was supposed to keep hot while she cooked for him and did the laundry. Sometimes she read to him while he was painting. Art, he would later say, was what he had really wanted to study, really wanted to do. If only the war hadn’t gotten in the way.

When she was offered a position in Odenwald, she turned it down: “There’s not the slightest intellectual stimulation there, I’d go brain-dead.” She liked to go to concerts, to the theater—a Shakespeare production in a ruined cloister, for instance. She was an enthusiastic reader of what people were reading in those days (Manfred Hausmann, Frank Thiess), and she liked telling him, a “specialist in the field,” her impressions of various art exhibitions in Wiesbaden. She worshipped the Old Masters (Dürer, Grünewald, Bosch) and complained about contemporary artists: “All their works have nothing to say except ‘Me, me, me.’” Within six months, she had revised her opinion and said she recognized genius in modern painting; she didn’t want to “label it as smears of color on the wall any more.”

In one of his early letters, Gerd had told her that he was more afraid of marriage than of the war. But on August 2, 1948, the banker’s son and the factory director’s daughter were married: Gerd, son of Gertie née Oechelhäuser and Hans Kippenberger, and Dr. med. Eleonore “Lorchen” Augusta Elena, daughter of Otto and stepdaughter of his new, third wife Dr. med. Lore Leverkus. Despite taking place in the lean postwar years, it was “a real peacetime wedding,” thanks to various bartered items (coal for wine, for example), care packages, cured meats from the black market, and ration cards contributed by all the guests. There had been several small engagement parties rather than one big party, and now the wedding itself was celebrated in style for three days: guests marched through the village singing miners’ songs on the first night, carousing until nine the next morning; the written schedule for the second day said “Sleep late!”; finally came the ceremonies on the third day, first at the registry office and then in the church. After lunch on the third day, according to the program: “Catch your breath,” then coffee, and finally dancing.

Lore Leverkus and Gerd Kippenberger (in miner’s tunic) on their wedding day, 1948

The groom himself had illustrated the “wedding newspaper” that was handed out to all the guests, and had written most of the poems in it as well. Like so many other family occasions to come, this festive day was recorded for posterity: “Mother-in-law Lore greeted the guests at the front door in her slip. Father-in-law Abba stood in the bedroom in his long underwear, unashamed, while Little Mouse had a wreath pinned up in her hair. Meanwhile little female cousins of every shape and size shuttled back and forth through the house, being either fed or put to work. The sexton didn’t want to let us into the church until we paid the marriage fee.”

Their honeymoon was in the Bergisches Land: hiking in the mountains. He shoved rocks he found geologically interesting into her backpack, and she secretly took them out again and dropped them. Almost as soon as they got home—by boat to Düsseldorf and from there by streetcar—he was off again, for a month in England with his fellow students. She had a job by then with a country doctor, near Aachen, and she supported her husband while he was in school.

DAD

He was born on March 1, 1921, the oldest of four brothers, so in 1939 he had just graduated high school and finished his time in the national labor service. He began his hands-on training in the mines: “I had chosen the career of the old Siegerland families: coal miner. But then, of course, came the war.”

Later, when he would tell stories about the war years, they were almost always comic. He was determined to see the beautiful side of things and refused to let even a war quash his worldview. His memoirs of the time read like stories of adventure tourism: when he transferred in Berlin on the way to Poland as an eighteen-year-old soldier, for example, he felt “a tingly sensation from being abroad, not knowing what to expect.” In Poland, he went to bars and enthused about the Masurian lake country; in France, he visited Joan of Arc’s birthplace, flirted with a little French girl from Dijon, came to love Camembert, climbed the church tower in Amiens, and held hands with a girl named Adrienne in Nahours, drinking a glass of wine with her father. He named his horse in Pommern “Quo Vadis” and used him to reenact scenes from Karl May, the beloved German writer of American-style Western novels. In Russia he jumped naked into the icy water. Then things got unpleasant. “We woke up from the dream of playing at war into the reality. Commands, orders, standstills, eyes left, eyes right, dismissed.”

The CV that he later wrote up for an exhibition makes it sound as though the only thing he did during the whole war was art: diary sketches, landscape pictures, illustrations; invented scenes, real events, horses, people, caricatures, village idylls, Hungarian scenes, transferring ordnance maps onto three-dimensional sand-table models, and whittling with a pocketknife while a prisoner between May and July 1945.

He would later write to his young fiancée that he was rarely in a bad mood. “My recipe for the war is: whistle a tune whenever you get sad.” He must have had a lot of opportunities to whistle. There was a period when no one wanted to be in the same regiment as him because he was always the only surviving soldier from his last regiment.

He never spoke of the horrors—only dreamed about them. Well into the 1950s he would scream in his sleep at night, according to our mother. Later, in a letter to us children, he would write that he was not allowed to yell at the guys in the mine, even when he got angry at them: “If I did, they’d report me for rudeness, which they call bad personnel management now and really frown on. Nowadays they want only good personnel management. I can understand that—good personnel management is actually a beautiful thing. When I was still a soldier, I always craved some decent personnel management, but it wasn’t in fashion at the time. On the contrary. We had to yell and scream if we wanted to impress our superiors—whoever screamed the loudest was automatically the best. You can see from this how attitudes change over time.”

After a few months in an American prisoner-of-war camp, he returned home and started to study mining in Aachen. It was a booming industry after the war: the mines smoked and reeked, and “everyone was clamoring for coal,” as he wrote in 1950. The miners were the heroes of the postwar period—they provided warmth for the freezing Germans—and they were thanked with the annual Ruhr theater festival in Recklinghausen. Our parents would see many plays there over the years.

It was backbreaking work under ground: dirty, hot, and dangerous. “The mine shaft is the dairy cow of the place,” he wrote about his first workplace in Altenbögge, “except that it’s sometimes not quite as docile.” He would often experience just how hard it was to control this wild cow. “Sometimes I feel like the annoyances never stop.” There were explosions in the pit, or water would flood in; he often had to spend all night in the mine. But the worst was bringing dead bodies up out of the pit. He attended many funerals. Once, when Martin wrote from boarding school for our father’s birthday, he wished him three cheers: “once for luck in the mine, once for a very happy day, and third, most important, that you stay healthy.”

“The Mine,” Gerd Kippenberger

Still, maybe because of the danger, he found the work fascinating. “It’s important to be possessed in a way by your job.” Our father, as a young man, discovered in mining “all the oppositions and dualities of life itself”: cruelty and solidarity, friendship and backstabbing, crudity and humor, tradition and innovation. At a time when the Ruhr region was officially ashamed of being the Ruhr (it would later call itself “Rustia,” punning on “Russia,” in a self-deprecating publicity campaign that was heavily criticized), he saw the beauty in the ugliness: the austerity of the industrial architecture, the coexistence of shafthead frames and meadows, and especially the people—the workers’ direct and natural ways, their warmth and humor and pride. In the Ruhr region, he would later write, he, the Siegerlander, found his second homeland.

He had barely started his first job, in Dortmund, when our oldest sister, Babs, was born: July 28, 1950. “Barbara” was what most miners named their firstborn daughters, after their patron saint.

Mining turned out to be a feudal world. “We live on Mine Street, the royal road of Altenbögge, so to speak,” our father recorded. “The senior officials—the highest caste in the place—live there, so we are only tolerated and suffered.” But soon he himself belonged to that highest caste: he was made director of the Katharina Elisabeth Mine in Essen-Frillendorf in 1958 and given a giant house as a residence, with a huge garden, tended by gardeners. Sometimes our father had a chauffeur, Uncle Duvendach, who took trips with us.

But no sooner had he arrived in Essen than the great crisis in the mining industry began, as did worrying, anxiety, and fear for his job. “Now we need to get tough,” he wrote in September 1963 to friends in Munich. “The coal crisis continues, and whoever doesn’t go along (with the crisis) gets fired. Whoever fires the most people is the champion marksman.” His mine was shut down too; he was transferred to a desk job and eventually let go. In September 1972, just back from vacation, he got the news: “early retirement,” at fifty-one. A few months later, just days before Christmas, he had a heart attack. Only after several frustrating attempts to secure a foothold in the construction industry—likewise in crisis—did he find another position: as a manager at a plastic tubing company in Mülheim.

His fascination with mining and its traditions only grew in this period. He continued to do research, reading books on mining’s history and practice in other countries. When he died, he was buried in his miner’s tunic, meant for special occasions—the same one he had married our mother in.

He could be crude as well as charming and tended to find the shortest path from one social blunder to the next. He loved provocation and making fun of people. Once, introducing our sister Bine’s boyfriend—a mining engineer like him—to some colleagues in Aachen, he did not say the young man’s name, which he had probably already forgotten. He said, “Here’s the kid who wants to be my son-in-law.” It was a test, and Andreas passed it. Our father said what he thought, loud and clear, and also what he knew: for example, that there were safety problems down in the mine because the wooden supports for the shaft, from a company executive’s forest, were rotten. That got him into a lot of trouble. Still, he didn’t go as far as his son would later; he also paid court to his superiors. As he wrote to our mother once: “I think Mrs. Wussow [a friend] is right after all: I’m a revolutionary, but only in secret—someone who never makes the move.”

He was an exotic species in a conservative world, along with his whole family and their lifestyle. A “rare bird,” as they say. Our parents’ friend Ulla Hurck said that “he made the sober mining folks uneasy—he was a shock for them.” In a children’s story that he wrote for us, where he is recognizably the father, he is the only one not to laugh at the child who wanted a skating rink in the middle of summer. “He knew how much it hurt to be laughed at.”

“Diagram,” Gerd Kippenberger, 1965

“If he had not been the company director at the Katharina Mines, he would certainly have been a painter,” a newspaper wrote in an article about our father’s exhibition at the House of the Open Door in Frillendorf in 1960, one of the many exhibitions that he organized himself as a member of the artists’ society. He showed landscapes and city views, and his art, according to the newspaper critic, was “a beautiful, free expression of modern creativity.”

He usually painted on vacation and signed his pictures “kip.” But he didn’t need a canvas to make art. In the 1960s, the era of Pop Art, he made constructions from flotsam and jetsam he found on the beach, painted picture books for his grandchildren, built brightly colored wooden cities, and threw parties. He laid out gardens, first in Frillendorf and then, in his second life (for there would be another wife and more children), in Marl. There he bought an allotment, where he built hills, a frog pond, and a trellis for grapevines. He planted blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries. He named the path that the bushes were on “Blackcurrant Way” and placed his wooden figures everywhere as a special kind of scarecrow: The Passionate Lover, The Blue Angel, St. Francis of Assisi, The Market Lady with Sagging Breasts.

He wrote books about his travels, our house, the neighbors, parties, the Siegerland area, and his early years. The worse the crisis in the mining industry became, the more he clung to his private life. The stories were not invented, but he did fictionalize the truth, exaggerating, distorting, and embellishing. His brother called him a “magical realist.” The world was a stage in his books, and life was a play, or more specifically, a farce, with everything more comic than it actually was. He referred to himself in the third person, as “Father”; his wife was “Mother.” In one of his little books, Hike, 1963, about a walk he took with our mother and the two oldest children, he gave the “cast” at the beginning and ended with “The End.” He was everything in this theater—director, writer, star, and cameraman—except the audience. The camera was always there. Whenever we left the house, he hung the “photey” around his neck and over a belly that slowly grew fatter with the postwar economic recovery. He had no interest in taking snapshots, though—he directed us: behind this window, on that bridge, between those columns. We sisters hated it, but Martin loved it. He later turned one of these photos, where we’re standing with raised arms on the front steps of our great-grandparents’ little manor house, into a work of art, a postcard with the title “Hey, hey, hey, here are the Monkeys.”

On the front steps of our great-grandparents’ manor house in Siegen-Weidenau: Martin, Barbara, Sabine, Susanne, Bettina (bottom to top). Photo by our father, which Martin turn into a postcard in 1985: “Hey, hey, hey, here are the Monkeys.”

Every big party was planned from beginning to end, with a written program. The guests had to sing on cue. Since his first talk as a student, he had loved to give speeches entirely improvised—“I talked myself into such a state that everyone there listened, entranced.” He did not need a podium to be seen, of course, or a microphone to be heard: like all the men in his family, he had an impressive voice. It grew even stronger as he became hard of hearing, like many men in his profession—it often got so loud down in the mine that you had to scream to be heard.

To make completely sure that he would get speeches for his own birthday, he assigned them himself, along with suggested topics. Our instructions, printed in the invitation, were “Our father as he really is. Only my four daughters are qualified to speak, and they are requested to please agree on the content beforehand and on who should deliver the address.” The only one of his children who could have performed the task without any difficulty was Martin, but he was in Brazil at the time. Our protests meant nothing to him—he just threatened to write the speech himself. So he got what he wanted: our father as he really was.

Afterward his cousin came up to us with a serious face and a sepulchral voice: someday we would be sorry we had given such a speech. But our father—who knew he had skin cancer and not long to live—had enjoyed himself immensely.

Not even at the very end, after seven years of fierce struggle against the cancer that finally defeated him, did he give up the reins. Our father staged his own funeral. In the weeks before his death, when he could barely hold a pen any more and his handwriting was growing more and more shaky, he wrote out his stage directions: whom we should invite (and whom we should not); where the funeral meal should under no circumstances take place; that a bagpiper should play; that he should lie in state in his miner’s tunic; and that his coffin should have eight handles, one for each child and stepchild. He got everything he wanted, and speeches to his taste, too.

Indecisiveness irritated him. “I’m not the type to hesitate for a long time,” he wrote as a young man, before he was our father. Once, when he heard that his semester would begin later than expected, he got on the next train, stayed with his grandmother in Siegen, and rode from one mine to the next, meeting geologists and getting new ideas. When our mother once again didn’t order anything to drink at a restaurant in Munich, our father later wrote, “Either she wasn’t thirsty, or she was thirsty but didn’t know what to do about it.” Both possibilities were equally incomprehensible to him. He liked to drink—beer, wine, liquor—this last with the guys from the mine, usually. He sometimes came home a little drunk and smelling of cigarette smoke.

Even though he was an engineer, he understood nothing about technology in everyday life. Maybe he didn’t want to understand. Whenever something needed fixing, the clever neighbors had to help out; when they weren’t around—if the camera broke on vacation or the film projector wasn’t working on Christmas—a major marital crisis ensued. He lacked both the calm and the patience to fix things. When it was time for us to set out, whether for the day or for six weeks, he got in the car and leaned on the horn, and everyone had to be ready. It didn’t matter that our mother still had meals to pack, shoelaces to tie, diapers to change, or suitcases to shut—when he was determined, he was determined, and he charged ahead deaf and blind, as he himself said, unwilling to even hear whatever the various members of the family wanted or were whining about. Otherwise, he knew he would never reach his goal. And he wanted to.

When he was diagnosed with skin cancer, he was determined to live, even if it meant having an operation every week. He managed a few years more than the doctors and the statistics had allotted him. “Onward and upward!” he scribbled in a shaky hand six months before his death, adding a stick figure climbing up a flight of stairs and sinking into an armchair. He was held up as a model patient in the hospital and even gave a lecture about how to do it: how to live your life anyway.

He always moved forward, never backward, except in his memories, which were as important to him as new experiences. He preserved these memories in little books, usually illustrated and always self-published—memories of his mother, whose name he bore (she was Gertie); of his childhood, his hometown, family celebrations; of Pastor Noa, who took his own life under the Nazis. He made the most beautiful of his books out of several hundred family letters. It’s not that he lived in the past, but that for him the past was the foundation of everything that came in the present. “Remember,” he told me to give me courage the night before my university exams, “you’re a Kippenberger!” He meant it not as a threat or a warning, but casually and naturally: nothing bad can happen to one of us! He was as proud to be a Kippenberger as he was to be a pigheaded Siegerlander, or a miner, or a father of five (and later eight) children. “One Family One Line,” Martin inscribed on our father’s gravestone. This is the attitude we grew up with.

Always forward, no backtracking: that was the ironclad rule of all our walks and travels. Never walk the same road twice. On the way back, we had to seek out another path, no matter how complicated or hard it was to find, or whether we would get lost. He always ran ahead, even on vacation. How was he supposed to notice when our mother clumsily stumbled and fell in Barcelona? “The husband, three steps ahead as usual, didn’t even turn around.” Courteous Spaniards helped her to her feet.

He rarely found downtime, as he put it, for reading—sometimes a thriller, but usually not even that. “You called it restlessness in my blood,” he wrote our mother once. She was someone who, wherever she went, looked for a place to sit and read a book, while his gaze was always directed out at the landscape or the sunset. “There’s probably some truth in that. Maybe I’m only running away from myself. Sometimes life is only a kind of running away, after all.”

He enjoyed life, and he loved to eat—preferably big, hearty meals. Every Saturday at our house there was thick, rich soup—split pea, lentil, vegetable—because he liked it so much. After his in-laws served him half a piece of meat and counted out the potatoes for lunch, he avoided going back. He also liked to cook, for guests and on weekends, on vacation and out camping. He cooked the same way he painted: improvising, without recipes and definitely not measuring cups. And as with his painting, writing, and celebrating, it had to be big. For him, cooking was also art, though not a pure art for art’s sake—the important thing was the eating, in as large a group as possible, along with wine and conversation.

“Father Kip: Leader of the Family. Mother Kip: His wife and mother of five children.” So ran their descriptions in the dramatis personae of his book Hike, 1963. Day-to-day matters and child rearing were her responsibility. During their years in Essen he left the house at seven in the morning, came home for lunch, lay down for fifteen minutes (during which there had to be absolute silence in the house), then drank an enormous cup of tea (he allowed himself coffee only on vacation: “it gets me too excited”) and left until seven at night.

He was responsible for weekends, and sunshine. Monday through Friday our mother hauled groceries home from the co-op in two giant bags, food for a large family plus guests and the help. On Saturday our father went to the market, chitchatted with the market women, tasted the cheese, bought too much of everything (and not necessarily what we needed), and was our maître de plaisir for the rest of the weekend. On Sunday our mother often lay in bed with a migraine, and was finally left in peace while the rest of us took a day trip.

He was constantly getting ideas. That’s when our mother got scared. Ideas meant that he would suddenly turn everything upside down, redecorate the house, maybe buy some exotic birds. Just three years after we moved into the house in Essen, when our mother had taken us children away on vacation, he wrote to her that he had “girded his loins and decided to thoroughly change some things in our house (no half measures). First the dining room. Out with the piano. We found a good place for it in the large children’s room (everything with Heia’s agreement). The other junk is being spread around the house too. Now the furniture will stand clean and pure in the pared-down room. Some of the pictures were already taken down off the walls—now the rest. Everything has to be rethought from its foundations.”

He had found new lighting for the dining room, “five simple, clear plastic tubes in a row to emphasize the length of the table and the shape of the room.” Plus it was finally bright enough: “I can’t stand this gloom any longer.” He was looking for a carpet to tie the room together: “Colorful, but strictly vertical stripes to emphasize the lines, you know, not scitter-scatter everywhere,” he told the carpet dealer.

Maybe his family was another of his “ideas.” He liked the family best when it was gathered around a long table, as multitudinous and loud as possible. He sat at the head of the table, of course. We called him “Papa,” but he usually signed his letters “Your Father.” And then he retreated. First he would go to the wooden loft, two comfortable rooms, that he had built above the garage in the garden and named “Father’s Peace.” Soon he started sleeping there, too. Then he slipped even farther away, to the apartment in Marl that our mother had bought for them to share in their old age. He seemed to grow younger: he let his muttonchops and beard grow long, adopted a Caesar haircut, traded in his old Opel Captain (the biggest family sedan available at the time) for a small, sporty Opel two-door, and took a vacation, alone for the first time, to Greece, to try to find himself among the men’s-only monasteries.

He had, as he put it himself, a weakness for the romantic. And for women. As was already printed in their wedding newspaper, “From Siegerlan’ / He’s a ladies man / And whoever sees him can understand / He’s someone no girl can withstand! / When Gerd rolls his rrrr ’s all full of charm / Even the coldest heart gets warm.”

He met Petra Biggemann in 1968, at a union dance, and married her in 1971. She already had two young sons, Jochen and Claus, and a third arrived in 1973: Moritz. When he told Martin the news, Martin immediately asked to be named the godfather. And he was.

MOM

Born February 11, 1922, she was an Aquarius and so, in her words, prone to creative flights of fancy but without a trace of ambition. And incapable of logical thought: “The Aquarius thinks in zigzags.”

She studied medicine during the war, in Frankfurt, Freiburg, and Göttingen. During vacations she had to perform her national labor service, first in a factory and later in a military hospital. Our parents were barely engaged when she started imagining their future life with children, calling him “Pappes,” and enthusing about the little Hansie and little Conrad they were going to have soon. “It can be a Barbara, too,” he would throw in. She didn’t want one child—she wanted lots of children. She couldn’t wait to be a mother.

She was eight years old when her mother, Paula Leverkus, died at thirty-four. Paula had helped take care of her husband’s factory workers as a nurse and had caught tuberculosis. Our mother had nothing except a few vague memories of her, a few photographs and letters; she didn’t miss her mother, she would later say, since she never knew what it was like to have one.

She was not like other mothers. She couldn’t cook, except spaghetti and noodle casseroles. She never buttered our toast. We had to pack our own knapsacks, and when we fell she would just tell us, “Go put some iodine on it.” She was definitely not one of those mothers who constantly wipe their children’s snotty noses and pull up their socks. Our underwear peeked out from under our clothes. She never fretted when we started to go off on our own, and we never had to call home to say we had arrived safely; she knew we would. Bad news, she liked to say, comes anyway, and soon enough. Her child rearing methods were laissez-faire, although she could be strict and sometimes even a bit hysterical. All three of them were drama queens: father, mother, and son.

Lore Kippenberger in the mid-1970s

Giving presents was her passion; organization was not her strong suit. She was constantly looking for her glasses, or buying Christmas presents in summer and hiding them so well that she never found them again. Cleaning was a nightmare for her and when, after a long vacation, she finally had to do it, she gave us a few coins, if we were lucky, and sent us off to the vending machines so that she could take out her bad mood on the vacuum cleaner instead of on us. In day-to-day life, keeping house oppressed her: we didn’t help out enough and were too messy. “If I was your cleaning lady, I would have given notice a long time ago,” she said once.

She liked to quote the English saying “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.” For one thing, she felt that cleaning—even more than cooking—was a thankless task, the results of which were obliterated swiftly and unremarked, as though it had never happened. Secondly, she felt that “maintaining cleanliness and order, if you put too much time and care into it, works against the peace and happiness of the household.” So she did what absolutely had to be done, and that was more than enough. Even the laundry, which she had to haul out to dry in the yard or on the roof, would have been enough, but then there was also shopping, helping with homework, and battling our teachers.

In the only year when all five of us children passed all of our classes and moved up a grade, our father gave her a large brooch with our names on the back as a “Maternal Order of Moving Grades.” He knew she had earned it. “Tell me the truth,” she said to her friend Christel Hassis once, “are we all actually idiots, since our children do so badly? I always thought we were the crème de la crème .”

She gave us names with an eye to our future, names that could be pronounced easily in other languages and which would go well with titles of nobility. That said, she didn’t raise her daughters just to get married—we should have careers first. And driver’s licenses (the only one of her children who never got one was Martin). She cared more that her first son-in-law, Lars, was “a nice boy” than whether or not he had a successful career.

She wore her hair permed—sometimes even wigs, when there wasn’t enough time for visits to the hairdresser—and never left the house without lipstick and pearls. Not real pearls, of course, and she especially liked that they were fake. Thanks to her high-class background and way of carrying herself, she thought, no one would ever suspect it.

After bearing five children, she had lost her slender figure and was constantly on a diet. She liked to moan and groan that she had only to eat half a praline to gain three pounds. In fact, she had probably eaten half the box, after a day of starving herself. She usually wore big dresses, brightly colored and patterned; Marimekko was her favorite brand. Her glasses and rings were large, too, and later so were her hats. Only her shoes were flat and practical.

She could lie and read in bed for hours, or in the sun on the beach for weeks. On the bookshelves was literature that hadn’t been available under the Nazis, in the early series of inexpensive paperbacks published by rororo : Fallada, Hemingway, C. W. Ceram, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Roald Dahl, Siegfried Lenz, Christa Wolf, Marie Luise Kaschnitz. She devoured them. When she was finished, the book would be loaned to a friend, with a letter full of commentary. She was a critical reader: not even Goethe and Schiller were safe: “Schiller’s Don Carlos is also utterly out-of-date. . . . What bombastic nonsense!” She started an imaginary correspondence with Goethe, among other things suggesting improvements to certain lines of verse that, in her opinion, fell short of the mark.

Then her husband met Petra Biggemann and her marriage fell apart. She died her first death then, she told a friend, and mourned the love of her life. The big, loud house soon grew even quiet and emptier: Tina left to become a midwife, and Martin spent more time in bars than at home.

For decades her main occupation had been wife and mother, and now she was a divorcée. A rarity in the late sixties, especially in her circle: I was the only child in my class whose parents were divorced. She was forced to face the fact that the society she lived in was a kind of Noah’s Ark: “Entrance permitted only in pairs!” Single women were not invited anywhere because they would ruin the even number of seats at the table.

She missed her old social life. Our sister Tina took a vacation to Wales once. Our mother had been to Wales too in her day. When Tina wrote home, she asked, “How many people did you meet here?! Everyone seems to know you.” People meant more to her than things, our father thought: “You can talk to people, you can write to them, they let you give them things when you have too much. The danger is just that you give away too much of yourself.” She made people laugh and made herself laugh, too, until tears ran down her face, especially with her female friends.

As a child she had been raised as her brothers’ equal. There was no question that she would go to a real academic high school, not some girls’ school home-ec nonsense. Thirty years later, she learned that the world was not as emancipated as she had thought. But she still had her family: she never broke off contact with her in-laws or with our father. She even took care of his new sons sometimes.

Then, twice, she almost really died. After a hysterectomy she had an embolism, and shortly afterward she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She took it with gallows humor, writing to Wiltrud Roser in high style, with an allusion to Schiller no less: “Grant me my wish to be your third confederate! On Tuesday I am having my right breast removed. Who would have thought! No longer full-bosomed—now half-bosomed. Warmest wishes, Your Lore.” On her New Year’s card, for which Martin drew an apocalyptic picture, she printed as a motto the Goethe quote “ Allen Gewalten zum Trozt sich erhalten” (Despite all the violent forces against us, we will overcome).

Despite everything, she flourished again in the years after her divorce. By the standards of the time, she was an old woman. When she was forty-two, the photographer in a Munich photo studio told her she had so many wrinkles that there was no point in retouching the photo; besides, it would be too expensive. Our mother put a big hat on her head and sailed out into the world. “The older my mother got,” Martin later said in an interview, “the more beautiful she became. She had no womb and no breasts left but grew more and more beautiful, free, and open. More open. She got so much older, and learned that she had cancer, and then suddenly: Pow! Everything opened up.... She would say, ‘Come on, kids, let’s go to Paris! And no squabbling about your inheritance!’”

Having left her career almost twenty years before, she started working again, as a doctor in the Gelsenkirchen public health department, and liked it very much. For years she had not driven a car—the husband was always in the driver’s seat back then—but now she bought herself a Citroen 2CV, a car that at the time was driven mostly by college students. Not that she shared all their views—free love didn’t interest her in the least, she categorically opposed the pill, and she often gave lectures condemning drugs after Martin started taking them. It was just that she liked the little Deux Chevaux, and it was cheap.

Change-of-address card: “Mother Kippage and Her Children” (MK, 1971)

What was left of the family moved out of the big house into a new duplex apartment she set up. Its great luxury: floorboard heating. No more cold feet ever again!

Martin drew the change-of-address card himself and called it “Mother Kippage and Her Children,” a reference to Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. He drew himself sprawled out in an armchair, grinning and exhausted, with long hair, and our mother in a large hat, smoking a cigarette. She had started smoking, or puffing, to be exact—she never inhaled her Lord Extras.

From our guestbook in Zandvoort, the Netherlands

“Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes the sadness easier,” she told a friend after she inherited money. Until then she had lived frugally, which was how she was raised and what she was used to from the war and the early postwar years. Nothing was ever thrown away, whether it was used wrapping paper, old food, or even moldy bread; as a teenager, she wore her long-dead mother’s clothes, retailored; her father wore the coats of his brother who had fallen in WWI. We children had to share everything too: clothes, knapsacks, first-day-of-school candies. Martin was lucky: as the only boy, he had lederhosen of his own. Our mother adored shopping, but, as our father wrote, “She could only get really excited about affordable things.”

Babs said, “It’s good to know that in the end she finally took taxis, stayed in good hotels, and wasn’t addicted to shopping only at clearance sales. Any extra money she took in was frittered away within the family, at the city’s better restaurants.” This extra income was from the “Prostitute Control Board,” where she filled in for a colleague. She loved it and soon knew all the women who came for checkups every week, including a grandmother. She liked talking to them, and then she again had stories to tell us. She certainly liked the prostitutes more than the teachers she had to deal with at the public health department.

Finally, she rediscovered her Spanish blood—allegedly slightly blue as well. She had always been proud of it and did in fact look slightly Latin: tall, with black hair and long, thin fingers. As early as 1954, the first time she crossed the Pyrenees, she no sooner caught sight of the customs officials than she fell under the spell of Spain’s beauty, and that of its men, especially the “bold and elegant” men who fought the bulls in the ring. She, who usually kept the peace by doing whatever our father wanted, could not get enough of the bullfight and her Spanish blood surged so powerfully that at the end of the fight she almost threw her purse into the ring like the Spanish women. Only her German frugality held her back. Of all her ancestors, her favorite was Don Antonio, a nobleman who, it was said, had been forced to immigrate to Venezuela after a duel. “He was an adventurer.” That was exactly why our mother loved him. “Everything that we possess of charm and generosity, our inborn kindness, that ‘certain something’—it all comes from Don Antonio,” she wrote. After the divorce she learned Spanish, in Malaga and at the Berlitz school in Essen; during breaks she would step out for a coffee and chat with the bums. When she traveled to Andalusia with Babs on a cheap package holiday, “she insisted on going to flamenco and bullfights and shouted Olé! with the Spaniards.” Martin drew her in this role once, dancing flamenco-style on the table, with OOLEE OOLEE next to her. It was New Year’s Eve, 1974.

By then she had long since had what Virginia Woolf wanted all women to have: a room of her own where she could write. After the war, she had traded her accordion for a typewriter, on which she would write her long letters. The mailman mattered more to her than the milkman.

Before long she was composing not only letters but humorous little articles, about, for example, “our beloved dust,” or Tupperware parties, “happenings,” visitors, teachers. Always, frugal as she was, on scrap paper: the back of junk mail, invitations, day planners, and discarded drafts. She wrote about the comic side of our life, for the Doctor’s Paper, the German Sunday Magazine, the Christian Friendly Encounter : “The words just flow from my pen, even if it’s all just mental masturbation.”

One evening in 1974, she appeared at an event of the National Association of Writer-Doctors in Göttingen. After a Beethoven performance, poems were recited, philosophical disquisitions held on “the significance of the pause,” and reflections aired on “solitude.” Then our mother came onstage to present her piece: “Daddy Dummy.” She knew that everything she experienced could be turned into a story, and that nothing was ever so bad that it couldn’t sound hilarious on paper later.

She liked that no one could boss her around. Once, at an event for the Social Democratic Party “on the position of women in the modern world,” when she expressed her own opinion and was then accused by a party member of being a traitor, she said, “That’s what I want to be. I’m neither ‘us’ nor ‘them,’ I want to say what I think.” She never wanted to subordinate herself to a party and its pragmatic electoral politics. “What’s the use of working and struggling to emancipate myself from a husband just to dance to other men’s tunes? They’re probably less intelligent than he was, and I don’t even love them enough to forgive them when they make me mad.”

All of which is not to say that she never sought others’ approval. Even her advisor’s praise of her dissertation made her happy: “What author would not be delighted at such a response to his or her first work?” She was livid when a story of hers wasn’t printed, and was proud when Brigitte, Germany’s largest women’s magazine, solicited a piece from her: “So now I’ve come far enough that they want something from me, not the other way around!”

Soon she started to dream of becoming famous. In 1968, having given herself the assignment to write a book that year, she traveled to Hamburg for the twentieth anniversary of the Lutheran Sunday Magazine, “to put myself out there.” She drank champagne to boost her spirits and fortify her self-confidence, and met accomplished writers like Ernst von Salomon and Isabella Nadolny. She made an impression, and not only because she was one of fifteen women among the two hundred guests: “I may not be so impressive by nature, and not a famous writer, but I put a wagon wheel of a hat on my head, and it worked like it always does.” A few hours later, she took the train back to reality: “At home I was met with the news that Sanni had thrown up, Bettina had fainted, and the boy had gotten into trouble.” Now she didn’t want any more children. “From now on I will give birth only artistically.”

She also wrote about her cancer, which caused quite an uproar. That wasn’t done at the time—you were supposed to “bear it stoically,” as the death notice would always say.

Like our father, she planned her own funeral: compiled an address list for the guests, warned us to get the cheapest coffin and not fall for any scams, since after all it would just be burned anyway, and asked to be decked with carnations, her favorite flower.

She was at the threshold of a new life phase. Her two youngest children were about to leave home—Bine was going to be a medical assistant in Munich and I was off to university in Tübingen—and she was dividing her duplex apartment to rent out a floor. The apartment was full of contractors when the call came: the accident happened during lunch hour, while our mother was coming home from the health department. In his book Café Central, Martin would write about how “his mother made the transition from living mother to dead mother (a truck overloaded with EuroPallets took a curve too fast and lost some of its freight, which caused my mother’s death) (so she didn’t have to die a slow and painful death of cancer).” She died a week later without regaining consciousness, in 1976, at age fifty-four. She was buried in Wiesbaden, where she was born, in the Leverkus family grave.

Essen-Frillendorf (Gerd Kippenberger);

bottom center: Number 86, our house

ESSEN-FRILLENDORF

We lived in Essen-Frillendorf. After our father was made director of the mine, he moved us from Dortmund into the heart of the Ruhr, right next to mines and brickworks, where we grew up among miners and laborers.

Our parents loved Anton the pitman and his curt sayings, and laughed at Jürgen von Manger, who didn’t even come from the Ruhr region (like them). The people’s warmth and humor, their self-confidence, ease, and readiness to help, shaped all of us. Here you didn’t make a big to-do, you just did what needed doing. People were strong characters, open and very direct, always ready to laugh at themselves. No one took themselves so terribly seriously. They drank beer, told stories, made fun of each other, and accepted people as they were, faults and all. They teased with affection.

The Kippenberger family (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)

Frillendorf was a real village, with everything that entails: candy kiosk, cemetery, public primary school, village idiot, and church. But it was a village in the middle of the city, only three streetcar stops from the center of Essen. Farmer Schmidt had his farmstead right near us, and large fields lay alongside the streets.

A Mrs. Böhler watched over the entrance to the yard and the alley of chestnut trees that led to our house, which was at the end of a cul-de-sac. Mr. Böhler only ever appeared in the background, in his undershirt. She put her pillow in the window, rested her heavy breasts on it, and looked out at everyone, sending curses after them. There was hardly any television in those days—only three stations for a couple of hours a day—and what we had to offer was apparently more interesting to her. She shows up several times in Martin’s books.

“St. Nicholas at the Kippenberger’s’” (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)

Our parents had moved often since the start of their marriage, several times in and around Dortmund during the previous few years. All five of us children were born in Dortmund and the apartments got bigger with the increasing number of children. But only now, in 1958, did they move into a house where they could really stretch out—a stage on which to perform their life. It was a paradise for us children. “A crazy house at the end of a cul-de-sac” is how the local newspaper described 86 Auf der Litten in an article about Martin when he showed his work for the first time, at eighteen years old. “The rooms and studios are stuffed full of pictures, posters, and objects. On the stairs, an outer-space hotel made of radiator parts that Martin’s father put together. The chaos is welcoming, clean, and cozy. And when the sunlight plays across the garden with its naive stone sculptures of horses and cowboys, it is almost possible to believe in an ideal world again.”

Or, as our mother once wrote, more soberly, “We lived in a huge house with countless rooms and just as many side rooms, nooks, and crannies. It was a nightmare for cleaning ladies—almost every time a candidate interviewed, she turned around and left. A paradise, but with its flaws: it never warmed up past sixty-three degrees, because the old heating system couldn’t manage anything higher; mice would run around in the bedrooms every now and then.”

The Kippenbergers in Essen-Frillendorf, 1961: Bettina, Martin, Susanne, Lore, Barbara, Gerd, Sabine (l. to r.)

There were always children running around, with bows untied and underpants slipping down—no one watched or tended them when they were playing. Life consisted of homework and playing and nothing else: no hockey practice, no saxophone lessons, no carriage rides through the city. There were a good dozen other children besides us who were always there in the yard to play. It was a life lived in public, in company. You didn’t retreat into your room when you wanted to play; you went outside.

Or else to the Kinderhaus , or kids’ house. They redid the old laundry shed in the garden for us, and for the grown-ups to use for holiday celebrations. In fact, in our family everybody had their own house: the ducks, the chickens, the pigeons, our father, and Martin, too. There was a wooden hut, the “Martin hermitage,” tucked away in a little woods connected to the garden, but he rarely used it. What would he want with an isolated hut in the woods? He was never a recluse. He wanted to be with other people.

Behind our Kinderhaus was a playground with a slide, merry-go-round, swing, sandbox, and seesaw—all from a miners’ kindergarten that had just closed. The mining crisis had already begun, and the feudal world was crumbling around us. A big slate blackboard hung on the fence, with a tree trunk in front of it as a bench—that was the school. We could sit behind the wheel of an old, brightly painted BMW and play driving. We used the nearby brickworks as a kiln for our little clay bowls and figurines. We could play croquet on the grass, hopscotch and double Dutch on the sidewalks. There was a big suitcase in the attic with costumes for dressing up.

The gigantic garden, as big as a park and surrounded by huge old trees and two little wild forests, was there to enjoy. Everything practical—vegetable garden, greenhouse—our father tore down and then started to rebuild. So the garden filled up with bushes and trees, lilacs, goldenrain, tree of heaven, roses and sumacs, classical columns and billboard posts, a flagpole, a bathtub for cooling the drinks at parties and then the guests. More and more sculptures populated the garden: Genevieve the Pretty and others of less classical beauty—a cowboy and horse, and a hunter with dachshund, made by a retired miner who caused a sensation as an outsider artist. There was a large terrace, where later the Hollywood swing stood, and next to the old weeping willow was a lake where the ducks swam.

Other people had dogs and cats. If it were up to our mother, we would have had no animals at all—she didn’t care about them, and they made extra work for her when she had more than enough to do. But since it was up to our father—who at least knew enough not to buy monkeys; if he had, our mother threatened, she would leave him—we did have animals: bantam chickens, goldfish, turtles, and two ducks, Angelina and Antonius. Nobody in the family, our mother wrote, had any more of a clue about animals than she did, but “in place of actual knowledge they substituted enthusiasm. The consequence for the turtles was a rapid death.” The exotic birds that our father bought all quickly died off, too. The only animal tough enough to survive in our family was Little Hans, the canary.

“The Kippenberger Children’s Carnival,” with our father as clown

(Reiner Zimnik, 1961) © Reiner Zimnik

Our house was always full of children, full of pictures, full of visitors. You were never alone. “House others happily” was the pastor’s parting advice for our parents at their wedding, but they would have done so anyway. A year later, in Aachen, they had cards printed up with our father’s drawings to use for inviting guests. In Frillendorf, the door was always open: whoever came, invited or not, was welcome to sit down and join in.

There were nannies and au pairs, live-in maids and men who helped around the house (or didn’t). Friends’ and relatives’ sons and daughters who needed a place to stay while at school or in a residency lived with us; so did various children stranded in Frillendorf. Petra Lützkendorf, the artist, brought her son Pippus to stay with us for a couple of weeks. The “Belgian fleas” spent their holidays there too: two siblings, a brother and sister, whose mother was in a psychiatric ward and whose professor father had his head in the clouds, so they were left to hop and leap over our tables, benches, and armoires at will, grabbing onto anything and everything. Pedro, the fat waiter from Martin’s regular bar, lived under our roof for a while, too, since he had no place of his own. For a long while, in fact, until our mother finally threw him out.

Sigga came to stay with us from Iceland, Chantal from Belgium, and Genevieve from French Switzerland. Carolyn came from Wales for what should have been a couple of weeks, but she stayed a whole year. She was short and fat and uncomplicated, and the family chaos didn’t bother her at all. We all loved Carolyn and later went to visit her in Ffestiniog; Martin stayed with her a few times.

“Easter with the Kippenbergers” (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)

Pelle, the student from Norway who wanted to work for a couple of weeks in Essen, was our mother’s favorite. Dear, cheerful Pelle, who was training for the Olympics.

They all came and went. Only Heia and Köckel were always there: our neighbors. Without them we would have sunk into chaos, and our lives would not have functioned. Köckel fired up the old coal heater in the basement every morning and helped out whenever anything needed fixing. Energetic Heia kept things running smoothly, looked after the little ones, and kept her cool, even when her hand got caught in the blender. She roasted the meatballs and fried the potato pancakes that our mother didn’t know how to cook for us, and that we used for eating contests (Bine won: she ate twelve). The kitchen was our favorite place, because, among other reasons, it was the only warm room in the whole huge house. We ate there, talked there, drew, fought, baked cookies, and did our homework, and Martin monkeyed around and imitated people.

Our father called us “the Piranha family”: wherever there was something to eat, we threw ourselves at it, afraid that otherwise we would find nothing left. There were never enough treats; actually, there were sweets only when visitors brought them. But with seven family members, houseguests, and grandparents, it was almost always someone’s birthday: the only day in the year when the child was in charge of who was invited, what game to play, and what food to eat. Other holidays we celebrated included Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day (which our parents had introduced specially for us), the Mother-Isn’t-Home Party, Confirmation Day (in “special house style”), May Day, and Summer.

“St. Martin’s Day Procession at the Kippenbergers’” (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)

Our parents were in their element as hosts: relaxed, happy, and generous. And they enjoyed themselves at least as much as their guests. “They didn’t go around serving their guests,” one cousin said. “They were ahead of their time that way.” They just put a big pot of soup on the stove for people to serve themselves, and a hundred eggs next to the stove for them to cook on their own. After a meal our mother sometimes even pressed aprons into the hands of the astonished men so that they would help with the dishes.

On December 6, St. Nicholas came to our house in person in his fur hat and loden coat and with his golden book. For advent it was the trombone choir, and at Christmas we hosted our whole extended family, who came back again for Easter. Several hundred eggs would be painted, Father would haul them into the garden by the bucketful, and many of them would be found only weeks later, or never.

Every year there were two Carnivals, one for the children and one for the grownups. Our parents would dress as Caesar and Cleopatra, or Zeus and Helen of Troy; our mother especially liked dressing up in slutty costumes: “cheap and trashy with all my heart.” “They kissed each other, loved each other, stayed in love, tragedies ensued,” our father wrote. “It took three years before some people surmounted the moral crisis of our first Carnival celebration in Aachen.” There was often a theme for the party, usually from a play or movie: “Greek Seeking Greekess,” “Suzie Wong,” “Guys and Dolls.”

Even for the summer party, people dressed in costume and danced until dawn. The massive buffet was set up on a market stall—pickled eggs, cucumbers, peasant bread—and we children got to drink whatever was left in all the opened cola bottles the next morning. Every party was planned, with things to watch and things to do, from a polonaise to a pantomime show to a ride in a donkey cart. “We will expect you at 4 p.m. and assume you will stay late,” read the invitation to the advent party of 1962, where more than a hundred guests spread out through the whole house and into the side houses, too, to “make, glue, decorate, bake, paint, dress, arrange, and photograph” under the direction of the master and mistress of the house, artists, and other friends. The church trombone choir appeared on the stairs. Guests were asked not to come empty-handed: “We also plan to collect clothes, toys, groceries, etc. for the elderly and needy in our community and for packages to send to the East.”

Our mother said once, “No one should ever say they don’t have time for Christmas preparations. I would say that they don’t have the heart, or the imagination.” For weeks leading up to the holiday, presents were wrapped, cookies baked, gifts put together; on the day after Christmas our mother would lie in bed, sick with exhaustion. “You love to overdo it,” our father told her. “Conserving your energy is not your strong suit.”

By New Year’s, everybody was worn out—except our father and Martin. Our father tried his best to keep us up, he wrote, but “Mother always gets tired and then there’s nothing to be done. Father is offended that no one appreciates his fireworks. Everyone’s yawning or snoring.” Only Martin went along with him to the neighbors next door, “since he likes dancing so much, and he’s right, it’s fun.”

Even when they were away from home our parents threw parties, for example in Munich at the house of our uncle Hanns, the youngest of our father’s three brothers. “Five Minutes Each” was the name of this party: only artist friends were invited, and “everyone is allowed to put on their own show, if they want, and if they don’t want to, they don’t have to.” One couple played guitars, a poet read, a sculptor brought out his sculptures, an illustrator told stories. The rest danced or contented themselves with being the audience.

The parties were always raucous, even when only the family members were there. In fact, those were often the loudest. No one went around on eggshells at the Kippenbergers’. “Uncle Otto made fun of Uncle Albrecht and father defended him. Then Leo was teased and Albrecht started defending him. In any case, it was all very lively.” Too lively for some people. At one legendary Christmas party, when the whole extended family had come over for turkey (three turkeys, to be precise), one uncle’s posh fiancée left the house in tears after a dirty joke and never returned to her intended again. Every party was a test of fortitude.

On weekends, we usually took day trips. We were dragged everywhere, to exhibitions, to Castle Benrath, to the Weseler Forest, and to the Münster area, with its moated castles and the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Rüschhaus, which we visited again and again. Martin sought her out again later; for his 1997 sculpture exhibition, he set up a subway entrance next to the poet’s sculpture.

Every year on St. Martin’s Day, November 11, we traveled to Cappenberg to visit the Jansens, who also had five children. They had a big house with a fireplace and a dollhouse, and there was a lamplit procession with a real St. Martin on a real horse, which our Martin was allowed to ride, too. He was so proud of his namesake and this privilege that he was happy to share his bag of candy later. On All Saints Day we were allowed to go to the carnival in Soest with the Jansens: first came pea soup with the Sachses, then everyone got a roll of coins and could go crazy with it, and when we got lost we would be whistled back with the special family code-melody.

Trip to the Drachenfels: Father, Sabine, Susanne, Martin, Pippus (son of the artist Petra Lützkendorf), Mother, and two au pairs (l. to r.)

On Pentecost we went to Siegen, to the little manor house where our gay great-uncle lived with his Silesian housekeeper; in early summer, it was off to Drachenfels, where the first thing we did was have our picture taken in a photography studio—draped on and around a donkey, or behind a cardboard cutout of an airplane, with our arms hanging loose over the side. We children had never been on a real plane. Then it was time for a donkey ride or a hike on foot up the mountain, where we stopped into a hiker’s restaurant and were shoved into a corner, since families with lots of children were considered antisocial at the time.

All of our activities and celebrations were recorded—in pictures, home movies, photos, and words—by our mother, our father, and our artist friends. Petra Haselhorst-Lützkendorf, Karin Walther, Ernst and Annemarie Graupner, Elisabeth and Bernhard Kraus, Reiner Zimnik, Luis Delefant, Wiltrud Roser and her sister Hildegund von Debschitz, Janosch, and so on. Our life was turned into art. We were embroidered, painted, sewn, woven—all hanging on our own walls. It wasn’t a matter of good likenesses, only of the idea: like Wiltrud Roser, many of the artists didn’t know us in person at all when they received the assignment.

Polonaise at a summer party on the Frillendorf lawn

We look beautiful, harmonious, and cheerful in all of these family pictures except one: the large group portrait painted by Ilse Häfner-Mode, a small, lively woman with a pageboy haircut and a pipe in her mouth. We had to spend hours in her Düsseldorf studio—as tiny a room as she was a person, though it nevertheless also served as her apartment—sitting and standing as her models with the puppets and figurines that populated her house. We never looked so sad in our lives. The painting is as melancholy as all her other pictures. She was an expressionist who had studied in Berlin in the twenties, and a Jewish woman who had been in a concentration camp, but that was never spoken of, only whispered. Later, after our mother’s death, there was never any conflict between us siblings about our inheritance except over this one piece: Martin, who had been sent to study painting with her as a boy, absolutely wanted it at all costs.

Contemporary art wasn’t something our parents bought anonymously from unknown artists—they wanted to meet the artists in person. They became friends with most of them, and most of them came to visit us. Janosch was over once as well: still young at the time, not yet famous, he bewitched us children with his magical art and sold our parents “two large oil paintings, one to Father because Mother liked it so much, and one to Mother because she wanted something to give Father for his birthday.” He also made a little illustrated book, From the Life of a Miner, clearly based on our father.

Like many of the other artists, Janosch lived in Munich. Munich and Düsseldorf were the cities our parents visited to see exhibitions, go to plays and restaurants, see friends and relatives, and shop for art and crafts, loden coats, jewelry, pottery, furniture, and presents.

Our large house filled up. In our living room were Arne Jacobsen’s “Swan” and “Egg,” Braun’s “Snow White’s Coffin,” and plastic stools from Milan that you could spin around. No wall units, no matching living room sets: individual pieces were mixed together. Our parents wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things, and what was modern was beautiful: Olivetti typewriters, Georg Jensen silverware. They were confident in their tastes, and they were right to be: things they bought at the time as avant-garde are now shown in museums as classics.

The heavy Biedermeier furniture they inherited was exiled to a room of its own that was actually never used, except when a great many people were visiting. “So fancy we are!” our father wrote. “Or at least: So uncomfortable our chairs are!” Still, our parents were thoroughly bourgeois. We all had to wear pigtails until our confirmation, except for Babs, the oldest (this was one of our father’s ideas); we all had to be home in the evening precisely on time. Our mother was not conceited but she could not stand stupidity, and she also knew the limits of her own tolerance. One of her favorite movies was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play a liberal couple who are anything but pleased when their daughter brings a black man home.

We always prayed before going to sleep and said grace before meals. “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, / And let these gifts to us be blest”—here we clasped our hands—“ Bon appetit! Let’s all eat!” Then we threw ourselves on the food. The god we believed in was not a threatening, punishing god but a protector. Our mother believed in guardian angels, she had favorite saints (St. Anthony, finder of lost things, and St. Barbara, protector of miners), and she named her son after St. Martin, who shared what he had. Our parents’ religion was a rather worldly kind: political, artistic, and, above all, social. In 1961 they founded a youth group in Frillendorf, “in a battle against Pastor B.’s pious club”; our mother helped care for the needy; our father, as a presbyter, had influence in the parish. Later he gave up his office, over an artistic argument with the church: the paraments (hangings for the pulpit, altar, and lectern) that the pastor had commissioned from one artist were opposed by the other presbyters, and “Father cannot bear intolerance.” It was said of Pastor Wullenkord that he wanted to be a musician but was the son of missionaries; at Martin’s baptism, in Dortmund, he spoke “more about Mozart and Goethe than about our dear Lord.”

Every Christmas Eve morning, we were sent around the community to visit the old people. Our mother was glad to be rid of us during the final preparations, and the old people were glad to have someone to talk to. They told the same stories every year, mostly about their time as refugees in 1945. Every year, old Mr. Jäger told us what it was like when he and his wife had fled from East Prussia, now Poland, to Frillendorf on a horse cart. Every year, old Mrs. Haupt baked us New Year’s cookies and delighted us with her humor. When her health took a turn for the worse, at over ninety years old, and she lay on the sofa moaning, “Ah! Ah! Ah!” Finally she yelled at herself, “Say B for once, for God’s sake!”

Eventually, the house was emptier, quieter too—we were no longer children—and in 1971 we left Frillendorf and moved to a new building in Bergerhausen. Everything there was middle-class, green, and boring. “Whoever, like us, has felt true joy / Can never be unhappy again,” our mother wrote in a letter to a friend. The Ruhr District as we knew it came to an end as well. “Have you been to Essen?” asked the Dannon blueberry yogurt container that Martin reproduced in Through Puberty to Success. “Today there is only one coal mine operating in Essen, and the derricks are almost all gone. Essen’s biggest business today is retail. Essen is the Ruhr’s number one shopping city. Come take a shopping trip to Essen today!”

THE KIPPENBERGER MUSEUM

Our parents were hungry when the war ended—hungry for art, too. They went to the movies, to the theater, to exhibitions, including the very first documenta. Martin later told and retold the story about our grandfather wheeling him to the show in a stroller in 1955.

“Kippenberger knew perfectly well, ever since he was a child, that pictures, as the surrounding for sometimes worn-out feelings, can have an immensely positive effect,” Martin wrote about himself in Café Central. Pictures, our parents thought, make a house a home. In their wedding newspaper, our father said he wanted “pictures in all sizes and price points.” Once, when they were spending a week in Munich in a hotel near the train station, they unpacked their things, stowed their suitcases, and realized that “something was missing.” The pictures. The figurines. The books. “They healed the wound by using the shelf to display pictures, statues, and a tiny library.” By the end of the week, the soulless hotel room looked like their own apartment.

Decades later, when our mother was very sick in the hospital, she complained, “If only it wasn’t so bare in this room! No pictures, everything so insistently hygienic, all washable with disinfectants. Would a picture really mean a risk of infection? Or anything else that could give you something to look at and think constructive thoughts about?”

Our father called one of his first books—typed, illustrated, and properly bound— The Kippenberger Museum . Print run: one copy. The reader is led through the young couple’s miniscule apartment, ten by twelve feet, as though it were an actual museum, with the sink and coffee pot and and furniture and other objects described as works of art.

Our house in Essen was as large as a villa but absolutely without ornamentation and frills—the ideal “white cube.” It didn’t stay white for long, though. Soon even the outside walls had paintings on them, when our father followed an artist friend’s sketches and painted portraits of her figures on the walls. “The Kippenberger Museum,” one of the artist friends wrote on the drawing he’d made of the pictures on our Frillendorf wall, including a picture that showed the family from behind. The walls of the high, open staircase in the middle of the house were crammed with pictures hanging right next to each other, salon style. “Images hung on the walls from the baseboard to the ceiling in our house,” Martin would later say in an interview with Daniel Baumann. “Works by Beckmann, Corinth, Heckel, the German expressionists, Marino Marini, Picasso, and a lot of kitsch, too. I was faced with art on all fronts, end to end.” There was Barlach, too, and Chagall, and Grosz—many artists our parents had not been allowed to see in their own youth. Still, the contemporary art in our living room was decoration more than provocation, and often more crafts than art.

HOLIDAYS

Every year our parents went on a four or five week vacation by themselves, without us. The first time, in 1953, when Martin was six months old, they took the train to Italy and stayed in a hotel. Later it was always by car, with a tent and a cooking stove. Only in the beginning did our mother hold out hope that he would take pity on her and opt for comfortable accommodations: “I’m no pioneer. I get cold too easily.” But he preferred what he called the “straw sack” to normal sheets and a normal bed.

They devoured Europe. The war was over and now they could travel from the Arctic Circle to the Algarve, the west coast of Ireland to Helsinki, from Paris to Prague, the Norwegian fjords to the Hungarian plains. They drove and drove, every day somewhere else. On one trip they saw Utrecht, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Paris, Chartres, the Loire, Carcassone, Perpignan, Barcelona, Avignon, Bern, Freiburg, and Baden-Baden; another trip covered all of Great Britain. No sooner were they back than they sent out printed invitations for a matinee at the House of the Open Door (a kind of village center in Frillendorf) and showed four hundred slides, together with our father’s paintings, to the accompaniment of “new record purchases,” such as sea shanties or Welsh miners’ songs.

In Sweden they went swimming in the morning and dancing in the evening. Other people always assumed they were English, or Belgian, or even American; anything but German: they were nothing at all like the caricatures they knew from the movies. When they returned from a trip to the south and were met by a grumpy German customs official, it was like a slap in the face “after four weeks accustomed to the wonderful laissez-faire” elsewhere.

There were nannies and au pairs and neighbors and aunts to take care of us children, and we were well taken care of. When our parents came home, they spread out around the dining room everything they’d brought back, and they told us all their stories in the living room. Every trip resulted in material: for stories, for paintings, for writings. It was clear that, as our father remarked once, “they focused on people” when they traveled. The people they visited or met were more important to them than any churches and monasteries.

On school holidays we always went with our mother to Holland for as long as the vacation lasted. We had a vacation home in Zandvoort an Zee—nothing special, a modern apartment in a big apartment block with bunk beds and big windows through which you could see the ocean. After the basic furnishings were taken care of, “more pictures and more friends came with every succeeding visit: everything that makes a home homey.” Petra, the artist whose portraits already decorated the outside of our Frillendorf house, painted the cupboards and the walls. We only had to cross the street and we were at the beach, where we spent the greater part of every day; when it rained, we took the train to Haarlem or Amsterdam, to go shopping or go to the Frans Hals Museum or Rijksmuseum.

Martin and Susanne in Amsterdam, 1964

Holland was paradise for all of us. “In Zandvoort I never despaired,” Martin wrote in his book Through Puberty to Success. Our father called Holland his third homeland. In Holland you could buy pudding in bottles and French fries from stands. Our mother once wrote her friend Christel, while we were there recovering from Christmas, that “We spend our time sleeping—til 10 a.m., with no energetic husband slash father to hustle us out of bed—and eating and reading. Now and then we play some games too”: concentration, rummy, and mau-mau. She could read as much as she wanted and didn’t have to cook: every night we got dinner in a big pot from the French fry stand.

Our mother settled in for six weeks at the seaside with us, our friends, and her friends; our father came on weekends in a generous mood, entertaining us with trips to the pannekuchen house, the tourist attractions in Volendam and Madurodam, or the Alkmaar cheese market. In Holland we could ride motorized scooters and jump on trampolines—children were welcome everywhere, and there were big playgrounds built for them. When we got older, we went to the flea markets and mingled with the “beatniks” on the beach.

Alone at home, our father enjoyed a bachelor’s freedom. He had Heia cook for him and said “Bottoms up!” in the garden with the neighbors, feasting on cold duck, peaches in champagne, and beer. He went to the movies or the Cranger fair, hung out with friends and read thrillers. He got the playground under control with Köckel, put together his slide show, wrote talks, and redecorated the house. “There was time, time to think and time to do things.”

When we drove back, we could smell, by Oberhausen at the latest, that we were almost home. Then school started up again, “the nasty thing,” as our father wrote. “The boy won’t do his reading, Bettina puts up a fight, and Barbara gets sick. Sometimes the other way around.”

MARTIN’S CHILDHOOD

Still no boy. When Bettina was born, eleven months after Barbara, our grandfather came to the hospital, but this time he didn’t bring flowers.

Then, finally, Martin arrived: on February 25, 1953, in the middle of the week. “Father,” wrote the man himself,

had just started his first job as a supervisor. He was roughly shaken awake shortly before 3 a.m. Mother jumped out of bed and her water broke as usual. The taxi came, we hurried downstairs, and Father lost his house key.

Dr. Busse stood waiting at the hospital gate. Well, what have we here, he announced. Father told the doctor that his shift still started at 6:00. — At 4:45, the longed-for male heir appeared, with the powerful collaboration of Dr. Busse. Father showed up for his shift on time.

“We’ve got a boy!” Grandfather said with pride. He was the godfather, along with Martin’s other grandfather. Everyone else in the family took the news more calmly. Still, mother was especially happy. She had grown up among boys, an only sister with three brothers; the one she was closest to had fallen in Stalingrad.

Our father made Martin’s birth announcements himself. Our mother, to thank the doctor for not presenting her with a bill (since she was a fellow physician), gave him a poem she had written especially for him.

He was baptized Martin, but at first his only name was “Fatso.” Our mother also called him “Terrier,” “Mister,” and “Master,” but usually he was just “ Kerl,” “guy.” Or “Kerly Man.”

Martin in the Kinderhaus in Frillendorf

He was always something special, always different from the other boys. More imaginative, more anxious. “Seeing a mask and screaming are one and the same thing for the boy,” our father wrote once. “His fear of rigid faces cannot be overcome. For months before and after Carnival, he dreams about it. We can’t take him into the city for the Rose Monday parade [at Carnival] for that reason.” All of big sister Babs’s efforts to explain masks to him were in vain. At the same time, he loved to celebrate Carnival, dress up, and dance in the Kinderhaus. “Kerl,” our father said, “dances like a young god.”

Some of the other boys were afraid of him. Not physically—he was on the weak side, with “bad posture due to lack of exercise,” as the doctors attested. But they were afraid of his ideas, the same way children are afraid of Grimm’s fairy tales: fascinated by their fear. Tobias von Geiso, a friend the same age as Martin, says Martin’s ideas were “incredible and uncanny,” provocative, they made him tingle. For example, “to piss and shit in our dollhouse’s chamber pot. He was always ready with something I couldn’t understand.” He seemed older than he was to Tobias; Tobias had the feeling of not being up to his level.

He was never short of ideas. That’s why he was always invited along with me to younger children’s birthday parties: to help play games. He was always good with small children. As a teenager he went to Düsseldorf on weekends to babysit. “He’s great at it,” our mother wrote to a friend, “Antonia says ‘Martin’ again and again all week.” Martin’s best friend was a girl, Ute Böhler, who went to school with him and lived next door. (Ute was the quiet—and, later, depressed—daughter of the same Mrs. Böhler who shows up over and over again in Martin’s books as the epitome of Frillendorf.) He got along better with girls. He didn’t have to act the big man with them.

He cried often, including at his confirmation—moved to tears by his own speech. The same thing had happened to our father at Babs’s confirmation, which Martin had missed because he was in boarding school; our mother had described it to him: “A man isn’t necessarily a weakling if he cries with emotion in an especially solemn and impressive moment.”

Martin liked to annoy other people, but he himself “started to cry at the least little thing,” as our mother complained. “I don’t know what’s going on inside that boy. He’s got a long way to go.” Martin is never crying in his childhood photographs, though. He grins, beams, makes faces, strikes poses. Later, though, he always remembered himself as the one who was harassed and defenseless.

He was never a good boy. We had to be home at six, and Martin was the only one who would be late, showing up whistling a happy tune half an hour late. He did what he wanted and did it emphatically, without thinking about the consequences. He could be good-natured but could just as easily be fresh—if he didn’t feel like shaking a visitor’s hand, he didn’t do it. “He wanted to shock,” says Ulla Hurck, our parents’ friend. “He would look at people and see how far he could go. He did that with everyone. And we were taken in a lot of the time. I always had the feeling that he was thinking, ‘God, are they stupid? Don’t they realize why I’m doing this?’”

MARTIN, OUR ARTIST

He always asked for art supplies—for his birthday, for Easter, for Christmas. As soon as he could hold a pencil, he drew and painted, glued and stapled. “Nonstop,” our mother wrote, “since he was never without ideas.” At nine, he drew Adolf Hitler as a pitiable figure, like the one in Munch’s Scream. At family gatherings he would pull out his pencil and draw portraits of the people there. He sold one of these pictures for ten marks.

He received what he longed for all his life: attention and recognition. Our father praised “his beautiful drawings,” especially the one “of Father sitting with his thriller, you can hardly believe how good it is.” Encouraged by him, Martin drew his way through the art history course that hung on our walls. But he didn’t copy the pictures—he copied the styles. “Sometimes like this, sometimes like that—I imitated every style,” he later told the Swiss curator Daniel Baumann. After doing so, he came to the conclusion that “it wasn’t so incredible, what they’d done.” Klee and Chagall failed his test; Kokoschka passed. He needed conflict with others, friction, from the beginning. When he was ten he hung a photo of one of Picasso’s bull plates on an imaginary wall, drew a window next to it, and glued colorful curtains over the window.

SCHOOL

“I wasn’t born to go to school,” he later said. He was born to make art, and that’s what he insisted on again and again, but to no avail: he passed his first test in 1959 (like every other child who could reach his arm over his head to the opposite ear) and was admitted to the Frillendorf Protestant State Primary School. There he did what he always did: goof around. He stuck out his little leg and tripped the teacher on his first day of school. He preferred looking out the window to looking at the blackboard; what happened outside seemed to him like a movie, and he recounted it like a movie when he came home. The world seemed strange to him, strange and exciting. In Café Central, he describes a seaside scene from his childhood: “I still remember sitting on the edge of a grotto with my little dirty diving gear, watching the fresh fish through the diving mask clouded over with my breath, and they looked back at me the same way, and suddenly I had the impression that their eyes were actually the eyes of the sea itself.”

He couldn’t sit still. Rather than listen to the teacher, he filled his notebooks and textbooks with drawings and caricatures. Homework was torture for everyone involved. “Martin, pay attention!” our mother would warn, and plead, and threaten, with growing despair. “Martin, just read this!” But Martin didn’t want to read. He wanted to look, listen, play, be amazed. The official diagnosis: dyslexia. “He hates books,” our father wrote when Martin was thirteen. “Letters of the alphabet and sentences rub him the wrong way; he prefers picture books.” But we didn’t have picture books—comics weren’t allowed in our house (which is not to say we never read them). And there were certainly lots of other pictures: on the walls, and on television, since eventually we, too, had a TV. Lassie, Flipper, Fury , Bonanza, The Little Rascals, and I Dream of Jeannie were our picture books. Later, on vacations, we acted out scenes with the characters, Martin out in front and our father behind the Super-8 camera.

Maybe, too, like our father, Martin just didn’t have the time or patience to read. Deciphering a word letter by letter just took too long when you could take in a picture in one glance. Spoken, not written, language was his element. Even as a child he was an actor and entertainer, telling stories and doing imitations. Whoever laughed he had on his side. Miss Linden, a teacher, called him “Harlequin,” but from her it wasn’t a compliment.

So he used school in his own way, as a stage, a studio. A struggle began that would last his whole life: he would always be on battle footing with institutions, whether art schools, hospitals, or museums. He had something against fixed walls, narrow limits, hierarchy, and authority. He wanted to make decisions himself. He had no fear of people in power, so he got on their nerves, and they got on his case in return. He called one of his series of sculptures, all self-portraits, Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself.

His first report card could hardly have been much worse. “Participation in Class: Acceptable.” Out sick this semester: twenty-three days. Scholastic results overall: “M. has made an acceptable beginning.” The next semester didn’t look any better. “M. will have trouble in his second year,” the headmistress wrote. Only in drawing and handicrafts did he get a “Good.” Everything else was “Satisfactory” or “Acceptable” except spelling, which was “Poor” (and by the third year would be “Unsatisfactory”). The drawings he filled his notebooks with didn’t count for anything—his teachers cared only about the spelling mistakes. After his third year he was held back (“for health reasons,” according to the report card, since his teacher had been urging our parents for a long time to send Martin to boarding school).

“If he brought home report cards as good as Mr. Kaiser and Miss Linden were trying to help him get, he would be in good shape”: this was the report in St. Nicholas’s golden book about whether the eight-year-old Martin had been a good boy that year. “But since he is lazy, he doesn’t give anyone the pleasure of pleasing them. Like Bettina, he needs a slap on the backside now and then. Otherwise he is a good boy, he watches the workmen and gardeners working, visits the studio, and has lots of friends.”

HINTERZARTEN

In October 1962, at nine and a half, Martin was sent to the Black Forest, to the “state-licensed educational home” of Tetenshof, in Hinterzarten/Titisee. He wasn’t the first in the family to go to boarding school: after Babs had failed her high school entrance exam, she was sent to Bensheim, from which she would eventually be able to return to the Essen schools as a transfer student. Eventually she studied law. Tina followed Martin to boarding school the following year, as a preventative measure and to spare her the possible humiliation of failing. She stayed two years.

In Martin’s estate—among kitschy postcards from Florence, childhood drawings, letters from all periods of his life, cards he received for confirmation, photographs, and tickets—there was a brochure from the Tetenshof of those days. Children frolicked, fresh-faced, pious, and in harmony with nature, between the Black Forest cabin and the Alpine pasture, the girls with blond ponytails and the boys in lederhosen shorts with a front flap (like the ones Martin himself always used to wear). Happy children among happy cows, playing ball or shoveling hay, making pastoral music on recorders and guitars, washing up (caption: “Preparing for the Inspection of the Ears”). A letter from the housemistress that Martin reprinted in Through Puberty to Success. said: “We still have the courage to swim against the tide of the times: no television, newspapers, cheap tabloids, sensationalism, etc., of the kind that our children are exposed to every day in city schools and public advertising. Only good books, hikes, modest celebrations that the pupils organize themselves, making music, and closeness to nature.”

The boarding school included whole mountain meadows and real agricultural projects. “Inhibited children grow free and happy once again!” the brochure promised. “The work duty of 45 minutes a day is a great help toward socialization and fitting in. We have researched it as a positive factor in healing.” Parents, aunts, cousins, grandmas, grandpas, and anyone else who might take it into their heads “to visit the ‘poor child’ away at boarding school, to take him out and spoil him,” are explicitly brought back in line: just don’t! Tetensdorf is not a hotel, and every visit ruins the schedule and discipline of another child. “You have no idea how much it disrupts the classroom.” Such visits “are what make the child homesick, and prevent the creation of feelings of home here, which are necessary for the stay to be a success.” Half the children are from broken homes, the housemistress wrote to our mother, who had apparently written asking to visit. Visits that fly by are therefore not welcome—they only cause tension. Apparently not all the parents obeyed these demands. One time, Martin wrote in a letter, a father landed on the home’s meadow with a hang glider. “He wanted to see his son again, for once.”

Decades later, Martin would tell Diedrich Diederichsen how he had once stood howling and crying all alone on a hill. His classmates had told on him because he had “jerked off again, until the bed shook.”

Day-to-day life was strictly regimented. After the children woke up, beds were aired, teeth brushed, and shoes polished. Then came porridge for breakfast and, afterward, silent prayer. Respect, gratitude, and obedience were among the stated educational goals. “The Word of God is the foundation and guiding light of the house.” Everything was so pious that the children had to call the women who ran the school “Mother.” When Martin came home for vacations, he had a repertoire of prayers he could say and religious songs he could sing. Even our mother understood that all that silent prayer would “gradually drive him up the wall.”

Letters from home kept him up to date. Our mother told her “dear boy” about Babs’s confirmation in full detail, “so that it will be almost like you were there to see it yourself.” In November 1963 our father wrote, “It’s a shame you couldn’t be here, so here is a report about everything we’ve been doing in the past few weeks!” Ten typed pages telling him all about what he’d missed. There was a party for the Graupners, an artist couple, where nowhere near all the invited guests showed up, “only” a hundred. It started at the opening at the Schaumann Gallery, “where Father gave a speech and everyone clapped. It put everyone into a good mood, which was mutually contagious, so they were enthusiastic about the paintings and fought over who would get to buy which.” Afterward everyone came back to our studio, where our mother was waiting, “so she only heard Father’s beautiful speech secondhand. That’s too bad.” One of the guests was another painter, whom they had never heard of—“an abstract painter, wearing a shawl instead of the tie that you would expect. Ah, artists.” Our father had set up a canvas in the studio, and every artist there had to paint on it in oil: “They had no choice.” It was, as Thomas Wachweger would later call it, Zwangsbeglückung —mandatory cheer—followed by eating, drinking, and dancing.

Then came descriptions of the All Saints fair in Soest and St. Martin’s Day at the Jensens’. He sent a carbon copy of the same letter to Tina at boarding school, and she was furious:

Well I must say, you have a nice life! On Sunday you go to the fair. Who has to go for a nature walk? I do!

Who goes to St. Martin’s Day procession on Monday? You!

Who has to go beddy-bye? Me!

Soon it’ll go a step too far.

Everyone at home longed for Martin to return. “My dear little Kerl,” our mother wrote him, “Bine and Sanni are already counting how many bedtimes they have until you’re back.” When he came home for the first time, at Easter break, the whole family went to meet him at the station.

He doesn’t seem to have had a bad time at Tetenshof. “Martin is happily back in the whirl of things here,” Mrs. Tetens wrote to Essen after the 1963 Easter vacation. “Our Kerl was glad to go back again after the holiday,” our mother said in the summer of 1964, “and stuck to his opinion even though both his older sisters tried by any means possible to talk him out of it, those rascals! He is happy and in good spirits, he’s not causing problems, not a crybaby anymore, and he’s fitting in well.” His proletariat sickness, too, seemed to have been cured by the Black Forest: in Martin’s medical report of 1963, Nurse Walli attests to his “fresh, healthy appearance, bad posture, no other findings.”

The most important thing, though, was that Martin had found a supporter in Tetenshof: Dr. Hans Groh, his homeroom teacher, “who has already worked wonders with our Kerl.” Suddenly there was a “Very Good” on his report card, in drawing and handicrafts. For conduct, diligence, and participation he got an A–/B+. Only spelling remained merely “Satisfactory.” In 1964, our mother told Martin about a letter she had received from Dr. Groh: “He wrote me to say that you’re a good boy and that he’s glad he can keep you for another year because he likes you so much. Make him happy by studying hard and not goofing around so much, ok?” One year later, the teacher sent our mother another letter, which Martin would later reprint in one of his first catalogs, Mr. Kippenberger , next to a collage he made in 1962, presumably at Tetenshof.

Groh wrote Martin a recommendation for the Odenwald School and hoped that

I managed to pack in everything that could help Martin. He is in good spirits and looks forward to sharing a room with his cousin. If his temperament and disposition stay the same, you won’t need to worry about anything. Martin has managed some good grades recently, too, so he is starting to be prouder of himself. The serious inhibitions in his artistic effort have disappeared without a trace, so that sometimes he even seems to me too mature in his pictures. Since I don’t know his models—probably pictures, calendars, and books he has at home—and since I don’t want to ask about them, for obvious reasons, I don’t know what aspects are his own creation and what is only imitation. But if the pictures are really outgrowths of Martin himself, then it seems to me his path in life is already decided.

Martin didn’t only draw, he also wrote, in fact nonstop: letters to parents, sisters, neighbors, au pairs, grandparents, aunts, friends. He wrote them on his personal stationery, which Petra, one of our parents’ artist friends, had designed for him, with an illustration of Martin running with books under his arm. More often than not he drew his own pictures on the page, too—pictures of the village, pictures of skiing, self-portraits. He personalized every envelope by making a little drawing, and even the sender’s name was turned into an artwork: a little house with his name as the roof. The kippenbergerization of the world had begun.

Our mother was the same way. She couldn’t draw at all (just like her daughters), not even a stick figure, but she glued. All the presents she wrapped for weeks before Christmas—for friends in the East, godchildren, relatives—were decorated with little pictures: flowers, angels, and whatever else she ran across and cut out. The man at the post office drove her crazy about it: “That is not allowed (he says). Why not??? (I ask). rules. What rules?” She called him Fussbudget but bewitched him with words and homemade pear jelly (which no one in the family liked anyway) until he accepted the packages after all.

Martin never wrote a word about Inspections of the Ears or work duty in his letters—maybe because he knew that the people in charge of the school read them. He just wrote about slide shows and movies, games of cowboys and Indians or Lego, plays and soccer games (“We won 1-0 for us”); he wrote about another child’s birthday, where he put on eight layers of clothes, one on top of another, and looked as fat as our neighbor Mrs. Böhler. In a school play, he was cast as a deaf grandmother: “I sure looked funny. Totally like Frillendorfer trash.” Even if he didn’t read much himself, the children were read Greek myths; in summer there was gym class in the forest, and skiing every day in the winter. “Wolf-Dieter made a real plank-salad. In real words: he broke his skis.” Martin sent his skiing certificate (second prize) home so that Mother could keep it safe. One time Mr. Tetens, the housemaster, brought ice cream for everyone, as much as they wanted. “And to finish he gave orders: ‘Clean the plate with your tongue!’ We all cheered and started licking away like pigs.”

Along with his experiences, he wrote made-up stories and illustrated them with drawings. He gave our mother an elephant story for her birthday—very dramatic, with Martin himself appearing as a character—to be continued in a week. “With five colorfull pictures and three sentimentil drawings.”

He also told the story of the Kennedy assassination as a cops and robbers story and illustrated it with a coffin. He kept this letter to the end of his life and reprinted it in Through Puberty to Success :

He was shot 3 times in the head. He was broght right away to the hospital. He died. The shotts came from the villa. Oswald did it. Everybody was sad. Later a nightclub owner shott im. He’s in jail. – The End.

That’s what it aproximatly said in the paper.

Your, Kerl.

“The spelling was still extremely strange, to tell you the truth,” our mother said, “but the style of his letters was often amazing.”

He wasn’t just writing letters—he was writing them for an audience and hoping for good reviews. “I’m always very happy when someone says: ‘That letter was very good.’” At the end of the letters, after “God Bless,” there was usually a P.S. with his requests: for example, Babs’s brown parka and the red one from Zandvoort, and three cakes and a visit from Grandma for his birthday, plus, “dear Mommy, send me sweets becuase I dont have any sweets and I have to just look wile the others eat theres.”

But studying was still not his thing. Once when he was sick in bed, he decided he wanted to learn English but “I always fall asleep and dream about ice cream and marcipan.” “He’s a treasure,” our mother said, “even if he’s not a treasure who’s ready for middle school.”

HONNEROTH

In April 1965, Martin graduated from Tetenshof, which only went up to fifth grade. For the next three years he went to Honneroth, a boarding school near Altenkirchen in the Westerwald. The contrast could not have been greater. Honneroth had just opened, and the children lived not in the idyllic Black Forest but in what was practically a construction site. Running water was still being installed, and barracks were only gradually being replaced with real buildings. And the children were expected to do serious work to help out. There were “Work Days” instead of classes over and over again: planting trees and flowers, building huts. Afternoons were given over to “practical work,” in other words, pulling weeds. “Martin took good part again in the practical work,” the housemaster praised. Martin saw it otherwise: “During the practical work I sometimes have the feeling that I’m only working for Mr. Hoffmann. I’ve been working on the new school building for days. We clean and sweep and wipe, but always for the Hoffmanns.”

Any student who talked back was “sent to jail,” which meant working after school or running laps around the dining hall before class while the other students had breakfast. Our sister Bine was jealous—she would have liked to do that. She was with Martin at Honneroth for a year, one of ten girls with the seventy boys. It was an adventure for her. But she was never allowed to do laps for punishment: in the end, she was always excused from punishment because she was too nice and had too sunny a disposition. Not Martin. He got “jail” all the time (for example, when he made himself a little soup with the immersion heater) and was always being slapped. As our mother wrote: since “the missus” apparently looks funny when she’s mad, “our Kerl has to laugh and then he gets even more punishment, which he doesn’t seem to mind. That’s how you’re victimized when you have a sense of comedy.”

He himself told Wiltrud Roser, “I’d really like to write a book this summer, if I can. About evil.”

There was no Dr. Groh in Altenkirchen, no one who supported Martin or expected anything from him. The new housemaster’s evaluation comes across as rather unfriendly: at Easter in 1966, Herr Hoffmann wrote (“not for the pupil’s eyes”) that “we have unfortunately not made much progress in the battle against Martin’s disorderliness. He is still receiving demerits for failure to keep his notebooks clean and proper, and he continues to strew his things through all the rooms in the home.” His chaos would cost him: anyone who left something lying around in the hall was penalized a dime. “Martin has to turn in the most dimes. Perhaps the parents could help by not giving Martin quite as many toys to bring along as they have done. It is also hardly possible for us to protect the sometimes very valuable toys from being used by the other students, and then Martin is often sad when this or that nice toy is damaged.” But, he conceded, “In spite of Martin’s disorderliness it’s impossible not to like the boy for his original and cheerful sense of humor.”

Martin called Honneroth “my horrorschool.” “It stinks, it’s so boring,” he wrote to Sebastian Roser, and he looked forward to finally seeing his friend again, “doing stupid things and taking people in.” Boredom tormented him constantly, and any change of scene was welcome, even in the form of Chancellor Kiesinger. Martin’s report of the politician’s visit in 1967 is very dramatic: a helicopter landing, lots of pushing and jostling, Martin rushing to the car and managing to shake hands with him “as he ran by.” On the other hand, a visit to the circus was “Garbage. A miserable circus. The acrobats fell into the nets 3x in a row, the clowns were totally unfunny and stupid.” What got on his nerves the most were the teachers who laughed anyway.

His confirmation class “makes me throw up.” The best thing about it was that he could go into the city, check out shops, eat French fries and ice cream, and go to the fair. Sunday services were absolutely the only chance to get away from school. He spent the money for the church on candy. Many of the students were picked up by their parents for weekends at home, but Martin and Bine came home only on vacations. Every now and then they went to stay with Aunt Margit and Uncle Jost and their sons Micky and Pit in Siegen. When he was twelve, Martin wrote that he had smoked with Pit over the weekend, played on ditch-diggers outside, read Mickey Mouse comic books, and bought a bag of danishes that “we scarfed down with great pleasure.” Then TV. One time they almost burned down our great-uncle’s manor house in Weidenau.

The time of Greek myths and Christian songs was over. Painting and drawing were the only things he enjoyed. He asked for Janosch’s address, and Zimnik’s, and Otto Eglau’s in Berlin, Clemens Pasch’s in Düsseldorf—all our parents’ artist friends. “What I need are skeches, beginings, scrap paper, desines. For the walls of my room and also to copy.” He asked Wiltrud Roser for old sketches “even if they’re just scribbles. I need models.”

He griped about the boarding-school food: the horrible gruel, the “fish with old potatoes and mustard sauce: Yuck!” Even the noodle salad managed to taste bad. The thirteen-year-old Martin had only good things to say about the art teacher: “She is pretty, with long hair, beautiful legs, and a thin figure.” He also pimped out his older sisters (who were not at the boarding school, needless to say), with the result that, as our mother wrote, the sisters held him in much greater esteem: “He goes about it in real style. Brings photos of Barbara and Bettina to the older boys who seem acceptable to him; his ideas are practically genius. He recently sprayed water all over one of these boys, intending to offer him a photo of his sister to make up for it. And in fact the reparations were accepted with obvious pleasure.”

In one of his letters, Martin drew himself, as he so often did, with a crew cut, big ears, and a broad smile: “Me, in a good mood.”

He wrote nonstop even when there was nothing to write about, spinning his spiderweb in all directions in order to stay connected to the world. His favorite time for writing these letters was during Latin class, which he found almost unbearably boring. They read differently than the Tetenshof letters, maybe because they did not have to pass through a censor, maybe because he was older, and maybe because he was having such a bad time at this school. After a visit from our mother, she wrote, “he poured out tears when we said goodbye that went right to my heart.”

He felt abandoned. “One Saturday,” Hoffmann the housemaster wrote, “he had expected to be picked up by relatives and had already put on his Sunday suit for the occasion, but when they did not come, my wife suggested he change back. Martin refused these instructions and went around the rest of the day and evening in his Sunday suit.”

Martin certainly got enough attention—he made sure of it by being so fresh. He got his coddling in a different way: even though his health was “thoroughly satisfactory,” the housemaster wrote, “he gets himself mothered by the nurse: a prescription, or applying a band-aid.” He demanded love. “St. Nicholas approaches!” he wrote in one letter, like a threat. “Write me!” was the demand underlying all his letters. “Write me already like I write to you. Pappa too please.” Once he drew the whole long journey of a letter, from dropping it in the mailbox down its long route to him, where he awaited it with arms raised in delight. “Since I still havent gotten any letters or packages, I feel forced to write to you. This is already my third letter.”

No matter how many letters he did get, they were never enough.

Was it really true that he—the troublemaker, the back-talker—received so much less mail at boarding school than darling Bine? Probably not, but that’s how it felt to him.

In June 1966, when he was thirteen, he wrote a despairing letter that he later reprinted in Through Puberty to Success :

Dear Daddy, dear Mom!!

12:31 a.m.!!

I got a postcard from you yesterday, it said “I look forward to your letter, hopefully I’m not waiting in vain.” Three guesses who has been waiting for the mail here. It’s been four weeks already since I’ve heard a peep from you. But dear little Sabina, sweet darling Sabinie gets one package after another. Every time, Mr. Hoffmann says Kippenberger Sabine has mail, nothing for you Martin I’m afraid! Try to guess how disappointed I am every time. Every time I think “tomorrow I’ll get something from home!” But then it’s again nothing. Finaly a card comes and I think “now I’ll hear a little about what’s going on at home.” But no, another disapointment. But Bine, dear sweet Bine, you have a nice story to tell her, yes indeed. I’m bad, I don’t get any mail. Doesn’t matter. Packages are too expensive anyway. So it’s better to do it “Ladies first!” and that means Bine. I don’t get any news about how you’re all doing, what’s new in the garden or the house? Even the weather!!!!! None of that matters, he doesn’t get to hear those things only Bine. I have no one who writes to me anymore. No friend in the world.

Four weeks ago I heard from you i.e. Tina on the phone and I said you should send me and Bine a little package. But I guess you have to ask 1000x in letters first. I don’t know, sometimes you only think about Bine and forgett me. Yes, yes, that’s what I have to think every day. I think about you the whole time. And you? “Yes well it doesn’t matter.” Bine told me today that we got a Holliwood swing but Kerl doesn’t need to know that. Bine gets a letter, not Kerl, Bine gets a package, not Kerl, Bine gets a second package, nothing for Kerl. I’m supposed to just sit here all by myself. So I hope you now know what I’m thinking about.

At the bottom, he drew a furious face with a telephone: “Call me please. Write me!! And send a package! If you don’t I’ll run away! But I probly will anyway. Your dumb Martin.” In the margin, he scribbled a request to send him Aunt Ev’s and great-aunt Lissy’s addresses: “If you write me already I’ll write back otherwise I’d rather write someone else!!!” Finally he added in the margin in small letters: “I’m gonna kick the bucket on Sunday if I havent heard anything from you by then. And if you tell me that you don’t only write to darling Bine! I don’t get any mail from anyone. I’m all alone here.”

That same summer, he took a camping trip to Scandinavia with our parents, Tina, and Babs. In the book our father wrote about the trip, Martin is a lively child, longing to see only two things: French fry stands and toy stores. When he goes swimming he doesn’t want to come out of the water, and when a lifeguard holds out a cigar box full of swimming badges he can’t resist. “He is always interested in badges.” He didn’t let himself be led around on the vacation: “Martin demanded a plan.” He took the guidebook in hand and looked for campsites “with all the amenities.” When they stayed in a bed and breakfast, he entered his profession as “Student” in the guest book.

The following year, he left Honneroth. The report card was covered with “Satisfactory” and “Poor.” Art: “Very Good.”

The only person who didn’t worry in the least about Martin’s future was Martin. He knew he was an artist. At fifteen, our mother said, “he was filled with boundless optimism and saw himself already raking in the millions, he wouldn’t work for less!”

ADOLESCENCE

“Honneroth,” our mother summed up, “was more of a step backward for [the children] than forward. Our Kerl had a nice long nap for three years and now I’m trying to get his totally somnolent brain back into gear.” When it came to school, she wouldn’t succeed. He attended a private high school in Essen, where they paid just as little attention to their students as at Honneroth. After failing to pass sixth grade for a second time, he had to leave the school without graduating.

The only school he liked and did well at was Aenne Blömecke’s dance school. Chubby Miss Blömecke fell prey to his charm and dancing ability, though she did occasionally admonish him, “Mr. Kippenberger, not so much shaking your behind back and forth, please.” For the ball at the end of the year, he had our mother dress him up: velvet suit, tailored white shirt, giant black bow tie. “He looked like Franz Liszt, The Early Years.”

At ten, along with pencils (black and colored), erasers, drawing paper, and an easel, he asked for a camera (“since Father has one too”), plus a wristwatch, long pants, and a tie. He carried the camera like our father did, proudly hanging down over his belly like a part of his clothing. “He is more vain than all four girls put together,” our mother noted down when he asked for more clothes and a fancy Schmincke paint box for the next holiday.

Martin and our father, passport photo booth, mid-1970s. Martin used this photo as the title image of his Homesick Highway 90 catalog

He knew that an artist needs appropriately artistic clothes, just as an actor needs a wardrobe. So he always decked himself out for his appearances. Before embarking on his first long trip (a couple of weeks in South America at age sixteen, working his way there and back as a cabin boy), he equipped himself in Hamburg with two Hawaiian shirts, sunglasses, polo shirt, straw hat, belt, and pipe. At home, our mother loaned him her Indian shawl of brightly colored silk—out of pity, she said: “He has such a sense for beauty, color, and form, and what is he allowed to wear? Practically nothing decorative with bright, happy colors.”

It turned out, though, that men’s fashion was changing more quickly in those years than our mother was comfortable with. “He looks like Rasputin,” she wrote when Martin was seventeen, the same year that she saw him as young Liszt. She continued, writing to her friend Wiltrud Roser:

That center part, that sheep’s-wool overcoat (old Finnish military surplus, not to say very old, and with bullet holes in various places! or holes of some kind). He wears it night and day now, he got it for Christmas from Gerd, he said it was what he wanted most of all and we had no idea how filthy the thing was since he bought it in a store with a good reputation. Now it’s even filthier, and it takes a certain social courage to show myself in public as the mother of a son in clothes and a haircut like that. Gerd’s parents have already disowned him in their thoughts, totally written him off. No lack of complaints from that side too, but what can you do. Now I’ll go make some dinner, since there’s nothing else I can do!

He liked to wear a long bedouin robe, long hennaed hair, bright orange overalls, and red toenails. Martin’s friend Hanno Huth said that Martin “was a Gesamtkunstwerk [a total, multimedia work of art]. He not only was loud, he looked loud too.”

Now he was starting to perform the Gesamtkunstwerk in public, too. He had his own domain at home—a large room cut off from the rest of the house—but he was hardly ever there. Instead he was out at the Youth Cultural Center, nicknamed the KZ, [1] where kids met up, played go, and smoked a little pot; or at the Pop-In, a disco; and most of all at the Podium, a tiny basement bar that was the first of the many “locals” he would have in his life. He spent every evening there, literally every single evening. It opened at seven, and by six thirty at the latest Martin would be sitting on the little wall in front. Martin would later think of Manni, the owner, with his “predilection for Western-style behavior,” as akin to Michel Würthle, the proprietor of the Paris Bar in Berlin.

Helge Schneider describes the Podium in his autobiography as “the only drug and jazz bar to go to” in the city. There was everything there, and lots of it: pot, LSD, and “Dutch capsules,” a kind of Ecstasy, with the appropriate live music to match. Among others who played there were Withüser and Westrup, “two German marijuana-folk-bards from the seventies,” as the German newspaper taz later described them; “German dope music,” another critic wrote. “Have a Joint, My Friend” was the title of one of their songs, from the album Trips & Träume ( Trips & Dreams ). Helge Schneider also describes seeing “a strange band” at the Podium, with “the woman playing the drums naked while the man blew into his bamboo tube. It was Limpe/Fuchs, a so-called ‘free jazz formation.’” The musicians from Kraftwerk played there, too.

Essen, “the shopping city,” “the Ruhr’s white-collar city,” had a flourishing music scene, with one of the most important pop-music venues in the country, the Gruga Hall. Everyone played there: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Nat King Cole, Joan Baez, Louis Armstrong, and German acts like Heintje and Willy Brandt. The rock and pop festivals there were famous nationwide, and people came from all over to see Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, or Frank Zappa, to smoke their first joint, to lose their virginity. Martin saw Hair and Fiddler on the Roof there and pushed his way ahead to meet the actors at the stage door. One of the two short-lived conceptual bands he founded later, in Berlin, was called the Grugas. He painted a picture of the Gruga Hall, too, called From Zappa to Abba.

Martin was one of the youngest patrons of the Podium—in truth he was too young to be allowed in, but he wouldn’t let that stop him. Besides, he was so entertaining. No matter what he was drinking or smoking, his friend Hanno Huth says, he had “as much of a need to communicate as ever.” He also had “the all-important thing,” or “the admission ticket,” in Huth’s words: long hair. Helge Schneider, in his autobiography, describes feelings that Martin must have shared: “Now I feel totally groovy, I’m a hippie. I dance by myself and throw my head back and forth, my long hair needs to fly out, far, far out!” Martin’s first public exhibition was at the Podium: Esso S, an oilcan made out of wood; For the Rhine Fishermen; and a little crab in a box of Lord cigarettes ( Krebs in German means both “crab” and “cancer”), which he called Oh Lord, what have you done to me .

Martin with his friends Birgit and Willi, in the Frillendorf yard, with the artworks they had exhibited in the Podium

He had long since discovered women, and he fucked them, banged them, screwed them, nailed them—he never ran out of words for it, or of girls either, it seems. Our mother was amazed: didn’t he have horrible, sweaty feet? He was obsessed with sex and apparently had it in the disco itself, at friends’ houses, at whorehouses. One time, after breaking up with a girlfriend who was older than him (as they so often were in those days), he stood grinning in front of our mother and said, “You have your son back, chaste as Joseph!” “I always wished that originality was rewarded more at school,” she commented. “Then our children would do a lot better.”

Our mother was by no means always amused by his drifting life. They had serious fights about it all the time. Every other week he would be screaming into her face that he wanted to run away from home, but he never did it and never would. Instead, he brought home a girlfriend who had run away from her home. “There they stood at the door, St. Martin the Protector and a delicate blonde little thing, trembling like an aspen leaf, wrapped in a maxi coat.” She had gotten into a fight with her mother because her mother had opened a letter from Martin addressed to her, which started with a collage that the mother found obscene, “and what Kerl wrote after the collage was even more obscene (what wouldn’t a boy in puberty write who feels enlightened? Thanks a lot, Oswald Kolle!)” [2]

Martin held his first “happening” in the garden of our house, on a Sunday, with a hundred and fifty people invited. “‘This afternoon a few people and a great band will be coming by,’ Martin announced. What came was an invasion,” our mother wrote. “They camped out in little groups on the grass, like happy cows, chewing the cud and staring into space. Cows chew cud but what were they chewing? Impossible to find out and impossible to guess.” From a distance (in bed with a migraine), she observed how the visitors lazily said hello to each other; to her, they all looked the same. Our father was in his element and made soup from leftovers and whatever was around (“we never had more grateful guests”). The music was loud; the neighbors complained, and the police showed up; finally a real band performed, inside the house. “At ten at night, our son told them they had to go now, his ‘mommy’ (he really said ‘mommy’ and no one thought it was ridiculous, they thought it was sweet and nice, those hippies) was sick and needed to rest. Then they went home, quiet and well behaved, or went wherever, in any case they left.”

The proceedings were not always as well behaved as our mother described here. One time, when the family was away, Martin’s “strange friends” (as our mother called them) showed up, all tripping on LSD. “The earth opened up at our feet, the ceiling came down and rose back up, we couldn’t talk,” says Hanno Huth. When a few older musicians who were even higher came by, Martin gave them a special performance: he went upstairs, shaved off part of his hair in front, pulled on a striped bathrobe with a hood, and came back downstairs with a large, marmalade-smeared knife in one hand and a candle in the other, making horrible faces. It was like a scene from a horror movie. The people there really flipped out. At that moment, Hanno Huth decided that “this was a guy you want as your friend, not your enemy.”

People Martin’s age both admired him and hated him for daring to do the things they were too timid to try. For having such a big mouth and so many girls, and taking hard drugs, and cutting school.

For his sixteenth birthday, Martin got a letter from our grandfather, who was also his godfather. The retired bank manager explained that you can aspire to be free and independent only on a solid foundation:

Special talent alone is not sufficient. The effort to one day raise oneself above indolent mediocrity is inextricably bound with diligence and hard work, first and foremost with expanding one’s knowledge and abilities into as many areas as possible. . . . Your parents responsible for everything, and you living idly from their efforts? You know yourself that that is not right. You bear the responsibility for your own self and no one can take that responsibility away from you. . . . I cannot personally judge your abilities in drawing and painting. The predisposition toward it is in any case inherited, and comes at no charge, for which I hope you are grateful. But it is no less certain that it is not enough to build a life upon.

Discipline, order, and hygiene (“of body and soul”) are what it means to grow up, he wrote. “You must fight with all your strength to subdue yourself and any temptations that come at you from without.”

And since he hadn’t graduated high school, Martin should at least learn a respectable trade. So, under pressure from our parents, he applied to the Böhmer shoe store, which rejected him as an apprentice window-dresser (“and may we suggest a graphic career for you, given your drawing abilities”), and to the Boecker clothes store, which hired him as a decorator in 1970. He entertained the family with his imitations of the end-of-summer sale, but he didn’t find the course of vocational study nearly as entertaining. He cut classes, didn’t go to work, promised and promised to do better in the future but then did whatever he wanted. “But at the same time, he’s a total softie,” our mother wrote. “When he saw how I was in real despair yesterday, he almost started crying himself and gave his word that he would finish vocational school.” In the end, Martin proved to be incompatible with women’s outerwear, and shortly after this touching scene he quit anyway.

He was more interested in getting out and seeing the world. He traveled to Wales for the first time at fifteen, to visit our former au pair. At sixteen he took a ship to Brazil, sharing a cabin with a friend. It wasn’t a pleasure cruise—they worked on board, with Martin as cabin boy. “That meant I could have some of whatever the captain was having: chicken, sausage, potatoes, the best cuts.” After work, at night, he plunged into the swimming pool. “I hope he won’t go to any negro whorehouses or other dens of iniquity,” our mother wrote when he left. “I don’t even want to think about the dangers lurking in every corner, but they do need to leave home sometime.” She was right to be worried—in Brazil he did in fact go to a “negro whorehouse” and had his money stolen there, too. But she’d known for a long time by then that you couldn’t stop Martin from doing what he wanted.

Most of his trips produced more bad news than happy postcards: from England, for example, the telegram “Money stolen.” He was seventeen. Our mother wanted to send him more money but then changed her mind and sent these words instead: “Work, maybe a harvest-time job, be patient. Mother.” It was hard for her to be firm with him, and she consoled herself “by buying a dress, on clearance, 25 marks.” The girls he borrowed money from in England came to Zandvoort to get it back from our mother, and they liked it there so much that they stayed and had a little holiday with us. When Martin finally came back to Zandvoort, he kept Wiltrud Roser up all night telling her about what had happened, furiously repeating over and over again, “Work, child!” He could not comprehend how his own mother could leave him in the lurch like that.

Most of the time, though, no matter how annoyed she was, she gave in in the end. Once, when she went to the airport to meet him, furious about something he had done, he just came up to her with outspread arms: Mommy, you’re here, my darling mommy! “What was I supposed to do?” She took him in her arms and laughed. He attacked her with her own weapons. (“From my darling mother my cheerful disposition and fondness for telling stories.”) Whenever he needed money, he had only to make her laugh. Even when she was lying in the hospital, sick with cancer, he entertained her and her friends.

The low point came in 1971, the year our father remarried and we moved out of our house in Frillendorf. Martin ended up in the hospital with drug poisoning. He had, our mother wrote, “taken LSD on three consecutive days and various other things too. Then he collapsed.” The psychologist told her “what I knew myself, that he is insanely sensitive.”

Discharged from the hospital, he went back “to his drug den” that same night. So he was sent to Norway, to our dear friend Pelle, with the hope that the trip would cure him. Instead, as he put it, he shared with a girl “his free time, conversations, and her gonorrhea.” He traveled on, but tourism bored him: he didn’t care about the midnight sun; Stavanger seemed just like Recklinghausen in the Ruhr; the airport looked like barracks on a golf course. He fought off boredom by working in a photo shop and took pictures himself of whatever there was to see: birch trees, fjords, wood, more wood. Finally he left for Stockholm, a wild city. A poem came out of it later: “In Stockholm I took speed / Cigarettes I didn’t need.” He bummed around. Eventually the German embassy sent us a telegram saying that he was begging at their doorstep for his parents to please send money. Our father went and fetched him home.

Martin turned eighteen. That year, the first newspaper article about him appeared, in NRZ, the local paper. It described him, his art, and his friends Birgit and Willi, with whom he had mounted a group show at the Podium. A photograph shows the three of them with their artworks, in our garden, with the caption “And Venus has a hole in her head” (referring to a sculpture in our garden).

Martin works “on the side” as a decorator, while Birgit and Willi are studying graphic arts at the Folkwang School. They live day-to-day—which doesn’t mean that they’re beatniks. “Beatniks,” Martin protests, “are the people in the city who play their bongos and guitars, and usually just stare into space.” No, they’re not dropouts, these three. They want to “live life to the fullest” (that phrase is their magic formula) and then turn their experiences into art together. Without needing to follow a career, if possible.

Martin already had two movie projects in mind: one to restore the honor of the typical German, and a grotesque Easy Rider -style movie. “It’s enough for us when we see that we’ve made progress every day and are always learning something new,” Martin told the reporter.

Our mother wrote to a friend, “We’ve made it through three bad years, which was almost too much for the boy. He loved and respected his father very much, and his world collapsed [when his father left]. He took refuge in drugs, even morphine, and by late 1971 I had truly given up hope. But then the miracle happened and he pulled himself together.”

[ 1 ] This is an outrageous nickname for the “Kulturzentrum,” because “KZ” is the common abbreviation for the Nazi concentration camps (“Konzentrationslager”).

[ 2 ] Oswalt Kolle was a German popularizer of information about sex; his works played a cultural role more or less analogous to The Joy of Sex .

Подняться наверх