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CHAPTER TWO

HAMBURG

It’s a commune and that means communication.

— MK

Martin didn’t choose Hamburg at all—our mother and our uncle Erich did.

“The only thing that helps with Martin is prayer,” our mother once wrote. She said she felt like “a chicken that had hatched a duck, and now is clucking anxiously on the shore while the duck happily paddles around in the pond.” Martin himself never worried that he hadn’t finished high school, that he’d ditched his job, that he took drugs. He knew he was an artist!

But this time, in 1971, when our mother took him to the hospital in Essen—maybe he really had taken too much, maybe it was just a particularly histrionic acid trip, maybe our mother simply didn’t know what else to do—he ended up in a large hall in the men’s ward where most of the patients were old, coughing miners. He felt pushed aside and abandoned. In any case, he told Hans Meister it was a traumatic experience. Meister was one of the founding members of Release, the “Association for the Struggle against the Narcotics Threat”: the first self-help group that aimed, with the support of the Hamburg city government, to wean addicts from hard drugs by using softer ones. Martin described Hans Meister in a letter to our mother: “Hans, formerly an assistant window-dresser, four years morphine, shot heroin, founder, married, to Vaveka the Swede, two kids, responsible for drug advice, repairs, interviews, makes music and sound pieces.” Our mother had begged her brother Erich, a banker in Hamburg, for help with Martin, and he had found out about Release. They signed Martin up and he agreed to go.

Via Hamburg, Martin ended up at Otterndorf (near Bremerhaven), where the Association had a commune in the countryside. It was a huge farmhouse with a converted barn where Martin, as he wrote to our sister Tina, “could relax after that whole screw-bang-nail-fuck-do it-screw it thing in Stockholm.” There he could do what he wanted to do: make art.

Martin played the drums and danced, and at Release you could drum on pots and pans for three days straight if that’s what you needed to do. He jumped over a dike naked, long hair flying, and used the photo for a poster fifteen years later (“The Battle against Bedsores”). Most of all, he painted. There was a studio for radio plays and music in Otterndorf, and the artist Hermann Prigann had a space “where they painted like crazy,” Hans Meister recalled. Martin even dyed his underwear “in every color,” which was the fashion at the time, and he learned how to enlarge photographs and sew on a sewing machine.

He had a remarkable talent for making himself at home immediately wherever he was. As soon as he got to Otterndorf he felt better: “accepted, not abandoned,” as Meister put it. “He realized he wasn’t crazy, he had just had visions on acid that he couldn’t explain.” There, sympathy was based on mutual understanding. He had a new family. That’s what the commune was: a kind of extended family, with fixed rules and a daily schedule, including cooking and eating meals together. For the first and last time in his life, Martin stuck to a healthy diet. He was so enthusiastic that he even thought the macrobiotic food tasted good.

“It’s a commune and that means communication,” he wrote euphorically to our mother after two weeks. “It’s going brilliantly! The day before yesterday I built myself a bed as well as a table and much more! My pad is slowly getting homey.” The table stood by the window with a view of the landscape, cows, and clotheslines. Eighteen people lived there, and Martin described every one in his letter:

Wastel, 6 yrs old, going to school. Anna, 3, wants to be Winnetou! [1] Holm, 25, nine years on heroin, been here two months, they got him out of the insane asylum, officially labeled “a serious threat to public safety,” very nice and totally normal and very smart!!! Uwe, 23, five years on heroin! Just done with withdrawl, still gets seizures, colapses a lot! And finally: Martin, 18, going to AofA (Academy of Fine Arts) in the fall! Me!!

He added his requests in a P.S., just as he had done from boarding school: “I need sheets, lots of stamps, pocket money, Plaka paints from my room, and my big phone book!”

He had pulled it off: been accepted to study art at the Hamburg Academy of Art without a diploma, with only a portfolio and talent (something possible only after the changes of the sixties). He would have to take a preliminary class first, and then he could enroll in the summer of 1972.

Martin stayed with Release in Otterndorf for six months, maybe as long as nine months, then moved to central Hamburg. There was always something happening there; visitors from everywhere showed up constantly, and he met Gil Funccius, a graphic artist ten years older than him who had just moved from Berlin to Hamburg “to do something social.” But she soon found the group at Release too alternative and their constant discussions too self-flagellating, so she spent most of her time with “Kippi,” as everyone called him back then, “because that was the most fun. Kippi knew how to go out, how to get out of obligations, too.” As Martin would later write in Through Puberty to Success, Gil “was the very only one at Release who allowed herself not to suggest me on the message board in the kitchen that had topics to discuss at night sitting in a circle in the attic after two joints (‘Tell us about your problems!’).”

A lot of people were always roaming around, just like the hippies in our Frillendorf garden. Then again, there were repeated conflicts at Release, “highs and lows that everyone always has to discuss!” as Martin wrote to our mother.

Because we’re living in a collective, that’s exactly why we’re criticized more, and I’m trying to figure out the reasons for lots of things! In the past few days I’ve gone into myself amazingly sharply. Over the weekend I saw the core of the problems in my brain, and it was almost too much for me! Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll flip out!

Martin was always on the move, “always had to put on some show or another”: set up a tea-room, swim across the Alster River, change apartments.

Our father was enthusiastic, in any case. “That’s great, everything you guys are doing!” he wrote to Martin in Otterndorf in the summer of 1971. “I wish I could join in, building and woodworking and painting and all that. That’s what I’ve always done. When I was just 18 like you, I painted the insides of all the barracks in bright colors.” Did they have pillows and a sewing machine in Otterndorf? “The ladies could sew something like that very well.” He would get Martin some brightly colored fabric on clearance. Maybe they could start a whole production line.

Later, when Martin was working on his idea for a tea-room, in 1972, our father gushed: “That idea might have come from me, if it hadn’t come from you!” He went on and on about Japanese ladles and started thinking about the tea service, never mind that they didn’t have much money: “teacups are not the same as coffee cups, you know.” By the next letter, he was furnishing the tea-room with armchairs, lamps, books, underground books, and magnifying glasses, and hanging pictures on the wall: they had to be “soft,” like the tea. “Modern landscapes maybe. Better yet: Faces. Faces are expressive and even intellectual, so to speak. — But then something poetic, something that tells a story. Narrative has almost disappeared from painting since the Blue Rider.” [2]

ONE OF YOU – AMONG YOU – WITH YOU

“Maaaaartin!”

Martin doesn’t hear. He is racing around the garden, jumping high up in the air and having fun, almost tumbling and falling on his face. He wants to play, not listen to anybody. This Martin is tall, dark, and shaggy—a dog like a teddy bear. Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger had named their giant schnauzer Martin “because it’s a name you can say both forcefully and affectionately.”

The garden is enormous. After the fall of the Wall in 1989, the artist couple moved from Berlin out to Brandenburg, into an old village inn, to retreat and recover from their excessive lifestyle. They had come to Berlin in the first place because of the other Martin: when my brother had moved from Hamburg to Berlin, he convinced them to come along, not go to New York as they had planned. He said the show was on in Berlin now. Where he was. The fact was, he didn’t want to go to Berlin alone.

Thomas Wachweger knew what was what the first time he saw Martin—or rather, heard him. (“He couldn’t stand me either at first,” Martin later wrote in a catalog.) It was in the cafeteria of the Hamburg Academy of Art in Lerchenfeld. Even when it was full, everyone could always hear Martin—he led the conversations and was always surrounded by people. “His big mouth was his greatest weapon,” Gil Funccius says, “his entree.” For him, the cafeteria and the Ganz on Grindel Lane were stage, living room, and workspace in one. “Have some fun, drink some beer, meet some people”: that is how his friend, fellow student, and housemate Jochen Krüger described the course of study. The academy was small and easy to get a handle on; students often met in the cafeteria for breakfast in the morning and boozed there at night too. Their meal program included beer.

“Where do you go to school? At U of Cafeteria?” was a favorite saying at the time. But it was only half true. He once got a letter from the Lübeck district court addressed to “Mr. Martin Kippenberger, Worker,” and he kept the envelope until the end of his life. He was, in fact, a hard worker to the very end. He gave one of his pictures the title Work Until Everything’s Cleared Up.

When Ina Barfuss remembers Martin, she hears four slaps so hard they sound like fireworks. They were in the same class, taught by the Vienna artist Rudolf Hausner, who painted only his so-called Adam pictures and almost never showed his face at the academy: “he would swing by once a semester, deliver some Viennese nonsense, and disappear again.” He had an assistant, nicknamed Plato because of his bald head, who also didn’t like showing up to class. On this particular day he was hours late, but Martin wanted to show him some work and discuss it anyway. Martin wasn’t just there for fun: he really did want to learn something there, especially different techniques (lithography, etching, bookbinding—he took the most varied courses he could). So the assistant received a few thunderous slaps from his student: “Left, right, left, right, I’ve been waiting for you! It was like a movie,” Barfuss recalled.

Martin “always wanted to prove that he could really do something, despite everything: You might say I’m a do-nothing, a good-for-nothing, but I’ll show you! ” He called one of his first large series of self-portraits, using photographs of himself from each year of his life to make a collection of postage stamps to mark his twenty-first birthday, One of You – Among You – With You : explicitly staking his claim to belong.

Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger were a couple of years older than Martin. They had begun their studies in the sixties and were more experienced; they had already had some success and—this was very important to Martin—knew Sigmar Polke. They were kindred spirits: Thomas’s parents were also divorced, and he had also hated school and suffered from being sent away to boarding school. “He’s smart,” Wachweger’s father, a judge, said of Martin. “Smarter than you.” In Thomas’s view, Martin had above all “an extreme emotional intelligence: he could feel what was inside another person right away, and immediately imitate it.”

Thomas and Ina were what they still are (and something relatively rare at the time): a stable couple. Like a little family. Other people found it bourgeois and “square,” and some tried to break up their relationship, but not Martin. He sometimes told Thomas that he envied him for not having to look for a woman anymore. Martin changed girlfriends more often than sheets, which wasn’t a big deal since a lot of other people were doing the same thing, but he also went to the movies and saw Dr. Zhivago over and over again: Wachweger says Martin was in love with Lara.

Martin forced himself on them, or at least that’s how they saw it at first: that he was pushy. But then they became friends after all. They went out to bars together. Sometimes he would drop by every day, and if they weren’t home he would leave a message, card, or letter. He ate at their house at least once a week and always wanted stuffed cabbage—nothing else was allowed. He usually brought someone else along with him, for instance, our father: “to show him that it is in fact possible to survive as an artist.”

Together with Thomas, Ina, and Achim Duchow, he met Sigmar Polke: in Martin’s view the great artist of the seventies. Martin often traveled from Hamburg to Düsseldorf to visit Polke and lived in the country with him in 1974: “it was very funny, lots of hippies, music, drugs, and dark beer.” When Polke became a professor in Hamburg, Martin stuck by his side and once even went with Polke, Ina, Thomas, and Duchow to Berlin for a week. Polke gave him an assignment: “Take photos of drunk people.” Martin later made a poster out of one picture, showing Martin with a camera in front of his belly and his pants pulled down, and Polke in the background with his pants unbuttoned. A lot of people resented Martin for working his way into the star’s inner circle like that.

But at that time they still went around together—“they were unstoppable,” Gil Funccius said. Beer and words flowed in torrents; Polke’s sharp tongue impressed Martin. Martin’s admiration for Polke’s humor, irony, confidence, and artistic impudence and lack of inhibition never wavered, though he did, like many people, come to find Polke as a person more and more difficult, even vicious. Near the end of his life, some six months before he died, Martin told a friend that Hamburg in general and Polke in particular had ruined him by giving him the idea of turning his own life into art, “throwing one’s physical, bodily existence onto the scales. We had to, back then, at the price of destroying ourselves.” But by then, in 1996, Martin felt it was too late to change course.

ALL YOU EVER DO IS MOVE, CHILD!

Thomas Wachweger and Ina Barfuss were happy when Martin came over to visit, but they certainly never wanted to live with him. “He was too dictatorial. Everyone else had to be subordinate.”

In his first years in Hamburg, he constantly moved apartments—whenever he had finally finished renovating one place, he moved on to the next. “All you ever do is move, child!” our mother wrote to him. His answer:

To find your own milieu you need to gather a lot of different life experiences. Every apartment—every roommate—is a step in that proccess. — Whenever you realize that theres no more room to move, no way to develop, you have to move out. Every change is a new beginning, and it all ends up being a development. Progress. People don’t only invest financially, its more important psychologically— thats what I’m after.

At some point he ended up in a shared apartment at Zippelhaus 3, across from the Speicherstadt warehouse district. Today the hundred-year-old office building with its magnificent art nouveau facade has been splendidly restored, and it houses “Kandinsky—Market Leading Merchandise,” but at the time it was a dilapidated repurposed industrial building housing nothing but art students. “It’s important for me to come into as much contact as I can with people who can take me somewhere with them, who can carry me away.... Human contacts in a limited space are advantageous, since I only need to go to the next room or the next floor and already the relationship or whatever I’m involved in takes another step forward.” The good thing about the Zippelhaus apartment, for him, was that everyone there was so different, doing something different: “painting, photography, writing, filmmaking. Everyone shares their technical knowledge with everyone else.”

His best friend there was Jochen Krüger, or “Joey,” an art student from Bremerhaven. He was skeptical when Martin introduced himself, “with his red leather pants, red hair, and a red Coca-Cola can in front of his face.” Jochen was no groupie of the type Martin was already collecting: he had no interest in laying himself at Martin’s feet. He was a stubbornly independent artist, if anything rather aloof, with a dry, north-German sense of humor—just what Martin liked about him. He was one of the first artists whose work Martin showed.

Martin brought to his Zippelhaus room a professional art cabinet with drawers for graphic work, all his colored pencils, and a Rolodex where he noted down, in neat, beautiful handwriting, the addresses of all the attractive women he met. And there were many, especially tall blondes. Almost every morning, when Joey was having breakfast in the common room, “another naked young woman came gamboling out of Martin’s room.”

Life in the building took its easygoing course; everyone who lived there was tolerant. Noodle casserole was more or less the only thing Martin could cook, and he wasn’t into washing dishes or cleaning rooms. Once, lying hungover in bed, he himself was taken aback by the chaos and mess, “which had once again reached one of its most extreme states.” His room looked gruesome, our father reported after visiting him there. “And he pays 380 marks a month rent plus 50 for the telephone,” our mother wrote angrily. Visits from our uncle Erich, who was supposed to keep an eye on him and who gave him the money he needed to live and work, got Martin to straighten up the place and to draw “day and night” so that he would have something to show when Erich asked “So, what have you been doing?”

The only real disruption in this idyllic student life came from without. The Schleyer kidnapping [3] had whipped the mood in Germany into a frenzy, and someone thought that a terrorist or terrorist-sympathizer was hidden in the house. “There was a raid,” Martin said years later in an interview. “They stormed whole buildings. They showed up at the door wearing bulletproof vests, knock knock knock, I go to the door thinking the mailman’s early today, you know, my sense of time, go to the door naked and open it and wham I’m up against the wall.” He was in shock—the idea of being locked up in prison, of no longer being his own master, was Martin’s greatest fear. So he behaved well, well enough not to cause any trouble with the police, in any case.

He drew a lot in that apartment, very precise drawings with colored pencils, working all night long for months at a time. “A perfectionist,” Jochen Krüger called him—a worker. What did he draw? Himself (“I sit for portraits of myself—big freehand pencil drawings”), friends, and family. He made the wedding announcement for our sister Bettina, a double portrait of her and her husband Lars, and our father congratulated him on it: “You are definitely on the right path, not least because in everything you draw or paint you work out something that has to do with you.” His style was realistic. Krüger had no patience for such fussy things, but when he told Martin about an exhibition of Blinky Palermo’s in Bremerhaven, it was Martin’s turn to be dismissive: “Four chalk lines in the corner, OK, OK, that’s art?!”

Soon, however, drawing was not enough for Martin: it took too much time and resulted in only one picture, when he wanted to be visible, to be seen, to be everywhere. So he started copying. “He couldn’t walk past a Xerox machine without sitting his naked ass on it,” Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger wrote. The photocopier was a brand new technology at the time and a toy that artists loved to play with. He made hundreds of address labels that he stuck up everywhere, designed postage stamps, left behind lighters with sayings of his and Jochen Krüger’s in bars. He also took a lot of pictures with the new camera he had asked for as a present from the family, and one of his favorite occupations was to sit in a photo booth, alone or with other people, make funny faces, and have his picture taken. The medium fit well with his natural tempo: hundreds of pictures, just like that.

He wanted to put himself out there and get himself known, by any means necessary. “Mr. Kippenberger, since you were kind enough to leave your card in each of the three garbage bags that you placed at the emergency exit of the garage between the dates of Friday 1/11 and Sunday 1/13, we are happily in a position to convey to you our heartfelt thanks for your filthy mess,” wrote the proprietors of a parking garage around the corner from Zippelhaus. “If it ever crosses your mind to leave your garbage bags in or in front of the garage again, we will pursue legal action against you.” Martin would later reprint the 1974 letter in one of his books.

Warnings were always turning up: from the tax office, from the printer’s. Money was always tight; his bank account was constantly overdrawn. He looked for jobs and had a special talent for “finding jobs where he didn’t have to work himself to death,” as Jochen Krüger recalls. He painted three hundred windows for a health insurance company, licked envelopes, set up chairs, and signed up when the labor office needed “2 Men, strong” to load trucks for seven marks an hour. Once he got a job as a bookkeeper “even though he couldn’t even read his own bank statement,” Jochen Krüger said. “And he charmed the ladies so much that he wasn’t fired right away.” Our mother, from a safe distance, was especially impressed by this job and the fact that, as he reported, he washed, shaved, and shined his shoes for it every day. (“Next thing you know I’ll have to make him black satin sleeve protectors!”) Sometimes he said yes to two jobs at the same time, so he could call in sick to one and make twice as much money.

Our mother wrote him long letters that were a mix of worrying, warnings, and declarations of love. They often got on his nerves. She reminded him to send a thank-you letter to his grandma (“if you don’t do it now you never will”) or to show up for his military service exam (even if he would never be called up, given the drug use in his past, he shouldn’t get on the authorities’ bad side). “Stop smoking,” she warned in a letter, and included a newspaper clipping (“Did you know that every year in West Germany approximately 20,000 legs—so-called ‘smoker’s legs’—have to be amputated as a result of excessive nicotine use?” or “Did you know that constant exposure to loud thumping music can lead to permanent hearing loss?”). “Please go to the oral vaccination between Jan. 21 and Jan. 26, you’re not vaccinated for anything.” “You’re a boundless egomaniac, darling, there’s no one else in the world besides you who is worth your notice, including your little mother, who has spoiled you for far too long,” and then underneath: “Kisses, kisses, your little mother.”

She was always “terribly worried” about the “boy of my heart,” as she called him in her letters. “Or maybe I should say boy of my hurt?” she wrote once, when it was going particularly badly with his teeth and he needed to have several extracted. She was also, naturally, annoyed when he called her up in the middle of the night yet again, or brought a new girlfriend along every time he visited Essen. In his early Hamburg years, his visits brought her to despair—hanging around, sleeping late, suddenly disappearing and just as suddenly showing up again, “blind drunk for a change and getting on my last nerve.” It was a badly needed break for everyone whenever she gave him a trip to Berlin, “where he could stay with one of his countless girlfriends.” Afterward, at Christmas, he would be a friendly, happy kid again.

THE GOOD COUNTERPART

Meanwhile, Martin had fallen in love, with a pretty, brash, strong, lively, and capricious woman named Inka Hocke: his first long-term relationship. According to Gil Funccius, Inka “was a calming influence”; she also “had a giant apartment she had lived in forever, while we were constantly moving.” “Prewar building 4th floor nice neighborhood,” as Martin summarized. They had met at a costume party at the art academy. Inka was there with her friend Meheret, an Ethiopian woman whom Martin married in 1975 so that she could stay in the country (they divorced two years later). He looked bold that night, in his leather pants, loden coat, cowboy boots, and henna-red hair. He was twenty-one, and she four years older. “Red curly hair—covered with freckles all over her body—ex-married—8 yr old daughter—good mother—part time model—not histerical—balanced + quiet—good counterpart-not pretensious, doesnt want to conquer the world” was the description he gave to friends in Berlin.

Martin with Inka Hocke, ca. 1975

He didn’t have her address, but right after the party he asked all the neighbors where the woman with the red curly hair and the child lived. He showed up while she was ironing. They talked for hours and went on a walk, and “it was actually very thrilling.” It was his birthday that day, as she found out later. The next day a package came in the mail, with every sentence she had spoken written down on paper. She was won over.

From then on he was always there.

He got along wonderfully with Inka’s daughter, Mimi—“they were on the same level” and they played cards and squabbled with each other. The three of them “made a family.” They painted Easter eggs, cooked noodles, played Battleship. He liked that Inka made him get a haircut or take a bath; outside he was wild and crazy Kippi with a big mouth, but in private he could feel sorry for himself “and he would be pitied and taken into someone’s arms. He could be a little boy.” He could be childishly jealous as an artist, too: he couldn’t stand it when someone else was more successful than he was. “He was always proving himself, always going full throttle,” Inka says. When they went out, he would introduce her as “my girlfriend who has absolutely no interest in art.”

When she told him that she didn’t like his long red hair and mentioned that she liked the actor Helmut Berger, “he turned himself into Helmut Berger within two days. He was changing all the time anyway, and always looked different.” He had an antique mirror behind the door in his Zippelhaus apartment, he wrote in a letter, “something I inherited, and what I see in it changes all the time and every now and then gets quite seriously on my nerves.” At night he told Inka bedtime stories; during the break he went to Zandvoort with her, to show her where we had spent our school holidays; he took her to Marl to meet our father and told her that our mother had been so strict with him that she had often pinched him on the arm. When they were apart, he wrote her “moving, very loving letters.” They often went for a drive in the country on weekends, “with daughter + kit + caboodle + ex-husband + holding hands,” as he wrote to a friend. Even if their day trips weren’t quite as idyllic as he made them out to be, Inka’s home was a safe place for him. “As soon as he went out, it was a different world.”

And that world was his stage. One time he went to a concert in the Market Hall with Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger: a father, mother, and two sons were playing “terrible music. They acted like they were satirizing someone but they were the joke. Then Martin jumped onto the stage, danced the boogie-woogie (with the mother as well), and saved the night. The whole audience, three hundred people, went wild.” When the musicians handed out autographed photographs afterward, Martin naturally signed his name too.

He was with Inka for three years, although they never officially lived together. “I go back and forth from my place to hers,” he wrote to friends, “usually I work at my place and sleep there.” Inka gave him the key to her apartment only when he was going to Florence and already knew that he was moving on. Inka said she had already known as much: “Martin’s a wanderer.” To console her, he gave her a trip to New York as a farewell present.

He himself took a major trip in 1974, to Mexico. When he died, he still had the souvenirs in his possession: sugar packets and moist towelettes from the plane, tomato-can labels with pretty girls on them, stickers showing Mexican women in folkloric costumes, a big pile of postcards, a thick plastic plaque that he must have pried loose from the airplane (“Please. Lock. Door.”), and pages on local foods and drinks torn out of his guidebook: “The Mexican eating customs are a mix of pre-Columbian and Spanish traditions. The cuisine is full of flavor and dishes that are very spicy are called ‘hot’ even if they are served cold....” “Don’t throw this away” is not only written on one of his early works from Berlin (a silkscreen print, called “colander prints” in German, that he made with a kitchen colander—“It can still be used for noodle casseroles,” he added), it was clearly one of his life mottos.

He booked the trip at a student travel agency, the cheapest possible. But in Mexico City, “the trip’s home base and starting point for side trips,” he lived as he so often would later: “comfortably. Work space, bedroom, private bath, maid who cooks meals, straightens up, and does the laundry.” He did it by borrowing money from Ralph Drochner, a friend from Essen who happened to be in Mexico at the time. He never paid it back, and Ralph was left with nothing by the end of Martin’s trip.

In terms of art, Martin found the trip disappointing. “Historical museums are the only thing interesting here. Modern art hasn’t really arrived yet. They crown the one modern artist they have like a king over and over again: Diego Rivera, who painted the struggling masses, liberation, and social issues in large format. The content may be right but the style is like Nazi sculptures.” Despite speaking no Spanish, he got by, cracking jokes, making faces, and dancing: “Everyone likes that.” Whenever anyone grumbled about his taking their photograph, he grumbled back at them in German for as long as he needed to until they stopped.

WE LIVED WHATEVER LIFE HAD TO OFFER

In December 1975, Martin moved in with Gil Funccius, his old friend from Release. Gil and her boyfriend, Tony Petersen, lived on Feldbrunnenstrasse, and a third roommate had just moved out. “The apartment is totally art nouveau (window, furniture, doors), parquet floors, 15-foot ceilings. One giant room 400 sqft & one 190 sqft. The big one will be my studio, the small one my bedroom.” Just because he moved so often doesn’t mean that he didn’t care about where he lived: he always wanted it nice. “Kippi always hustled the best room,” Gil says.

The situation went well, even if Gil’s boyfriend didn’t always like it. There were no big arguments: “Kippi was always very bossy, but since he could also be so adorable people forgave him.” They would sit in the kitchen all afternoon long and talk for hours. “She gave me a boost and I gave her a boost,” Martin wrote later.

Gil says, “Kippi brought people home, I brought people home, Tony brought people home.” As was common in shared apartments, the doors were always open. Even while Martin was in the bathtub there would be guests around, drinking and talking with him and each other. If a door wasn’t open, Martin just opened it, and if he found two people in bed together, all the better—Martin especially liked starting a conversation in those circumstances. At night it was time to tour the bars: the favorites were the Ganz or the Marktstube, the Madhouse for dancing, and by midnight at the latest, Hamburg’s red-light district, the Reeperbahn. “We lived what life had to offer,” Gil later said. “People lived without being settled.” It was a time of not yet being grown up, of playing, of experimenting. Everything wasn’t so serious, including art. Gil remembers it as a happy time.

In the big apartment in the old building on Feldbrunnen-strasse, Martin worked on his pictures, was photographed, and offered, as he put it, “the simplest ideas and my face as a model for record covers.” He was an ideal model for Gil because “he always knew exactly what I wanted,” she said; he was delighted to act out in front of the camera, striking the most varied poses. Here Martin did for the first time what he had been groping toward in our house in Essen-Frillendorf, and what he would later elevate to an official policy at Kippenberger’s Office in Berlin: he turned his home into an exhibition space, an art space. Two shows took place there, both in 1977: Chimerical Pictures, with Ina Barfuss, Hajo Bötel, Anna Oppermann, Thomas Wachweger, and Jochen Krüger, and then al Vostro servizio (At Your Service), with Achim Duchow and Krüger again. They were two big parties; “Kippi invited everybody,” Gil Funccius later said, “and I invited everybody, too.” The drinks weren’t free, though—Martin sold them. “He was always very practical about such things.”

Striking Poses, Feldbrunnenstrasse, Hamburg

Hamburg was the right city at the right time for Martin, in the view of Gisela Stelly-Augstein, wife of the founding editor of Der Spiegel and a filmmaker and author herself. It was a port city, a “transit city”: “Something really got started for him there. He was seeking something, and he found it, and then he really put it into practice in Berlin.” She and Martin met each other near the end of his time in Hamburg. She remembers him at their first meeting as like an angel, with his long blond hair, but the occasion was earthly enough: the opening of a trendy new restaurant. Martin had come with his friend Peter Preller, an interior designer from Pöseldorf and Martin’s first patron. “He arranged for a steady income for Martin,” according to Martin’s friend Hanno Huth.

Preller, as introverted as Martin was extroverted, was also dyslexic (as Martin was happy to learn), and Martin, this strange, loose, and spontaneous being, made an enormous impression on him. Martin was up for anything, stood outside of dogmas and norms, provoked people, and was always at the center of wherever he was. When it all got to be too much for Preller, he simply retreated for a time. Martin was no less fascinated by this successful man who took him to restaurants he could never have afforded, introduced him to people like Rudolf Augstein and Jil Sander at teas served by butlers, had a dressing room of his own filled with the finest shoes and shirts. Gisela Stelly-Augstein thinks that the relationship between the gay aesthete and his father also fascinated Martin. Preller’s father worked in timber, and Preller had a dust allergy, so he had an asthma attack whenever he came near his father. “This psychodrama moved him deeply.” Martin called their relationship a “dust complex” in Through Puberty to Success which was dedicated to his own father: “For Papa (mother complex), from whom I inherited my father complex.”

On the evening Stelly-Augstein met Martin, Peter Preller introduced him to her as “very gifted,” although she didn’t know why. Martin had not yet started painting seriously. She met him as “someone wild and restless, seeking creative expression on all levels.”

The next time she saw him it was as a fallen angel. He called her one night and wanted to meet her in a bar. That was impossible, since she had a small child, but he needed to see her, he said, so he went out to her neighborhood and when he showed up at her door, quite late, he was a mess: he had gotten into a brawl, had a cut under his eye, and had shaved off his hair. There was for it but to bandage him up. “He wanted to be under someone’s wing, wanted a mother to take him in.”

This destructive and self-destructive side of Martin, Gisela Stelly-Augstein says, “was the other side of the coin.” Once, after two weeks on Ibiza, he wrote, “Got myself some suntan, booze, and beatings.”

They continued to use the formal pronoun with each other for a long time: “it went with his romantic ideas.” [4] He asked if she would be opposed to his being her admirer: would that look wrong? He would write her letters, give her presents, visit her, make a little installation for her out of toys and cheap department-store kitsch.

Love and Adventure was the name of her movie, whose lead actress Martin had discovered at a flea market. He himself insisted on playing a policeman with a German shepherd. Filming with him was a lot of fun, and he entertained the whole crew over meals. Later he often visited from Berlin, sometimes overnight, and when he did “he was totally different than out in the wild world. He still talked nonstop, but he didn’t have anything he was trying to prove.” Her husband and Martin never exactly got along. It was Rudolf Augstein who uttered the sentence that Martin was all too happy to quote later: “Kippi can’t even make himself a sandwich.”

UNO DI VOI, UN TEDESCO IN FIRENZE

Martin was done with Hamburg. He went to Berlin more and more often, stopped going to class, and “just decided in 1976 to be a professional artist,” according to Daniel Baumann, the curator of his major Geneva “Respective” covering the years “1997–1976.”

But before he moved to Berlin, there was one more stop he had to make. In 1976 the family celebrated Christmas together at Tina’s house in Chiemsee—three months after our mother had died and a month after the birth of our first niece, Lisa. Martin came with Inka and her daughter. From there he took the train to Florence.

Self-portrait from Florence, 1977

Clearly, as a German Romantic, he had to go to Italy at some point—the home of noodles and art, of love and cinema. He wanted to stay in the Villa Romana, a German artists’ residency in Florence, but they didn’t accept him.

At first, Martin felt homesick and alone in Florence, and maybe abandoned as well, since our mother had died. Toward the end she had been optimistic about his future—if he was in good spirits then so was she. “He is really satisfied with himself now and I think happy too. In terms of quality, I think what he’s doing is very good.” Six months before her death, when she thought she had discovered a new lump in her remaining breast, she wrote to him, “I so want to live long enough to see the great artist you are becoming. But it’s out of my hands.”

Florence did not welcome Martin with open arms; quite the contrary. It didn’t help that he didn’t speak the language. “It’s Monday today,” he wrote in a letter, “which means Der Stern and Der Spiegel on the stands at the train station—overjoyed—something in German. I read more intensively now that I’m in Italy.” Our father wrote an admonishing letter, surprised that Martin hadn’t learned any Italian yet, but still wished him good luck during his stay. “In my life I myself always put more weight on work than on luck though.”

The prospect of having no one to talk to but himself horrified Martin. “Searching for nothing (in particular)—looking around—drinking—keep searching, don’t know for what,” he wrote to our father shortly after he arrived. He found it annoying to have no schedule, no guiding thread. In frustration he went “shopping, shopping, shopping. It’s so sh---y to be alone.” The Italians called him “Adolfi” since “I apparently look like Adolfi, the way they imagine Adolfi to look down here.”

He would never again write as many letters as he did then. It was a mountain of letters, already practically conceptual art: one on vellum, another on postcards glued together to make a sewing pattern; one letter was three feet long. Every day he waited desperately for the mail, like an addict. He didn’t like silence; peace and quiet had nothing to offer him. He wrote to Gil Funccius that he was grateful just to hear a dog bark. The card game mau-mau, his lifelong passion, was what he longed for the most: his “fantasy. Like in Mexico, when I had the shitters, when all I dreamed of was a clean toilet, a loden coat, and noodle casserole.”

Florence was too much for him at first—too beautiful, too chic, too old. “Let’s just say: It made me insecure.” But he stuck it out and asserted himself. “I’ve gotten past the worst of it now”: after a long, demoralizing search, he found a room in a villa away from the crowds of tourists, “very magnificent architecture: hall, foyer, another hall, with a sun porch (giant), massive wood furniture, doors, windows, guest room. Feels like a room, not an in-an-out booth.” Many of the pension’s guests had lived there for months, even years, and at last Martin had people to play cards with: “I love being able to cheat.” He added, “The upper crust of German artists used to come and go here before the war.” The writer Oriana Fallaci had lived there too, and “I read her book Letter to an Unborn Child in bed, everything in the book happened in that room. Live theater.” There were landscapes and ancestral portraits hanging in the hallways, picturesque views out the windows (the square, the roofs, the houses, the mountains), the Boboli Gardens around the corner, and an aristocratic landlady over eighty years old.

Despite his initial disappointments, Martin turned Florence into his “happy hunting ground.” First he went looking for a local bar and found the café where he would have breakfast every morning and take his many visitors. He met his landlady there: the Principessa del Mare. The café was across the street from the Palazzo Pitti and was run by two brothers, whom he soon painted. One brother always stood on the left behind the counter, the other on the right; they spoke English and a few words of German and tried to teach Martin some Italian. They also translated for him what the other regulars were saying: the sourpuss, the park warden, the former consul, the head of the Boy Scouts (no one knew if that’s what he really was), all talking about kidnappings, the Communist Party, and everything else. What especially fascinated Martin was how the Italians talked with their hands and their eyes, and how fast they ordered, drank, paid, and left. And came back. “If you stay in the café you can see almost everyone come back every half hour, or at least every hour.”

Martin stopped by the Villa Romana regularly, even if he hadn’t been invited to stay there—it was right across from his pension. He liked the atmosphere there better than the scholarship-holders’ art, though. Anna Oppermann was his favorite: “We’re both from Hamburg and that’s a tremendous bond.” She was later one of the artists he showed on Feldbrunnenstrasse in Hamburg, in his Chimerical Pictures exhibition. She showed her work there as a favor to him, and he was duly grateful. She “looked a little like a witch in a gingerbread house” and “she protected me from inappropriate remarks in the Via [ sic ] Romana.”

What he really wanted in Italy was to star in a movie, “but no one discovered me,” even though he looked, as he himself liked to say, “like Helmut Berger in his good years.” So instead he made the big move and bought turpentine and paint. “My head is giving off puffs of smoke and seeing good things,” he wrote. He had been spoiled by photography, which let him shoot dozens of pictures in a few minutes, and was a little afraid of painting, but then he bought his canvases (twenty by twenty-four inches, “a transportable size—I made sure of that”) and an 6’2” easel, the same height as him. He painted copies of postcards, newspaper clippings, and his own photographs and experiences. He painted his room, his ice cream parlor, his drinking buddies, the backside of the lion monument on the street where he lived, a cop-killer, his work table, the Palazzo Pitti porter, the cobbler’s shop window, baked Florentines, bangers and mash, “the fixed stare unconsciously looking up at the ceiling,” a retired Nazi, Tuscany, “two glowing cigarettes,” a “Sicilian criminal,” “3 fireflies on their way home,” tourists on the bus, and his birthday cake that Gil had sent him from Hamburg in the form of a photograph. Eighty-four black-and-white paintings in three months, usually one in the morning and one in the afternoon, with his inviolable midday nap in between. They were left out to dry in the kitchen, the bedroom, and the hall. As he later put it, he painted like a musician who plays a gig every day.

He was excited about his (as he himself put it) megalomania: “My brain mass swings back and forth a little—it hums + you can hear the pure tones,” he wrote to his friend Herbert Meese in Essen. “I mean things come together in my head and are already ready—not to be modest, amazing ideas.... Everything is really going to blow up!”

His project was to paint a stack of paintings as tall as he was, but he stopped a few inches short. He left the empty canvases and his towel behind in Florence. He called the series Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze (One of You, a German in Florence).

Uno di voi, un tedesco in Firenze : When no one wanted to buy the series of black and white paintings in a uniform size (20” x 24”) from Florence, Martin gave them to his friend Michel Würthle in exchange for lifetime free food and drink for himself and a guest at the Paris Bar in Berlin.

“To assert yourself,” our father had written to Martin just before his tenth birthday, “means being able to influence your own life, to do some of what you want to do, what matters to you. To assert yourself also means, though, not blabbing along after whatever other people say.” Behaving well may not count for much: “It’s much more important to know what you’re doing and why you’re doing it.” Florence was the turning point for Martin. He had lived abroad for the first time and would often do so again, though never again for such a long time alone. For the first time, he had really thrown himself into painting, and after nine months he returned to Hamburg as an artist, with work to exhibit too: Adventure pictures in 6x audiovisual show, drawings, souvenirs. For the group show he organized in October 1977 with Achim Duchow and Jochen Krüger— On the Occasion of a Journey to Italy: There and Back —his first ever catalog was published: al Vostro servizio. Print run: one hundred copies.

“I am a seeker,” Martin was already saying back then, and “variety and experience” were what he sought. It was time to move on, even if he would return to Hamburg often to see friends old and new (such as Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner, who moved from Berlin to Hamburg just when Martin was going in the other direction) and to show his work in exhibitions in the Artist House, at Fettstrasse 7a, in the World Bookstore, or in Ascan Crone’s gallery. Now, though, he wanted to take the money he had inherited after our mother’s death and invest it in his future in Berlin. “He gave himself two years,” Jochen Krüger said, “to make his career.”

The Hamburg Academy of Fine Art later claimed him as a graduate. But “as an independent artist your diploma is: to be an independent artist. Slips of paper don’t mean anything,” Martin had once written to our mother. “I dont have an employer like other people, or a union—someone to represent my interests. I’m on my own.” In Florence he experienced for the first time what it means to be an independent artist.

[ 1 ] The Native American hero in several of Karl May’s enormously popular Western novels.

[ 2 ] The Blue Rider ( Der Blaue Reiter ) was a Munich group of expressionist artists including Kandinsky, Jawlensky, Franz Marc, Gabriele Münter, and Paul Klee, active 1911–1914.

[ 3 ] Hanns-Martin Schleyer, a former Nazi and an influential businessman in postwar West Germany, was kidnapped by the far-left Red Army Faction (RAF) and later killed, at the height of the RAF’s 1977 terror campaign, known as German Autumn.

[ 4 ] In German (like French), there are two forms of the word “you”: the informal du , used among close friends and family or when speaking to children, and the formal Sie , used in public situations or with less intimate friends and colleagues. Among younger Germans, it is common to use du relatively quickly; here, MK maintains an old-fashioned, courtly tone.

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