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  They used the runway for fashion shows and sometimes even fashion dances, with Jenny Capitain modeling, Martin filming, Klaus Krüger taking care of the music, and Ulrike Ottinger, the filmmaker, taking photographs. “Armies of fashionistas crowd into Claudia Skoda’s studio on Zossener Strasse,” the Berliner Morgenpost wrote in fall 1977:

  Latecomers get only a tiny little space on the floor. In a hot atmosphere with cosmopolitan flair, garishly made-up models move to the disco sounds. The designing trio of Claudia Skoda, Hella Utesch, and Tabea Blumenschein has come up with a myriad of ideas: There were loose-knit superwide sweaters over skintight skirts, and shining satin pants (wide tops, narrow cuffs) with pop sweaters. Whether it’s suits, coats with an Indian look, or glittery knits over naked skin, you won’t find anything more original in New York or Paris.

  But just as the extended Skoda family looked strange on the streets of Berlin in Martin’s photographs, so too the critic for the Tagesspiegel found it difficult to reconcile the show inside with the reality outside: “The ambitiously floral-patterned models are fascinating like pop stars from Andy Warhol movies: after the show, visitors to the Fabrikneu studio have to take a deep breath before they can face gray, everyday life again.”

  NO WAR ANY MORE BUT NO PEACE EITHER

  Berlin was still a shabby city, not as scrubbed-clean as Hamburg. The parks were more overgrown than cultivated; the many coal stoves, in both halves of the city, made the air thick with dirt. It was a cheap city, too, a subsidized outpost of the Western democracies where alcohol and even postage stamps cost less than everywhere else. If you could get along with not much (coal heating, toilet in the hall), you could live on almost nothing. A lot of the shops in Kreuzberg stood empty; if you wanted to rent an office you could do it at any time and then move out a few months later. Many contractors, laborers, and shopkeepers had gone bankrupt in the slowdown after the Wall was built, and lots of young families had moved to the concrete housing projects on the edge of the city, or left for the West.

  Martin in East Berlin, with a camera around his neck as always

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  Berlin was a city that showed its wounds. They gaped everywhere on the streets; even in the middle of the city, there were plots of land with nothing but bombed-out ruins, still not rebuilt, and buildings were pockmarked with bullet holes. “No war any more but no peace either,” it says in Martin’s catalog for Truth Is Work .

  Ulrike Ottinger, who had lived for a while in Paris and then in Konstanz, was so enraptured with this Berlin, so full of history and so different from everywhere she knew in West Germany, that she decided to shoot her films there instead of in New York as planned. In his review in Der Spiegel of Ottinger’s movie Portrait of an Alcoholic Woman (a.k.a. Ticket of No Return ) , in which Martin and Tabea Blumenschein have small parts, Wolf Donner enthused about the “attractive tristesse ” of Berlin, which reminded him of New York. He loved the “touching cross between Zille [1] and Las Vegas... The city of Berlin has never been shown on film as lovably and horrifyingly as in this movie.”

  The absurdity of the world was before Martin’s eyes every day (he would later portray it in the book Psychobuildings , filled with his photographs of failed or otherwise mistreated buildings, and add to it with “nonsense construction plans” like the “METRO- Net, ” a system of subway entrances without subways scattered around the world). Berlin was a city of dead-end streets, bridges to nowhere, and streets ending suddenly at the Wall—which should have been, as Beuys had said and Martin loved to quote, three inches higher, for aesthetic reasons.

  Berlin was different. There was no closing time at the bars and no military service required of the residents—two more good reasons to move there. “It’s inconceivable, what [being called up] would have meant, if I’d had to go,” wrote Helge Schneider, who was in the same situation as Martin but who stayed in Mülheim and so lived in fear of the mailman for eight years. After spending years simply ignoring official, registered-mail requests to report for military examinations, as well as parental warnings, Martin could relax.

  Many people who lived in the West Berlin of those days, surrounded by the Wall, remember it as an idyllic, subsidized biosphere. One of them, Annette Humpe, told Jürgen Teipel that “for me West Germany was a bourgeois mish-mash. Berlin was already all sealed up, which was a good defense against the idiotic West Germans.” Attila Corbaci, from Vienna, experienced Berlin as a “blossoming ghetto”: he had come to Berlin to be an actor but ended up using his talents as a waiter in the Exile, a restaurant founded by Austrians and frequented by foreign artists. “Berlin is full of people who are alive, but it’s not too full,” the American sculptor George Rickey remarked; he was one of the artists lured to Berlin by the DAAD (German Academic Exchange Service) Artist Program. “There are not many big cities left that are good for walking around. Berlin is one of them.”

  It was a time out of time, to a certain extent: after the ideological conflicts of the ’68 generation and before the violent battles of the squatter scene, a relatively calm phase during which so much seemed possible. Especially in the Kreuzberg, where the Turks were opening their first grocery stores and where punks, freaks, skinheads, and artists lived in the ruins. In 1977, when Martin finally moved to Berlin, Rainer Fetting, Helmut Middendorf, Salomé, and Bernd Zimmer opened their gallery on Moritzplatz; a year later, Martin opened “Kippenberger’s Office” and took over S.O.36. The German Autumn of left-wing terrorism, which Max Hetzler (later Martin’s gallerist in Stuttgart, where the Baader-Meinhof group died in Stammheim prison) described as “very emotionally loaded,” had relatively little effect in Berlin.

  So were the late seventies in Berlin really the good old days? “It was a great time,” the musician Sven-Åke Johansson said; excessive, playful, and “carefree,” in gallerist Bruno Brunnet’s words. “There was no AIDS; there was no tomorrow, only the night, that you could spend in Kreuzberg getting hammered for eight marks.”

  There was enormous freedom under the protective shadow of the Wall, and it was easy to cross boundaries. The artists didn’t live in separate ghettos—with sculptors here, musicians there, and fashion designers somewhere else—but shared a common stage, as at Fabrikneu. It was a time of “genius dilettantes,” as they were called in Berlin at the time: people who did whatever they wanted, not only what they were good at. It was the time of the Gesamtkunstwerk. Salomé and Fetting, for example, two of the painters from the Moritzplatz gallery, designed clothes and also modeled for Skoda; Ulrike Ottinger cast amateurs in her movies alongside the professionals, including Martin and several people from his circle. Her movie Portrait of an Alcoholic Woman (a.k.a. Ticket of No Return ) , which was a great success, included several scenes shot in Fabrikneu. Tabea Blumenschein, Ottinger’s life partner and the star of many of her movies, also sang, designed clothes, posters, and book covers, and directed her own movie, The Dollar Princess, which Martin wrote the music for and then showed at S.O.36.

  Martin, too, was in love with the beautiful actress and drinker. Were they a couple? “Oh, you know,” Ulrike Ottinger said, “a couple? It was a different time.” They had fun together—at a photo session in her Charlottenburg apartment, for example, where they danced to rock and roll in the studio on a giant table that also served as the dining table. “A lot of people got carried away with Kippi, with his charisma and verve,” the drummer Klaus Krüger said.

  Tabea Blumenschein and Martin on Ulrike Ottinger’s table

  © Ulrike Ottinger

  It wasn’t only different kinds of artists who mixed in Berlin: the boundaries between groups were more permeable then, too. Martin and his friends drank their way through the bars alongside the Wall—two bars on every corner, with tapestries of flowers and German shepherds on the wall. Martin played mau-mau, stared as the truck drivers gulped down fried eggs by the dozen, and shot photos he would later use in magazines, in catalogs, and on posters. He always
had his camera with him. At this time it was much more important to him than a paintbrush, since there was so much to take pictures of, whether gravestones in the dog cemetery or German shepherds on the barroom wall.

  However wild and electric it was, Martin’s West Berlin was at the same time totally manageable and familiar. The artists’ city was more like a village, consisting of Kreuzberg, Charlottenburg, and the stretch in between. “There were really only a few places you could go,” the artist Uli Strothjohann said—the Exile, Einstein, Fofi’s, the Paris Bar, Axbax, Zwiebelfisch, Gabi’s Bar, the Kingdom of Saxony, the Jungle—“so you ran into each other all the time.” Martin called this stretch of bars his “beaten path.”

  Like many others, he lived and worked in the area around Oranienplatz. The Moritzplatz with its gallery and Oranienstrasse with S.O.36 were nearby, and you ran into people over dinner at the Exile, where the poet and owner Oswald Wiener held court, read the paper, and exuded charm and poison, while his wife, Ingrid, an artist herself, stood at the stove and cooked. Bernd Zimmer, the artist, worked there as an assistant cook; Bruno Brunnet, later a gallerist, was a waiter; Dieter Roth and Joseph Beuys and Arnulf Rainer showed you what it meant to be a real artist; Fassbinder hung out there with his clique, as did Peter Stein with his own troupe (the Schaubühne theater was not far away). Alongside the young artists, you could run into their teachers: Koberling, Hödecke, and Lüpertz. The Exile was one of the few places in Berlin where you could eat well and get an espresso. “It was cozy there” in the little wood-paneled inn, says Achim Schächtele. “Everyone was surprised to see how good life could be.”

  DANCE HALL AND GARAGE:

  KIPPENBERGER’S OFFICE

  At some point Martin had had enough of life in the Fabrikneu. He wanted to be a head of household, not just a friend of the house. So, right after meeting Jenny Capitain’s sister Gisela over a game of mau-mau, he asked her if she wanted to move with him into their own factory. They started looking around Kreuzberg, and the third place they saw was Max Taut’s beautiful 1920s building on Segitzdamm, ready to occupy. A week later they had a lease for a whole floor, three thousand square feet “for a studio and a gallery.” The rent was a big splurge for the time, fourteen hundred marks a month and another three hundred for the high heating costs. They divided the floor and the other side went to Hella Utesch (a restorer of old paintings and a fashion designer, whose “Berlin-West Leather Combine” Martin became “general sales rep” for) and Klaus Krüger (who was on the road with Iggy Pop most of the time anyway).

  Martin called the place an “Office” since Andy Warhol had already taken “Factory.” “I was already well known then, and could use my own name. But not as an art dealer: as something abnormal. I was really a very controversial figure in those days.” Kippenberger’s Office was sparsely furnished—most of the space was used for shows. Gisela and Martin each had a little cell to sleep in; Martin’s bed, actually only a mattress, had a bedspread with “Without Masses Rubble” written on it. There was a small kitchen and a round Bauhaus table with a couple of Bauhaus chairs in the main room, where they ate breakfast at noon when Gisela came home from her job as an elementary school teacher in Schöneberg. Finally, a platform with a Bauhaus writing desk and an executive armchair.

  Gisela Capitain remembers life with Martin as “very relaxed.” They shared the housework equally: “Martin also did some shopping, and cooked breakfast, other than that we each had our own daily schedule.” Of course she had to help out at the Office, folding copies of Martin’s zine sehr gut, very good, typing up price lists, and putting up stickers in the bathrooms of local bars. At night they went out.

  On May 20, 1978, at “19.30 (academic time),” the opening took place: on the program were “Aschamatta, Balkan folklore, beer, pictures, young people, and Angie with candles.” The Balkan folklore was provided by Gisela Capitain’s Turkish schoolgirls; Angie was a stripper although, as it turned out, she didn’t want to dance at the opening. There were pretzel sticks and beer, Klaus Krüger played the drums, and Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger showed slides of their trips with Martin and Sigmar Polke.

  The Office was basically a private club, according to Sven-Åke Johansson, who performed there as a musician. Martin arranged readings with Michel Würthle and Oswald Wiener, showed slides of everyday life in Berlin with his Moritzplatz colleagues Middendorf and Fetting, and screened Super-8 movies he’d brought back from New York, with accompanying music by Lydia Lunch. There were other, smaller events, too. For the 1978 soccer World Cup, which Germany would win, Martin set up two TV sets in the hall, hauled crates of Radeberger beer from the East (something not usually done at the time), laid out artificial grass on the floor, and hung team photos and newspaper headlines on the wall behind it. “Well then lads!” He had himself photographed against this backdrop with a sad expression on his face and holding a big cardboard sign: “Helmut. My Phone Number: 614 79 28.” He went around the city with a patch of artificial grass and a soccer ball, posing passersby on the grass with the ball under their arms and photographing them. During the actual games, Fetting and Middendorf came by to watch, Klaus Krüger showed up, and Martin even invited his landlord, who came in gray overalls and shook hands with Martin for a picture. Might come in handy, a picture like that.

  Martin during the 1978 World Cup soccer tournament, in Kippenberger’s Office, Berlin

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  In short, the provocations which were the Office’s real raison d’etre. Werner Lange wrote in the Tagesspiegel that

  “Kippenberger’s Office,” on the seventh floor of a 1920s high-rise, is used as a storeroom, roller-skating rink, editorial headquarters, dance hall, and garage for mopeds, an all-purpose room so to speak, and the sharp young Mr Kippenberger is there as the all-around multipurpose manager. Now, to fill the long dreary walls of the hall with some life, he has turned it into a gallery too.

  Martin did not use the Office as a painting studio, but he made it available to his artist friends at irregular intervals. Hans Bötel, for example, or Meuser with his colorful plastic panels (“Mommy take me out of the mine, I can’t stand all that black anymore”), or Jochen Krüger from Hamburg with his sayings (“Hurry up, people! The concrete is coming at 12”).

  After two years, at the end of March 1980, Kippenberger’s Office had to close. The money had run out. Hellmuth Costard, the filmmaker, took over the space and received a two hundred thousand marks as a subsidy for his movie Kippenberger’s Commentary, which was eventually shown on German public television as Humorlife. Costard was supposed to pay Martin five thousand marks for the title, but he probably never did.

  MONEY PLAYS NO ROLEX

  He was just waiting, Johann-Karl Schmidt said—waiting for the chance to waste money on himself: “The inheritance was a great stroke of luck for him: it gave him the means to start squandering himself in Berlin.” Finally he could do what he wanted, unchecked and uninhibited and with no regard to the cost. He didn’t have to fritter away his time on furniture-moving jobs or beg people to buy his art supplies for him; he could hire expensive bands at S.O.36, furnish Kippenberger’s Office the way he wanted, go out to eat every day (and drink, too), make his own records and produce other people’s, make books, hire sign painters, shoot movies and photographs at will, risk flops, and plaster bar walls with his stickers and posters. He could stretch out and make himself known.

  Our mother had died in September 1976 and it took a while before he received the inheritance (several hundred thousand marks). She had her doubts when it came to Martin’s relationship with money—even as a child, his monthly allowance was spent by the first of the month, usually on candy. “Martin, he has very long hair, but money with him is rather rare,” a friend of mine wrote about his teenage years, when he was constantly borrowing from friends and chance acquaintances without ever paying anything back. Our mother usually took care of it when his creditors came knocking on her doo
r. As a last resort, he would sit on the street and beg. Money was always an issue between mother and son: he never had enough, he always (in her view) spent too much, and he inevitably charmed her into giving him more anyway.

  After her death, an uncle of ours wanted Martin to receive his inheritance in installments, but in the end Martin got it all at once, and spent it all at once too. “The mother’s suspicion was proven right,” he would write ten years later in Café Central, “the darling boy couldn’t handle money. And that’s how it still is today: he has simply no relationship to money.”

  But he did invest the inheritance well, in the end—as Henri Nannen once said, “You have to throw money out the window, then it’ll walk back in through the door downstairs.” True, it took a long time before it started walking back in, but eventually it did, especially after his death.

  His only investment that was a real mistake, and which he himself was very upset about, was Hella Utesch’s Kreuzberg leather workshop, next door to Kippenberger’s Office. Years later, Martin would describe the

  seven employees, the Berlin-West Leather Combine, with Hopi weaves and massive purchases of leather. But the girls there only did yoga all the time instead of working. And the clothes cost 2,800 marks, absolutely no one wanted them, they didn’t even fit well. Later they were sold off at a sale price of 220 marks, not even enough to cover the cost of the leather never mind the manufacture. The whole thing really ate up money.