Kippenberger Read online

  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

  © 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

  © Kippenberger Family

  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. H
e 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

  © 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.