Kippenberger Read online

  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 She was a critical reader: not even Goethe and Schiller were safe: “Schiller’s Don Carlos is also utterly out-of-date.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)

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  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

  © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  “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 La
tin: 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

  © Gerd Kippenberger

  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)

  © Reiner Zimnik

  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)

  © Reiner Zimnik

  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 h
is 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.)

  © Ilse Pässler

  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.