Kippenberger Read online

  THE KIPPENBERGER MUSEUM

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

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

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

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

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

  HOLIDAYS

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

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

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

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

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

  Martin and Susanne in Amsterdam, 1964

  © Kippenberger Family

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

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

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

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

  MARTIN’S CHILDHOOD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Martin in the Kinderhaus in Frillendorf

  © Ilse Pässler

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

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

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

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

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

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

  MARTIN, OUR ARTIST

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

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

  SCHOOL

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

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

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

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

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

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