Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  But no sooner had he arrived in Essen than the great crisis in the mining industry began, as did worrying, anxiety, and fear for his job. “Now we need to get tough,” he wrote in September 1963 to friends in Munich. “The coal crisis continues, and whoever doesn’t go along (with the crisis) gets fired. Whoever fires the most people is the champion marksman.” His mine was shut down too; he was transferred to a desk job and eventually let go. In September 1972, just back from vacation, he got the news: “early retirement,” at fifty-one. A few months later, just days before Christmas, he had a heart attack. Only after several frustrating attempts to secure a foothold in the construction industry—likewise in crisis—did he find another position: as a manager at a plastic tubing company in Mülheim.

  His fascination with mining and its traditions only grew in this period. He continued to do research, reading books on mining’s history and practice in other countries. When he died, he was buried in his miner’s tunic, meant for special occasions—the same one he had married our mother in.

  He could be crude as well as charming and tended to find the shortest path from one social blunder to the next. He loved provocation and making fun of people. Once, introducing our sister Bine’s boyfriend—a mining engineer like him—to some colleagues in Aachen, he did not say the young man’s name, which he had probably already forgotten. He said, “Here’s the kid who wants to be my son-in-law.” It was a test, and Andreas passed it. Our father said what he thought, loud and clear, and also what he knew: for example, that there were safety problems down in the mine because the wooden supports for the shaft, from a company executive’s forest, were rotten. That got him into a lot of trouble. Still, he didn’t go as far as his son would later; he also paid court to his superiors. As he wrote to our mother once: “I think Mrs. Wussow [a friend] is right after all: I’m a revolutionary, but only in secret—someone who never makes the move.”

  He was an exotic species in a conservative world, along with his whole family and their lifestyle. A “rare bird,” as they say. Our parents’ friend Ulla Hurck said that “he made the sober mining folks uneasy—he was a shock for them.” In a children’s story that he wrote for us, where he is recognizably the father, he is the only one not to laugh at the child who wanted a skating rink in the middle of summer. “He knew how much it hurt to be laughed at.”

  “Diagram,” Gerd Kippenberger, 1965

  © Gerd Kippenberger

  “If he had not been the company director at the Katharina Mines, he would certainly have been a painter,” a newspaper wrote in an article about our father’s exhibition at the House of the Open Door in Frillendorf in 1960, one of the many exhibitions that he organized himself as a member of the artists’ society. He showed landscapes and city views, and his art, according to the newspaper critic, was “a beautiful, free expression of modern creativity.”

  He usually painted on vacation and signed his pictures “kip.” But he didn’t need a canvas to make art. In the 1960s, the era of Pop Art, he made constructions from flotsam and jetsam he found on the beach, painted picture books for his grandchildren, built brightly colored wooden cities, and threw parties. He laid out gardens, first in Frillendorf and then, in his second life (for there would be another wife and more children), in Marl. There he bought an allotment, where he built hills, a frog pond, and a trellis for grapevines. He planted blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries. He named the path that the bushes were on “Blackcurrant Way” and placed his wooden figures everywhere as a special kind of scarecrow: The Passionate Lover, The Blue Angel, St. Francis of Assisi, The Market Lady with Sagging Breasts.

  He wrote books about his travels, our house, the neighbors, parties, the Siegerland area, and his early years. The worse the crisis in the mining industry became, the more he clung to his private life. The stories were not invented, but he did fictionalize the truth, exaggerating, distorting, and embellishing. His brother called him a “magical realist.” The world was a stage in his books, and life was a play, or more specifically, a farce, with everything more comic than it actually was. He referred to himself in the third person, as “Father”; his wife was “Mother.” In one of his little books, Hike, 1963, about a walk he took with our mother and the two oldest children, he gave the “cast” at the beginning and ended with “The End.” He was everything in this theater—director, writer, star, and cameraman—except the audience. The camera was always there. Whenever we left the house, he hung the “photey” around his neck and over a belly that slowly grew fatter with the postwar economic recovery. He had no interest in taking snapshots, though—he directed us: behind this window, on that bridge, between those columns. We sisters hated it, but Martin loved it. He later turned one of these photos, where we’re standing with raised arms on the front steps of our great-grandparents’ little manor house, into a work of art, a postcard with the title “Hey, hey, hey, here are the Monkeys.”

  On the front steps of our great-grandparents’ manor house in Siegen-Weidenau: Martin, Barbara, Sabine, Susanne, Bettina (bottom to top). Photo by our father, which Martin turn into a postcard in 1985: “Hey, hey, hey, here are the Monkeys.”

  © Gerd Kippenberger/Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

  Every big party was planned from beginning to end, with a written program. The guests had to sing on cue. Since his first talk as a student, he had loved to give speeches entirely improvised—“I talked myself into such a state that everyone there listened, entranced.” He did not need a podium to be seen, of course, or a microphone to be heard: like all the men in his family, he had an impressive voice. It grew even stronger as he became hard of hearing, like many men in his profession—it often got so loud down in the mine that you had to scream to be heard.

  To make completely sure that he would get speeches for his own birthday, he assigned them himself, along with suggested topics. Our instructions, printed in the invitation, were “Our father as he really is. Only my four daughters are qualified to speak, and they are requested to please agree on the content beforehand and on who should deliver the address.” The only one of his children who could have performed the task without any difficulty was Martin, but he was in Brazil at the time. Our protests meant nothing to him—he just threatened to write the speech himself. So he got what he wanted: our father as he really was.

  Afterward his cousin came up to us with a serious face and a sepulchral voice: someday we would be sorry we had given such a speech. But our father—who knew he had skin cancer and not long to live—had enjoyed himself immensely.

  Not even at the very end, after seven years of fierce struggle against the cancer that finally defeated him, did he give up the reins. Our father staged his own funeral. In the weeks before his death, when he could barely hold a pen any more and his handwriting was growing more and more shaky, he wrote out his stage directions: whom we should invite (and whom we should not); where the funeral meal should under no circumstances take place; that a bagpiper should play; that he should lie in state in his miner’s tunic; and that his coffin should have eight handles, one for each child and stepchild. He got everything he wanted, and speeches to his taste, too.

  Indecisiveness irritated him. “I’m not the type to hesitate for a long time,” he wrote as a young man, before he was our father. Once, when he heard that his semester would begin later than expected, he got on the next train, stayed with his grandmother in Siegen, and rode from one mine to the next, meeting geologists and getting new ideas. When our mother once again didn’t order anything to drink at a restaurant in Munich, our father later wrote, “Either she wasn’t thirsty, or she was thirsty but didn’t know what to do about it.” Both possibilities were equally incomprehensible to him. He liked to drink—beer, wine, liquor—this last with the guys from the mine, usually. He sometimes came home a little drunk and smelling of cigarette smoke.

  Even though he was an engineer, he understood nothing about technology in everyday life. Maybe he didn’t want to under
stand. Whenever something needed fixing, the clever neighbors had to help out; when they weren’t around—if the camera broke on vacation or the film projector wasn’t working on Christmas—a major marital crisis ensued. He lacked both the calm and the patience to fix things. When it was time for us to set out, whether for the day or for six weeks, he got in the car and leaned on the horn, and everyone had to be ready. It didn’t matter that our mother still had meals to pack, shoelaces to tie, diapers to change, or suitcases to shut—when he was determined, he was determined, and he charged ahead deaf and blind, as he himself said, unwilling to even hear whatever the various members of the family wanted or were whining about. Otherwise, he knew he would never reach his goal. And he wanted to.

  When he was diagnosed with skin cancer, he was determined to live, even if it meant having an operation every week. He managed a few years more than the doctors and the statistics had allotted him. “Onward and upward!” he scribbled in a shaky hand six months before his death, adding a stick figure climbing up a flight of stairs and sinking into an armchair. He was held up as a model patient in the hospital and even gave a lecture about how to do it: how to live your life anyway.

  He always moved forward, never backward, except in his memories, which were as important to him as new experiences. He preserved these memories in little books, usually illustrated and always self-published—memories of his mother, whose name he bore (she was Gertie); of his childhood, his hometown, family celebrations; of Pastor Noa, who took his own life under the Nazis. He made the most beautiful of his books out of several hundred family letters. It’s not that he lived in the past, but that for him the past was the foundation of everything that came in the present. “Remember,” he told me to give me courage the night before my university exams, “you’re a Kippenberger!” He meant it not as a threat or a warning, but casually and naturally: nothing bad can happen to one of us! He was as proud to be a Kippenberger as he was to be a pigheaded Siegerlander, or a miner, or a father of five (and later eight) children. “One Family One Line,” Martin inscribed on our father’s gravestone. This is the attitude we grew up with.

  Always forward, no backtracking: that was the ironclad rule of all our walks and travels. Never walk the same road twice. On the way back, we had to seek out another path, no matter how complicated or hard it was to find, or whether we would get lost. He always ran ahead, even on vacation. How was he supposed to notice when our mother clumsily stumbled and fell in Barcelona? “The husband, three steps ahead as usual, didn’t even turn around.” Courteous Spaniards helped her to her feet.

  He rarely found downtime, as he put it, for reading—sometimes a thriller, but usually not even that. “You called it restlessness in my blood,” he wrote our mother once. She was someone who, wherever she went, looked for a place to sit and read a book, while his gaze was always directed out at the landscape or the sunset. “There’s probably some truth in that. Maybe I’m only running away from myself. Sometimes life is only a kind of running away, after all.”

  He enjoyed life, and he loved to eat—preferably big, hearty meals. Every Saturday at our house there was thick, rich soup—split pea, lentil, vegetable—because he liked it so much. After his in-laws served him half a piece of meat and counted out the potatoes for lunch, he avoided going back. He also liked to cook, for guests and on weekends, on vacation and out camping. He cooked the same way he painted: improvising, without recipes and definitely not measuring cups. And as with his painting, writing, and celebrating, it had to be big. For him, cooking was also art, though not a pure art for art’s sake—the important thing was the eating, in as large a group as possible, along with wine and conversation.

  “Father Kip: Leader of the Family. Mother Kip: His wife and mother of five children.” So ran their descriptions in the dramatis personae of his book Hike, 1963. Day-to-day matters and child rearing were her responsibility. During their years in Essen he left the house at seven in the morning, came home for lunch, lay down for fifteen minutes (during which there had to be absolute silence in the house), then drank an enormous cup of tea (he allowed himself coffee only on vacation: “it gets me too excited”) and left until seven at night.

  He was responsible for weekends, and sunshine. Monday through Friday our mother hauled groceries home from the co-op in two giant bags, food for a large family plus guests and the help. On Saturday our father went to the market, chitchatted with the market women, tasted the cheese, bought too much of everything (and not necessarily what we needed), and was our maître de plaisir for the rest of the weekend. On Sunday our mother often lay in bed with a migraine, and was finally left in peace while the rest of us took a day trip.

  He was constantly getting ideas. That’s when our mother got scared. Ideas meant that he would suddenly turn everything upside down, redecorate the house, maybe buy some exotic birds. Just three years after we moved into the house in Essen, when our mother had taken us children away on vacation, he wrote to her that he had “girded his loins and decided to thoroughly change some things in our house (no half measures). First the dining room. Out with the piano. We found a good place for it in the large children’s room (everything with Heia’s agreement). The other junk is being spread around the house too. Now the furniture will stand clean and pure in the pared-down room. Some of the pictures were already taken down off the walls—now the rest. Everything has to be rethought from its foundations.”

  He had found new lighting for the dining room, “five simple, clear plastic tubes in a row to emphasize the length of the table and the shape of the room.” Plus it was finally bright enough: “I can’t stand this gloom any longer.” He was looking for a carpet to tie the room together: “Colorful, but strictly vertical stripes to emphasize the lines, you know, not scitter-scatter everywhere,” he told the carpet dealer.

  Maybe his family was another of his “ideas.” He liked the family best when it was gathered around a long table, as multitudinous and loud as possible. He sat at the head of the table, of course. We called him “Papa,” but he usually signed his letters “Your Father.” And then he retreated. First he would go to the wooden loft, two comfortable rooms, that he had built above the garage in the garden and named “Father’s Peace.” Soon he started sleeping there, too. Then he slipped even farther away, to the apartment in Marl that our mother had bought for them to share in their old age. He seemed to grow younger: he let his muttonchops and beard grow long, adopted a Caesar haircut, traded in his old Opel Captain (the biggest family sedan available at the time) for a small, sporty Opel two-door, and took a vacation, alone for the first time, to Greece, to try to find himself among the men’s-only monasteries.

  He had, as he put it himself, a weakness for the romantic. And for women. As was already printed in their wedding newspaper, “From Siegerlan’ / He’s a ladies man / And whoever sees him can understand / He’s someone no girl can withstand! / When Gerd rolls his rrrr ’s all full of charm / Even the coldest heart gets warm.”

  He met Petra Biggemann in 1968, at a union dance, and married her in 1971. She already had two young sons, Jochen and Claus, and a third arrived in 1973: Moritz. When he told Martin the news, Martin immediately asked to be named the godfather. And he was.

  MOM

  Born February 11, 1922, she was an Aquarius and so, in her words, prone to creative flights of fancy but without a trace of ambition. And incapable of logical thought: “The Aquarius thinks in zigzags.”

  She studied medicine during the war, in Frankfurt, Freiburg, and Göttingen. During vacations she had to perform her national labor service, first in a factory and later in a military hospital. Our parents were barely engaged when she started imagining their future life with children, calling him “Pappes,” and enthusing about the little Hansie and little Conrad they were going to have soon. “It can be a Barbara, too,” he would throw in. She didn’t want one child—she wanted lots of children. She couldn’t wait to be a mother.

  She was eight years old when her mother
, Paula Leverkus, died at thirty-four. Paula had helped take care of her husband’s factory workers as a nurse and had caught tuberculosis. Our mother had nothing except a few vague memories of her, a few photographs and letters; she didn’t miss her mother, she would later say, since she never knew what it was like to have one.

  She was not like other mothers. She couldn’t cook, except spaghetti and noodle casseroles. She never buttered our toast. We had to pack our own knapsacks, and when we fell she would just tell us, “Go put some iodine on it.” She was definitely not one of those mothers who constantly wipe their children’s snotty noses and pull up their socks. Our underwear peeked out from under our clothes. She never fretted when we started to go off on our own, and we never had to call home to say we had arrived safely; she knew we would. Bad news, she liked to say, comes anyway, and soon enough. Her child rearing methods were laissez-faire, although she could be strict and sometimes even a bit hysterical. All three of them were drama queens: father, mother, and son.

  Lore Kippenberger in the mid-1970s

  © Kippenberger Family

  Giving presents was her passion; organization was not her strong suit. She was constantly looking for her glasses, or buying Christmas presents in summer and hiding them so well that she never found them again. Cleaning was a nightmare for her and when, after a long vacation, she finally had to do it, she gave us a few coins, if we were lucky, and sent us off to the vending machines so that she could take out her bad mood on the vacuum cleaner instead of on us. In day-to-day life, keeping house oppressed her: we didn’t help out enough and were too messy. “If I was your cleaning lady, I would have given notice a long time ago,” she said once.

  She liked to quote the English saying “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.” For one thing, she felt that cleaning—even more than cooking—was a thankless task, the results of which were obliterated swiftly and unremarked, as though it had never happened. Secondly, she felt that “maintaining cleanliness and order, if you put too much time and care into it, works against the peace and happiness of the household.” So she did what absolutely had to be done, and that was more than enough. Even the laundry, which she had to haul out to dry in the yard or on the roof, would have been enough, but then there was also shopping, helping with homework, and battling our teachers.