Kippenberger

by Searls, Damion, Kippenberger, Susanne

  Or else to the Kinderhaus , or kids’ house. They redid the old laundry shed in the garden for us, and for the grown-ups to use for holiday celebrations. In fact, in our family everybody had their own house: the ducks, the chickens, the pigeons, our father, and Martin, too. There was a wooden hut, the “Martin hermitage,” tucked away in a little woods connected to the garden, but he rarely used it. What would he want with an isolated hut in the woods? He was never a recluse. He wanted to be with other people.

  Behind our Kinderhaus was a playground with a slide, merry-go-round, swing, sandbox, and seesaw—all from a miners’ kindergarten that had just closed. The mining crisis had already begun, and the feudal world was crumbling around us. A big slate blackboard hung on the fence, with a tree trunk in front of it as a bench—that was the school. We could sit behind the wheel of an old, brightly painted BMW and play driving. We used the nearby brickworks as a kiln for our little clay bowls and figurines. We could play croquet on the grass, hopscotch and double Dutch on the sidewalks. There was a big suitcase in the attic with costumes for dressing up.

  The gigantic garden, as big as a park and surrounded by huge old trees and two little wild forests, was there to enjoy. Everything practical—vegetable garden, greenhouse—our father tore down and then started to rebuild. So the garden filled up with bushes and trees, lilacs, goldenrain, tree of heaven, roses and sumacs, classical columns and billboard posts, a flagpole, a bathtub for cooling the drinks at parties and then the guests. More and more sculptures populated the garden: Genevieve the Pretty and others of less classical beauty—a cowboy and horse, and a hunter with dachshund, made by a retired miner who caused a sensation as an outsider artist. There was a large terrace, where later the Hollywood swing stood, and next to the old weeping willow was a lake where the ducks swam.

  Other people had dogs and cats. If it were up to our mother, we would have had no animals at all—she didn’t care about them, and they made extra work for her when she had more than enough to do. But since it was up to our father—who at least knew enough not to buy monkeys; if he had, our mother threatened, she would leave him—we did have animals: bantam chickens, goldfish, turtles, and two ducks, Angelina and Antonius. Nobody in the family, our mother wrote, had any more of a clue about animals than she did, but “in place of actual knowledge they substituted enthusiasm. The consequence for the turtles was a rapid death.” The exotic birds that our father bought all quickly died off, too. The only animal tough enough to survive in our family was Little Hans, the canary.

  “The Kippenberger Children’s Carnival,” with our father as clown

  (Reiner Zimnik, 1961) © Reiner Zimnik

  Our house was always full of children, full of pictures, full of visitors. You were never alone. “House others happily” was the pastor’s parting advice for our parents at their wedding, but they would have done so anyway. A year later, in Aachen, they had cards printed up with our father’s drawings to use for inviting guests. In Frillendorf, the door was always open: whoever came, invited or not, was welcome to sit down and join in.

  There were nannies and au pairs, live-in maids and men who helped around the house (or didn’t). Friends’ and relatives’ sons and daughters who needed a place to stay while at school or in a residency lived with us; so did various children stranded in Frillendorf. Petra Lützkendorf, the artist, brought her son Pippus to stay with us for a couple of weeks. The “Belgian fleas” spent their holidays there too: two siblings, a brother and sister, whose mother was in a psychiatric ward and whose professor father had his head in the clouds, so they were left to hop and leap over our tables, benches, and armoires at will, grabbing onto anything and everything. Pedro, the fat waiter from Martin’s regular bar, lived under our roof for a while, too, since he had no place of his own. For a long while, in fact, until our mother finally threw him out.

  Sigga came to stay with us from Iceland, Chantal from Belgium, and Genevieve from French Switzerland. Carolyn came from Wales for what should have been a couple of weeks, but she stayed a whole year. She was short and fat and uncomplicated, and the family chaos didn’t bother her at all. We all loved Carolyn and later went to visit her in Ffestiniog; Martin stayed with her a few times.

  “Easter with the Kippenbergers” (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)

  © Reiner Zimnik

  Pelle, the student from Norway who wanted to work for a couple of weeks in Essen, was our mother’s favorite. Dear, cheerful Pelle, who was training for the Olympics.

  They all came and went. Only Heia and Köckel were always there: our neighbors. Without them we would have sunk into chaos, and our lives would not have functioned. Köckel fired up the old coal heater in the basement every morning and helped out whenever anything needed fixing. Energetic Heia kept things running smoothly, looked after the little ones, and kept her cool, even when her hand got caught in the blender. She roasted the meatballs and fried the potato pancakes that our mother didn’t know how to cook for us, and that we used for eating contests (Bine won: she ate twelve). The kitchen was our favorite place, because, among other reasons, it was the only warm room in the whole huge house. We ate there, talked there, drew, fought, baked cookies, and did our homework, and Martin monkeyed around and imitated people.

  Our father called us “the Piranha family”: wherever there was something to eat, we threw ourselves at it, afraid that otherwise we would find nothing left. There were never enough treats; actually, there were sweets only when visitors brought them. But with seven family members, houseguests, and grandparents, it was almost always someone’s birthday: the only day in the year when the child was in charge of who was invited, what game to play, and what food to eat. Other holidays we celebrated included Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, Children’s Day (which our parents had introduced specially for us), the Mother-Isn’t-Home Party, Confirmation Day (in “special house style”), May Day, and Summer.

  “St. Martin’s Day Procession at the Kippenbergers’” (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)

  © Reiner Zimnik

  Our parents were in their element as hosts: relaxed, happy, and generous. And they enjoyed themselves at least as much as their guests. “They didn’t go around serving their guests,” one cousin said. “They were ahead of their time that way.” They just put a big pot of soup on the stove for people to serve themselves, and a hundred eggs next to the stove for them to cook on their own. After a meal our mother sometimes even pressed aprons into the hands of the astonished men so that they would help with the dishes.

  On December 6, St. Nicholas came to our house in person in his fur hat and loden coat and with his golden book. For advent it was the trombone choir, and at Christmas we hosted our whole extended family, who came back again for Easter. Several hundred eggs would be painted, Father would haul them into the garden by the bucketful, and many of them would be found only weeks later, or never.

  Every year there were two Carnivals, one for the children and one for the grownups. Our parents would dress as Caesar and Cleopatra, or Zeus and Helen of Troy; our mother especially liked dressing up in slutty costumes: “cheap and trashy with all my heart.” “They kissed each other, loved each other, stayed in love, tragedies ensued,” our father wrote. “It took three years before some people surmounted the moral crisis of our first Carnival celebration in Aachen.” There was often a theme for the party, usually from a play or movie: “Greek Seeking Greekess,” “Suzie Wong,” “Guys and Dolls.”

  Even for the summer party, people dressed in costume and danced until dawn. The massive buffet was set up on a market stall—pickled eggs, cucumbers, peasant bread—and we children got to drink whatever was left in all the opened cola bottles the next morning. Every party was planned, with things to watch and things to do, from a polonaise to a pantomime show to a ride in a donkey cart. “We will expect you at 4 p.m. and assume you will stay late,” read the invitation to the advent party of 1962, where more than a hundred guests spread out through the whole house and into the side houses, too, to “mak
e, glue, decorate, bake, paint, dress, arrange, and photograph” under the direction of the master and mistress of the house, artists, and other friends. The church trombone choir appeared on the stairs. Guests were asked not to come empty-handed: “We also plan to collect clothes, toys, groceries, etc. for the elderly and needy in our community and for packages to send to the East.”

  Our mother said once, “No one should ever say they don’t have time for Christmas preparations. I would say that they don’t have the heart, or the imagination.” For weeks leading up to the holiday, presents were wrapped, cookies baked, gifts put together; on the day after Christmas our mother would lie in bed, sick with exhaustion. “You love to overdo it,” our father told her. “Conserving your energy is not your strong suit.”

  By New Year’s, everybody was worn out—except our father and Martin. Our father tried his best to keep us up, he wrote, but “Mother always gets tired and then there’s nothing to be done. Father is offended that no one appreciates his fireworks. Everyone’s yawning or snoring.” Only Martin went along with him to the neighbors next door, “since he likes dancing so much, and he’s right, it’s fun.”

  Even when they were away from home our parents threw parties, for example in Munich at the house of our uncle Hanns, the youngest of our father’s three brothers. “Five Minutes Each” was the name of this party: only artist friends were invited, and “everyone is allowed to put on their own show, if they want, and if they don’t want to, they don’t have to.” One couple played guitars, a poet read, a sculptor brought out his sculptures, an illustrator told stories. The rest danced or contented themselves with being the audience.

  The parties were always raucous, even when only the family members were there. In fact, those were often the loudest. No one went around on eggshells at the Kippenbergers’. “Uncle Otto made fun of Uncle Albrecht and father defended him. Then Leo was teased and Albrecht started defending him. In any case, it was all very lively.” Too lively for some people. At one legendary Christmas party, when the whole extended family had come over for turkey (three turkeys, to be precise), one uncle’s posh fiancée left the house in tears after a dirty joke and never returned to her intended again. Every party was a test of fortitude.

  On weekends, we usually took day trips. We were dragged everywhere, to exhibitions, to Castle Benrath, to the Weseler Forest, and to the Münster area, with its moated castles and the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Rüschhaus, which we visited again and again. Martin sought her out again later; for his 1997 sculpture exhibition, he set up a subway entrance next to the poet’s sculpture.

  Every year on St. Martin’s Day, November 11, we traveled to Cappenberg to visit the Jansens, who also had five children. They had a big house with a fireplace and a dollhouse, and there was a lamplit procession with a real St. Martin on a real horse, which our Martin was allowed to ride, too. He was so proud of his namesake and this privilege that he was happy to share his bag of candy later. On All Saints Day we were allowed to go to the carnival in Soest with the Jansens: first came pea soup with the Sachses, then everyone got a roll of coins and could go crazy with it, and when we got lost we would be whistled back with the special family code-melody.

  Trip to the Drachenfels: Father, Sabine, Susanne, Martin, Pippus (son of the artist Petra Lützkendorf), Mother, and two au pairs (l. to r.)

  © Kippenberger Family

  On Pentecost we went to Siegen, to the little manor house where our gay great-uncle lived with his Silesian housekeeper; in early summer, it was off to Drachenfels, where the first thing we did was have our picture taken in a photography studio—draped on and around a donkey, or behind a cardboard cutout of an airplane, with our arms hanging loose over the side. We children had never been on a real plane. Then it was time for a donkey ride or a hike on foot up the mountain, where we stopped into a hiker’s restaurant and were shoved into a corner, since families with lots of children were considered antisocial at the time.

  All of our activities and celebrations were recorded—in pictures, home movies, photos, and words—by our mother, our father, and our artist friends. Petra Haselhorst-Lützkendorf, Karin Walther, Ernst and Annemarie Graupner, Elisabeth and Bernhard Kraus, Reiner Zimnik, Luis Delefant, Wiltrud Roser and her sister Hildegund von Debschitz, Janosch, and so on. Our life was turned into art. We were embroidered, painted, sewn, woven—all hanging on our own walls. It wasn’t a matter of good likenesses, only of the idea: like Wiltrud Roser, many of the artists didn’t know us in person at all when they received the assignment.

  Polonaise at a summer party on the Frillendorf lawn

  © Kippenberger Family

  We look beautiful, harmonious, and cheerful in all of these family pictures except one: the large group portrait painted by Ilse Häfner-Mode, a small, lively woman with a pageboy haircut and a pipe in her mouth. We had to spend hours in her Düsseldorf studio—as tiny a room as she was a person, though it nevertheless also served as her apartment—sitting and standing as her models with the puppets and figurines that populated her house. We never looked so sad in our lives. The painting is as melancholy as all her other pictures. She was an expressionist who had studied in Berlin in the twenties, and a Jewish woman who had been in a concentration camp, but that was never spoken of, only whispered. Later, after our mother’s death, there was never any conflict between us siblings about our inheritance except over this one piece: Martin, who had been sent to study painting with her as a boy, absolutely wanted it at all costs.

  Contemporary art wasn’t something our parents bought anonymously from unknown artists—they wanted to meet the artists in person. They became friends with most of them, and most of them came to visit us. Janosch was over once as well: still young at the time, not yet famous, he bewitched us children with his magical art and sold our parents “two large oil paintings, one to Father because Mother liked it so much, and one to Mother because she wanted something to give Father for his birthday.” He also made a little illustrated book, From the Life of a Miner, clearly based on our father.

  Like many of the other artists, Janosch lived in Munich. Munich and Düsseldorf were the cities our parents visited to see exhibitions, go to plays and restaurants, see friends and relatives, and shop for art and crafts, loden coats, jewelry, pottery, furniture, and presents.

  Our large house filled up. In our living room were Arne Jacobsen’s “Swan” and “Egg,” Braun’s “Snow White’s Coffin,” and plastic stools from Milan that you could spin around. No wall units, no matching living room sets: individual pieces were mixed together. Our parents wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things, and what was modern was beautiful: Olivetti typewriters, Georg Jensen silverware. They were confident in their tastes, and they were right to be: things they bought at the time as avant-garde are now shown in museums as classics.

  The heavy Biedermeier furniture they inherited was exiled to a room of its own that was actually never used, except when a great many people were visiting. “So fancy we are!” our father wrote. “Or at least: So uncomfortable our chairs are!” Still, our parents were thoroughly bourgeois. We all had to wear pigtails until our confirmation, except for Babs, the oldest (this was one of our father’s ideas); we all had to be home in the evening precisely on time. Our mother was not conceited but she could not stand stupidity, and she also knew the limits of her own tolerance. One of her favorite movies was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play a liberal couple who are anything but pleased when their daughter brings a black man home.

  We always prayed before going to sleep and said grace before meals. “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, / And let these gifts to us be blest”—here we clasped our hands—“ Bon appetit! Let’s all eat!” Then we threw ourselves on the food. The god we believed in was not a threatening, punishing god but a protector. Our mother believed in guardian angels, she had favorite saints (St. Anthony, finder of lost things, and St. Barbara, protector of miners), and she named her son
after St. Martin, who shared what he had. Our parents’ religion was a rather worldly kind: political, artistic, and, above all, social. In 1961 they founded a youth group in Frillendorf, “in a battle against Pastor B.’s pious club”; our mother helped care for the needy; our father, as a presbyter, had influence in the parish. Later he gave up his office, over an artistic argument with the church: the paraments (hangings for the pulpit, altar, and lectern) that the pastor had commissioned from one artist were opposed by the other presbyters, and “Father cannot bear intolerance.” It was said of Pastor Wullenkord that he wanted to be a musician but was the son of missionaries; at Martin’s baptism, in Dortmund, he spoke “more about Mozart and Goethe than about our dear Lord.”

  Every Christmas Eve morning, we were sent around the community to visit the old people. Our mother was glad to be rid of us during the final preparations, and the old people were glad to have someone to talk to. They told the same stories every year, mostly about their time as refugees in 1945. Every year, old Mr. Jäger told us what it was like when he and his wife had fled from East Prussia, now Poland, to Frillendorf on a horse cart. Every year, old Mrs. Haupt baked us New Year’s cookies and delighted us with her humor. When her health took a turn for the worse, at over ninety years old, and she lay on the sofa moaning, “Ah! Ah! Ah!” Finally she yelled at herself, “Say B for once, for God’s sake!”

  Eventually, the house was emptier, quieter too—we were no longer children—and in 1971 we left Frillendorf and moved to a new building in Bergerhausen. Everything there was middle-class, green, and boring. “Whoever, like us, has felt true joy / Can never be unhappy again,” our mother wrote in a letter to a friend. The Ruhr District as we knew it came to an end as well. “Have you been to Essen?” asked the Dannon blueberry yogurt container that Martin reproduced in Through Puberty to Success. “Today there is only one coal mine operating in Essen, and the derricks are almost all gone. Essen’s biggest business today is retail. Essen is the Ruhr’s number one shopping city. Come take a shopping trip to Essen today!”