Kippenberger
Page 8
HINTERZARTEN
In October 1962, at nine and a half, Martin was sent to the Black Forest, to the “state-licensed educational home” of Tetenshof, in Hinterzarten/Titisee. He wasn’t the first in the family to go to boarding school: after Babs had failed her high school entrance exam, she was sent to Bensheim, from which she would eventually be able to return to the Essen schools as a transfer student. Eventually she studied law. Tina followed Martin to boarding school the following year, as a preventative measure and to spare her the possible humiliation of failing. She stayed two years.
In Martin’s estate—among kitschy postcards from Florence, childhood drawings, letters from all periods of his life, cards he received for confirmation, photographs, and tickets—there was a brochure from the Tetenshof of those days. Children frolicked, fresh-faced, pious, and in harmony with nature, between the Black Forest cabin and the Alpine pasture, the girls with blond ponytails and the boys in lederhosen shorts with a front flap (like the ones Martin himself always used to wear). Happy children among happy cows, playing ball or shoveling hay, making pastoral music on recorders and guitars, washing up (caption: “Preparing for the Inspection of the Ears”). A letter from the housemistress that Martin reprinted in Through Puberty to Success. said: “We still have the courage to swim against the tide of the times: no television, newspapers, cheap tabloids, sensationalism, etc., of the kind that our children are exposed to every day in city schools and public advertising. Only good books, hikes, modest celebrations that the pupils organize themselves, making music, and closeness to nature.”
The boarding school included whole mountain meadows and real agricultural projects. “Inhibited children grow free and happy once again!” the brochure promised. “The work duty of 45 minutes a day is a great help toward socialization and fitting in. We have researched it as a positive factor in healing.” Parents, aunts, cousins, grandmas, grandpas, and anyone else who might take it into their heads “to visit the ‘poor child’ away at boarding school, to take him out and spoil him,” are explicitly brought back in line: just don’t! Tetensdorf is not a hotel, and every visit ruins the schedule and discipline of another child. “You have no idea how much it disrupts the classroom.” Such visits “are what make the child homesick, and prevent the creation of feelings of home here, which are necessary for the stay to be a success.” Half the children are from broken homes, the housemistress wrote to our mother, who had apparently written asking to visit. Visits that fly by are therefore not welcome—they only cause tension. Apparently not all the parents obeyed these demands. One time, Martin wrote in a letter, a father landed on the home’s meadow with a hang glider. “He wanted to see his son again, for once.”
Decades later, Martin would tell Diedrich Diederichsen how he had once stood howling and crying all alone on a hill. His classmates had told on him because he had “jerked off again, until the bed shook.”
Day-to-day life was strictly regimented. After the children woke up, beds were aired, teeth brushed, and shoes polished. Then came porridge for breakfast and, afterward, silent prayer. Respect, gratitude, and obedience were among the stated educational goals. “The Word of God is the foundation and guiding light of the house.” Everything was so pious that the children had to call the women who ran the school “Mother.” When Martin came home for vacations, he had a repertoire of prayers he could say and religious songs he could sing. Even our mother understood that all that silent prayer would “gradually drive him up the wall.”
Letters from home kept him up to date. Our mother told her “dear boy” about Babs’s confirmation in full detail, “so that it will be almost like you were there to see it yourself.” In November 1963 our father wrote, “It’s a shame you couldn’t be here, so here is a report about everything we’ve been doing in the past few weeks!” Ten typed pages telling him all about what he’d missed. There was a party for the Graupners, an artist couple, where nowhere near all the invited guests showed up, “only” a hundred. It started at the opening at the Schaumann Gallery, “where Father gave a speech and everyone clapped. It put everyone into a good mood, which was mutually contagious, so they were enthusiastic about the paintings and fought over who would get to buy which.” Afterward everyone came back to our studio, where our mother was waiting, “so she only heard Father’s beautiful speech secondhand. That’s too bad.” One of the guests was another painter, whom they had never heard of—“an abstract painter, wearing a shawl instead of the tie that you would expect. Ah, artists.” Our father had set up a canvas in the studio, and every artist there had to paint on it in oil: “They had no choice.” It was, as Thomas Wachweger would later call it, Zwangsbeglückung —mandatory cheer—followed by eating, drinking, and dancing.
Then came descriptions of the All Saints fair in Soest and St. Martin’s Day at the Jensens’. He sent a carbon copy of the same letter to Tina at boarding school, and she was furious:
Well I must say, you have a nice life! On Sunday you go to the fair. Who has to go for a nature walk? I do!
Who goes to St. Martin’s Day procession on Monday? You!
Who has to go beddy-bye? Me!
Soon it’ll go a step too far.
Everyone at home longed for Martin to return. “My dear little Kerl,” our mother wrote him, “Bine and Sanni are already counting how many bedtimes they have until you’re back.” When he came home for the first time, at Easter break, the whole family went to meet him at the station.
He doesn’t seem to have had a bad time at Tetenshof. “Martin is happily back in the whirl of things here,” Mrs. Tetens wrote to Essen after the 1963 Easter vacation. “Our Kerl was glad to go back again after the holiday,” our mother said in the summer of 1964, “and stuck to his opinion even though both his older sisters tried by any means possible to talk him out of it, those rascals! He is happy and in good spirits, he’s not causing problems, not a crybaby anymore, and he’s fitting in well.” His proletariat sickness, too, seemed to have been cured by the Black Forest: in Martin’s medical report of 1963, Nurse Walli attests to his “fresh, healthy appearance, bad posture, no other findings.”
The most important thing, though, was that Martin had found a supporter in Tetenshof: Dr. Hans Groh, his homeroom teacher, “who has already worked wonders with our Kerl.” Suddenly there was a “Very Good” on his report card, in drawing and handicrafts. For conduct, diligence, and participation he got an A–/B+. Only spelling remained merely “Satisfactory.” In 1964, our mother told Martin about a letter she had received from Dr. Groh: “He wrote me to say that you’re a good boy and that he’s glad he can keep you for another year because he likes you so much. Make him happy by studying hard and not goofing around so much, ok?” One year later, the teacher sent our mother another letter, which Martin would later reprint in one of his first catalogs, Mr. Kippenberger , next to a collage he made in 1962, presumably at Tetenshof.
Groh wrote Martin a recommendation for the Odenwald School and hoped that
I managed to pack in everything that could help Martin. He is in good spirits and looks forward to sharing a room with his cousin. If his temperament and disposition stay the same, you won’t need to worry about anything. Martin has managed some good grades recently, too, so he is starting to be prouder of himself. The serious inhibitions in his artistic effort have disappeared without a trace, so that sometimes he even seems to me too mature in his pictures. Since I don’t know his models—probably pictures, calendars, and books he has at home—and since I don’t want to ask about them, for obvious reasons, I don’t know what aspects are his own creation and what is only imitation. But if the pictures are really outgrowths of Martin himself, then it seems to me his path in life is already decided.
Martin didn’t only draw, he also wrote, in fact nonstop: letters to parents, sisters, neighbors, au pairs, grandparents, aunts, friends. He wrote them on his personal stationery, which Petra, one of our parents’ artist friends, had designed for him, with an illustration of Martin runn
ing with books under his arm. More often than not he drew his own pictures on the page, too—pictures of the village, pictures of skiing, self-portraits. He personalized every envelope by making a little drawing, and even the sender’s name was turned into an artwork: a little house with his name as the roof. The kippenbergerization of the world had begun.
Our mother was the same way. She couldn’t draw at all (just like her daughters), not even a stick figure, but she glued. All the presents she wrapped for weeks before Christmas—for friends in the East, godchildren, relatives—were decorated with little pictures: flowers, angels, and whatever else she ran across and cut out. The man at the post office drove her crazy about it: “That is not allowed (he says). Why not??? (I ask). rules. What rules?” She called him Fussbudget but bewitched him with words and homemade pear jelly (which no one in the family liked anyway) until he accepted the packages after all.
Martin never wrote a word about Inspections of the Ears or work duty in his letters—maybe because he knew that the people in charge of the school read them. He just wrote about slide shows and movies, games of cowboys and Indians or Lego, plays and soccer games (“We won 1-0 for us”); he wrote about another child’s birthday, where he put on eight layers of clothes, one on top of another, and looked as fat as our neighbor Mrs. Böhler. In a school play, he was cast as a deaf grandmother: “I sure looked funny. Totally like Frillendorfer trash.” Even if he didn’t read much himself, the children were read Greek myths; in summer there was gym class in the forest, and skiing every day in the winter. “Wolf-Dieter made a real plank-salad. In real words: he broke his skis.” Martin sent his skiing certificate (second prize) home so that Mother could keep it safe. One time Mr. Tetens, the housemaster, brought ice cream for everyone, as much as they wanted. “And to finish he gave orders: ‘Clean the plate with your tongue!’ We all cheered and started licking away like pigs.”
Along with his experiences, he wrote made-up stories and illustrated them with drawings. He gave our mother an elephant story for her birthday—very dramatic, with Martin himself appearing as a character—to be continued in a week. “With five colorfull pictures and three sentimentil drawings.”
He also told the story of the Kennedy assassination as a cops and robbers story and illustrated it with a coffin. He kept this letter to the end of his life and reprinted it in Through Puberty to Success :
He was shot 3 times in the head. He was broght right away to the hospital. He died. The shotts came from the villa. Oswald did it. Everybody was sad. Later a nightclub owner shott im. He’s in jail. – The End.
That’s what it aproximatly said in the paper.
Your, Kerl.
“The spelling was still extremely strange, to tell you the truth,” our mother said, “but the style of his letters was often amazing.”
He wasn’t just writing letters—he was writing them for an audience and hoping for good reviews. “I’m always very happy when someone says: ‘That letter was very good.’” At the end of the letters, after “God Bless,” there was usually a P.S. with his requests: for example, Babs’s brown parka and the red one from Zandvoort, and three cakes and a visit from Grandma for his birthday, plus, “dear Mommy, send me sweets becuase I dont have any sweets and I have to just look wile the others eat theres.”
But studying was still not his thing. Once when he was sick in bed, he decided he wanted to learn English but “I always fall asleep and dream about ice cream and marcipan.” “He’s a treasure,” our mother said, “even if he’s not a treasure who’s ready for middle school.”
HONNEROTH
In April 1965, Martin graduated from Tetenshof, which only went up to fifth grade. For the next three years he went to Honneroth, a boarding school near Altenkirchen in the Westerwald. The contrast could not have been greater. Honneroth had just opened, and the children lived not in the idyllic Black Forest but in what was practically a construction site. Running water was still being installed, and barracks were only gradually being replaced with real buildings. And the children were expected to do serious work to help out. There were “Work Days” instead of classes over and over again: planting trees and flowers, building huts. Afternoons were given over to “practical work,” in other words, pulling weeds. “Martin took good part again in the practical work,” the housemaster praised. Martin saw it otherwise: “During the practical work I sometimes have the feeling that I’m only working for Mr. Hoffmann. I’ve been working on the new school building for days. We clean and sweep and wipe, but always for the Hoffmanns.”
Any student who talked back was “sent to jail,” which meant working after school or running laps around the dining hall before class while the other students had breakfast. Our sister Bine was jealous—she would have liked to do that. She was with Martin at Honneroth for a year, one of ten girls with the seventy boys. It was an adventure for her. But she was never allowed to do laps for punishment: in the end, she was always excused from punishment because she was too nice and had too sunny a disposition. Not Martin. He got “jail” all the time (for example, when he made himself a little soup with the immersion heater) and was always being slapped. As our mother wrote: since “the missus” apparently looks funny when she’s mad, “our Kerl has to laugh and then he gets even more punishment, which he doesn’t seem to mind. That’s how you’re victimized when you have a sense of comedy.”
He himself told Wiltrud Roser, “I’d really like to write a book this summer, if I can. About evil.”
There was no Dr. Groh in Altenkirchen, no one who supported Martin or expected anything from him. The new housemaster’s evaluation comes across as rather unfriendly: at Easter in 1966, Herr Hoffmann wrote (“not for the pupil’s eyes”) that “we have unfortunately not made much progress in the battle against Martin’s disorderliness. He is still receiving demerits for failure to keep his notebooks clean and proper, and he continues to strew his things through all the rooms in the home.” His chaos would cost him: anyone who left something lying around in the hall was penalized a dime. “Martin has to turn in the most dimes. Perhaps the parents could help by not giving Martin quite as many toys to bring along as they have done. It is also hardly possible for us to protect the sometimes very valuable toys from being used by the other students, and then Martin is often sad when this or that nice toy is damaged.” But, he conceded, “In spite of Martin’s disorderliness it’s impossible not to like the boy for his original and cheerful sense of humor.”
Martin called Honneroth “my horrorschool.” “It stinks, it’s so boring,” he wrote to Sebastian Roser, and he looked forward to finally seeing his friend again, “doing stupid things and taking people in.” Boredom tormented him constantly, and any change of scene was welcome, even in the form of Chancellor Kiesinger. Martin’s report of the politician’s visit in 1967 is very dramatic: a helicopter landing, lots of pushing and jostling, Martin rushing to the car and managing to shake hands with him “as he ran by.” On the other hand, a visit to the circus was “Garbage. A miserable circus. The acrobats fell into the nets 3x in a row, the clowns were totally unfunny and stupid.” What got on his nerves the most were the teachers who laughed anyway.
His confirmation class “makes me throw up.” The best thing about it was that he could go into the city, check out shops, eat French fries and ice cream, and go to the fair. Sunday services were absolutely the only chance to get away from school. He spent the money for the church on candy. Many of the students were picked up by their parents for weekends at home, but Martin and Bine came home only on vacations. Every now and then they went to stay with Aunt Margit and Uncle Jost and their sons Micky and Pit in Siegen. When he was twelve, Martin wrote that he had smoked with Pit over the weekend, played on ditch-diggers outside, read Mickey Mouse comic books, and bought a bag of danishes that “we scarfed down with great pleasure.” Then TV. One time they almost burned down our great-uncle’s manor house in Weidenau.
The time of Greek myths and Christian songs was over. Painting a
nd drawing were the only things he enjoyed. He asked for Janosch’s address, and Zimnik’s, and Otto Eglau’s in Berlin, Clemens Pasch’s in Düsseldorf—all our parents’ artist friends. “What I need are skeches, beginings, scrap paper, desines. For the walls of my room and also to copy.” He asked Wiltrud Roser for old sketches “even if they’re just scribbles. I need models.”
He griped about the boarding-school food: the horrible gruel, the “fish with old potatoes and mustard sauce: Yuck!” Even the noodle salad managed to taste bad. The thirteen-year-old Martin had only good things to say about the art teacher: “She is pretty, with long hair, beautiful legs, and a thin figure.” He also pimped out his older sisters (who were not at the boarding school, needless to say), with the result that, as our mother wrote, the sisters held him in much greater esteem: “He goes about it in real style. Brings photos of Barbara and Bettina to the older boys who seem acceptable to him; his ideas are practically genius. He recently sprayed water all over one of these boys, intending to offer him a photo of his sister to make up for it. And in fact the reparations were accepted with obvious pleasure.”
In one of his letters, Martin drew himself, as he so often did, with a crew cut, big ears, and a broad smile: “Me, in a good mood.”
He wrote nonstop even when there was nothing to write about, spinning his spiderweb in all directions in order to stay connected to the world. His favorite time for writing these letters was during Latin class, which he found almost unbearably boring. They read differently than the Tetenshof letters, maybe because they did not have to pass through a censor, maybe because he was older, and maybe because he was having such a bad time at this school. After a visit from our mother, she wrote, “he poured out tears when we said goodbye that went right to my heart.”
He felt abandoned. “One Saturday,” Hoffmann the housemaster wrote, “he had expected to be picked up by relatives and had already put on his Sunday suit for the occasion, but when they did not come, my wife suggested he change back. Martin refused these instructions and went around the rest of the day and evening in his Sunday suit.”