Martin certainly got enough attention—he made sure of it by being so fresh. He got his coddling in a different way: even though his health was “thoroughly satisfactory,” the housemaster wrote, “he gets himself mothered by the nurse: a prescription, or applying a band-aid.” He demanded love. “St. Nicholas approaches!” he wrote in one letter, like a threat. “Write me!” was the demand underlying all his letters. “Write me already like I write to you. Pappa too please.” Once he drew the whole long journey of a letter, from dropping it in the mailbox down its long route to him, where he awaited it with arms raised in delight. “Since I still havent gotten any letters or packages, I feel forced to write to you. This is already my third letter.”
No matter how many letters he did get, they were never enough.
Was it really true that he—the troublemaker, the back-talker—received so much less mail at boarding school than darling Bine? Probably not, but that’s how it felt to him.
In June 1966, when he was thirteen, he wrote a despairing letter that he later reprinted in Through Puberty to Success :
Dear Daddy, dear Mom!!
12:31 a.m.!!
I got a postcard from you yesterday, it said “I look forward to your letter, hopefully I’m not waiting in vain.” Three guesses who has been waiting for the mail here. It’s been four weeks already since I’ve heard a peep from you. But dear little Sabina, sweet darling Sabinie gets one package after another. Every time, Mr. Hoffmann says Kippenberger Sabine has mail, nothing for you Martin I’m afraid! Try to guess how disappointed I am every time. Every time I think “tomorrow I’ll get something from home!” But then it’s again nothing. Finaly a card comes and I think “now I’ll hear a little about what’s going on at home.” But no, another disapointment. But Bine, dear sweet Bine, you have a nice story to tell her, yes indeed. I’m bad, I don’t get any mail. Doesn’t matter. Packages are too expensive anyway. So it’s better to do it “Ladies first!” and that means Bine. I don’t get any news about how you’re all doing, what’s new in the garden or the house? Even the weather!!!!! None of that matters, he doesn’t get to hear those things only Bine. I have no one who writes to me anymore. No friend in the world.
Four weeks ago I heard from you i.e. Tina on the phone and I said you should send me and Bine a little package. But I guess you have to ask 1000x in letters first. I don’t know, sometimes you only think about Bine and forgett me. Yes, yes, that’s what I have to think every day. I think about you the whole time. And you? “Yes well it doesn’t matter.” Bine told me today that we got a Holliwood swing but Kerl doesn’t need to know that. Bine gets a letter, not Kerl, Bine gets a package, not Kerl, Bine gets a second package, nothing for Kerl. I’m supposed to just sit here all by myself. So I hope you now know what I’m thinking about.
At the bottom, he drew a furious face with a telephone: “Call me please. Write me!! And send a package! If you don’t I’ll run away! But I probly will anyway. Your dumb Martin.” In the margin, he scribbled a request to send him Aunt Ev’s and great-aunt Lissy’s addresses: “If you write me already I’ll write back otherwise I’d rather write someone else!!!” Finally he added in the margin in small letters: “I’m gonna kick the bucket on Sunday if I havent heard anything from you by then. And if you tell me that you don’t only write to darling Bine! I don’t get any mail from anyone. I’m all alone here.”
That same summer, he took a camping trip to Scandinavia with our parents, Tina, and Babs. In the book our father wrote about the trip, Martin is a lively child, longing to see only two things: French fry stands and toy stores. When he goes swimming he doesn’t want to come out of the water, and when a lifeguard holds out a cigar box full of swimming badges he can’t resist. “He is always interested in badges.” He didn’t let himself be led around on the vacation: “Martin demanded a plan.” He took the guidebook in hand and looked for campsites “with all the amenities.” When they stayed in a bed and breakfast, he entered his profession as “Student” in the guest book.
The following year, he left Honneroth. The report card was covered with “Satisfactory” and “Poor.” Art: “Very Good.”
The only person who didn’t worry in the least about Martin’s future was Martin. He knew he was an artist. At fifteen, our mother said, “he was filled with boundless optimism and saw himself already raking in the millions, he wouldn’t work for less!”
ADOLESCENCE
“Honneroth,” our mother summed up, “was more of a step backward for [the children] than forward. Our Kerl had a nice long nap for three years and now I’m trying to get his totally somnolent brain back into gear.” When it came to school, she wouldn’t succeed. He attended a private high school in Essen, where they paid just as little attention to their students as at Honneroth. After failing to pass sixth grade for a second time, he had to leave the school without graduating.
The only school he liked and did well at was Aenne Blömecke’s dance school. Chubby Miss Blömecke fell prey to his charm and dancing ability, though she did occasionally admonish him, “Mr. Kippenberger, not so much shaking your behind back and forth, please.” For the ball at the end of the year, he had our mother dress him up: velvet suit, tailored white shirt, giant black bow tie. “He looked like Franz Liszt, The Early Years.”
At ten, along with pencils (black and colored), erasers, drawing paper, and an easel, he asked for a camera (“since Father has one too”), plus a wristwatch, long pants, and a tie. He carried the camera like our father did, proudly hanging down over his belly like a part of his clothing. “He is more vain than all four girls put together,” our mother noted down when he asked for more clothes and a fancy Schmincke paint box for the next holiday.
Martin and our father, passport photo booth, mid-1970s. Martin used this photo as the title image of his Homesick Highway 90 catalog
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
He knew that an artist needs appropriately artistic clothes, just as an actor needs a wardrobe. So he always decked himself out for his appearances. Before embarking on his first long trip (a couple of weeks in South America at age sixteen, working his way there and back as a cabin boy), he equipped himself in Hamburg with two Hawaiian shirts, sunglasses, polo shirt, straw hat, belt, and pipe. At home, our mother loaned him her Indian shawl of brightly colored silk—out of pity, she said: “He has such a sense for beauty, color, and form, and what is he allowed to wear? Practically nothing decorative with bright, happy colors.”
It turned out, though, that men’s fashion was changing more quickly in those years than our mother was comfortable with. “He looks like Rasputin,” she wrote when Martin was seventeen, the same year that she saw him as young Liszt. She continued, writing to her friend Wiltrud Roser:
That center part, that sheep’s-wool overcoat (old Finnish military surplus, not to say very old, and with bullet holes in various places! or holes of some kind). He wears it night and day now, he got it for Christmas from Gerd, he said it was what he wanted most of all and we had no idea how filthy the thing was since he bought it in a store with a good reputation. Now it’s even filthier, and it takes a certain social courage to show myself in public as the mother of a son in clothes and a haircut like that. Gerd’s parents have already disowned him in their thoughts, totally written him off. No lack of complaints from that side too, but what can you do. Now I’ll go make some dinner, since there’s nothing else I can do!
He liked to wear a long bedouin robe, long hennaed hair, bright orange overalls, and red toenails. Martin’s friend Hanno Huth said that Martin “was a Gesamtkunstwerk [a total, multimedia work of art]. He not only was loud, he looked loud too.”
Now he was starting to perform the Gesamtkunstwerk in public, too. He had his own domain at home—a large room cut off from the rest of the house—but he was hardly ever there. Instead he was out at the Youth Cultural Center, nicknamed the KZ, [1] where kids met up, played go, and smoked a little pot; or at the Pop-In, a disco; and
most of all at the Podium, a tiny basement bar that was the first of the many “locals” he would have in his life. He spent every evening there, literally every single evening. It opened at seven, and by six thirty at the latest Martin would be sitting on the little wall in front. Martin would later think of Manni, the owner, with his “predilection for Western-style behavior,” as akin to Michel Würthle, the proprietor of the Paris Bar in Berlin.
Helge Schneider describes the Podium in his autobiography as “the only drug and jazz bar to go to” in the city. There was everything there, and lots of it: pot, LSD, and “Dutch capsules,” a kind of Ecstasy, with the appropriate live music to match. Among others who played there were Withüser and Westrup, “two German marijuana-folk-bards from the seventies,” as the German newspaper taz later described them; “German dope music,” another critic wrote. “Have a Joint, My Friend” was the title of one of their songs, from the album Trips & Träume ( Trips & Dreams ). Helge Schneider also describes seeing “a strange band” at the Podium, with “the woman playing the drums naked while the man blew into his bamboo tube. It was Limpe/Fuchs, a so-called ‘free jazz formation.’” The musicians from Kraftwerk played there, too.
Essen, “the shopping city,” “the Ruhr’s white-collar city,” had a flourishing music scene, with one of the most important pop-music venues in the country, the Gruga Hall. Everyone played there: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Nat King Cole, Joan Baez, Louis Armstrong, and German acts like Heintje and Willy Brandt. The rock and pop festivals there were famous nationwide, and people came from all over to see Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, or Frank Zappa, to smoke their first joint, to lose their virginity. Martin saw Hair and Fiddler on the Roof there and pushed his way ahead to meet the actors at the stage door. One of the two short-lived conceptual bands he founded later, in Berlin, was called the Grugas. He painted a picture of the Gruga Hall, too, called From Zappa to Abba.
Martin was one of the youngest patrons of the Podium—in truth he was too young to be allowed in, but he wouldn’t let that stop him. Besides, he was so entertaining. No matter what he was drinking or smoking, his friend Hanno Huth says, he had “as much of a need to communicate as ever.” He also had “the all-important thing,” or “the admission ticket,” in Huth’s words: long hair. Helge Schneider, in his autobiography, describes feelings that Martin must have shared: “Now I feel totally groovy, I’m a hippie. I dance by myself and throw my head back and forth, my long hair needs to fly out, far, far out!” Martin’s first public exhibition was at the Podium: Esso S, an oilcan made out of wood; For the Rhine Fishermen; and a little crab in a box of Lord cigarettes ( Krebs in German means both “crab” and “cancer”), which he called Oh Lord, what have you done to me .
Martin with his friends Birgit and Willi, in the Frillendorf yard, with the artworks they had exhibited in the Podium
© Kippenberger Family
He had long since discovered women, and he fucked them, banged them, screwed them, nailed them—he never ran out of words for it, or of girls either, it seems. Our mother was amazed: didn’t he have horrible, sweaty feet? He was obsessed with sex and apparently had it in the disco itself, at friends’ houses, at whorehouses. One time, after breaking up with a girlfriend who was older than him (as they so often were in those days), he stood grinning in front of our mother and said, “You have your son back, chaste as Joseph!” “I always wished that originality was rewarded more at school,” she commented. “Then our children would do a lot better.”
Our mother was by no means always amused by his drifting life. They had serious fights about it all the time. Every other week he would be screaming into her face that he wanted to run away from home, but he never did it and never would. Instead, he brought home a girlfriend who had run away from her home. “There they stood at the door, St. Martin the Protector and a delicate blonde little thing, trembling like an aspen leaf, wrapped in a maxi coat.” She had gotten into a fight with her mother because her mother had opened a letter from Martin addressed to her, which started with a collage that the mother found obscene, “and what Kerl wrote after the collage was even more obscene (what wouldn’t a boy in puberty write who feels enlightened? Thanks a lot, Oswald Kolle!)” [2]
Martin held his first “happening” in the garden of our house, on a Sunday, with a hundred and fifty people invited. “‘This afternoon a few people and a great band will be coming by,’ Martin announced. What came was an invasion,” our mother wrote. “They camped out in little groups on the grass, like happy cows, chewing the cud and staring into space. Cows chew cud but what were they chewing? Impossible to find out and impossible to guess.” From a distance (in bed with a migraine), she observed how the visitors lazily said hello to each other; to her, they all looked the same. Our father was in his element and made soup from leftovers and whatever was around (“we never had more grateful guests”). The music was loud; the neighbors complained, and the police showed up; finally a real band performed, inside the house. “At ten at night, our son told them they had to go now, his ‘mommy’ (he really said ‘mommy’ and no one thought it was ridiculous, they thought it was sweet and nice, those hippies) was sick and needed to rest. Then they went home, quiet and well behaved, or went wherever, in any case they left.”
The proceedings were not always as well behaved as our mother described here. One time, when the family was away, Martin’s “strange friends” (as our mother called them) showed up, all tripping on LSD. “The earth opened up at our feet, the ceiling came down and rose back up, we couldn’t talk,” says Hanno Huth. When a few older musicians who were even higher came by, Martin gave them a special performance: he went upstairs, shaved off part of his hair in front, pulled on a striped bathrobe with a hood, and came back downstairs with a large, marmalade-smeared knife in one hand and a candle in the other, making horrible faces. It was like a scene from a horror movie. The people there really flipped out. At that moment, Hanno Huth decided that “this was a guy you want as your friend, not your enemy.”
People Martin’s age both admired him and hated him for daring to do the things they were too timid to try. For having such a big mouth and so many girls, and taking hard drugs, and cutting school.
For his sixteenth birthday, Martin got a letter from our grandfather, who was also his godfather. The retired bank manager explained that you can aspire to be free and independent only on a solid foundation:
Special talent alone is not sufficient. The effort to one day raise oneself above indolent mediocrity is inextricably bound with diligence and hard work, first and foremost with expanding one’s knowledge and abilities into as many areas as possible. . . . Your parents responsible for everything, and you living idly from their efforts? You know yourself that that is not right. You bear the responsibility for your own self and no one can take that responsibility away from you. . . . I cannot personally judge your abilities in drawing and painting. The predisposition toward it is in any case inherited, and comes at no charge, for which I hope you are grateful. But it is no less certain that it is not enough to build a life upon.
Discipline, order, and hygiene (“of body and soul”) are what it means to grow up, he wrote. “You must fight with all your strength to subdue yourself and any temptations that come at you from without.”
And since he hadn’t graduated high school, Martin should at least learn a respectable trade. So, under pressure from our parents, he applied to the Böhmer shoe store, which rejected him as an apprentice window-dresser (“and may we suggest a graphic career for you, given your drawing abilities”), and to the Boecker clothes store, which hired him as a decorator in 1970. He entertained the family with his imitations of the end-of-summer sale, but he didn’t find the course of vocational study nearly as entertaining. He cut classes, didn’t go to work, promised and promised to do better in the future but then did whatever he wanted. “But at the same time, he’s a total softie,” our mother wrote. “When he saw how I was in real despair yesterday, he alm
ost started crying himself and gave his word that he would finish vocational school.” In the end, Martin proved to be incompatible with women’s outerwear, and shortly after this touching scene he quit anyway.
He was more interested in getting out and seeing the world. He traveled to Wales for the first time at fifteen, to visit our former au pair. At sixteen he took a ship to Brazil, sharing a cabin with a friend. It wasn’t a pleasure cruise—they worked on board, with Martin as cabin boy. “That meant I could have some of whatever the captain was having: chicken, sausage, potatoes, the best cuts.” After work, at night, he plunged into the swimming pool. “I hope he won’t go to any negro whorehouses or other dens of iniquity,” our mother wrote when he left. “I don’t even want to think about the dangers lurking in every corner, but they do need to leave home sometime.” She was right to be worried—in Brazil he did in fact go to a “negro whorehouse” and had his money stolen there, too. But she’d known for a long time by then that you couldn’t stop Martin from doing what he wanted.
Most of his trips produced more bad news than happy postcards: from England, for example, the telegram “Money stolen.” He was seventeen. Our mother wanted to send him more money but then changed her mind and sent these words instead: “Work, maybe a harvest-time job, be patient. Mother.” It was hard for her to be firm with him, and she consoled herself “by buying a dress, on clearance, 25 marks.” The girls he borrowed money from in England came to Zandvoort to get it back from our mother, and they liked it there so much that they stayed and had a little holiday with us. When Martin finally came back to Zandvoort, he kept Wiltrud Roser up all night telling her about what had happened, furiously repeating over and over again, “Work, child!” He could not comprehend how his own mother could leave him in the lurch like that.
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