Most of the time, though, no matter how annoyed she was, she gave in in the end. Once, when she went to the airport to meet him, furious about something he had done, he just came up to her with outspread arms: Mommy, you’re here, my darling mommy! “What was I supposed to do?” She took him in her arms and laughed. He attacked her with her own weapons. (“From my darling mother my cheerful disposition and fondness for telling stories.”) Whenever he needed money, he had only to make her laugh. Even when she was lying in the hospital, sick with cancer, he entertained her and her friends.
The low point came in 1971, the year our father remarried and we moved out of our house in Frillendorf. Martin ended up in the hospital with drug poisoning. He had, our mother wrote, “taken LSD on three consecutive days and various other things too. Then he collapsed.” The psychologist told her “what I knew myself, that he is insanely sensitive.”
Discharged from the hospital, he went back “to his drug den” that same night. So he was sent to Norway, to our dear friend Pelle, with the hope that the trip would cure him. Instead, as he put it, he shared with a girl “his free time, conversations, and her gonorrhea.” He traveled on, but tourism bored him: he didn’t care about the midnight sun; Stavanger seemed just like Recklinghausen in the Ruhr; the airport looked like barracks on a golf course. He fought off boredom by working in a photo shop and took pictures himself of whatever there was to see: birch trees, fjords, wood, more wood. Finally he left for Stockholm, a wild city. A poem came out of it later: “In Stockholm I took speed / Cigarettes I didn’t need.” He bummed around. Eventually the German embassy sent us a telegram saying that he was begging at their doorstep for his parents to please send money. Our father went and fetched him home.
Martin turned eighteen. That year, the first newspaper article about him appeared, in NRZ, the local paper. It described him, his art, and his friends Birgit and Willi, with whom he had mounted a group show at the Podium. A photograph shows the three of them with their artworks, in our garden, with the caption “And Venus has a hole in her head” (referring to a sculpture in our garden).
Martin works “on the side” as a decorator, while Birgit and Willi are studying graphic arts at the Folkwang School. They live day-to-day—which doesn’t mean that they’re beatniks. “Beatniks,” Martin protests, “are the people in the city who play their bongos and guitars, and usually just stare into space.” No, they’re not dropouts, these three. They want to “live life to the fullest” (that phrase is their magic formula) and then turn their experiences into art together. Without needing to follow a career, if possible.
Martin already had two movie projects in mind: one to restore the honor of the typical German, and a grotesque Easy Rider -style movie. “It’s enough for us when we see that we’ve made progress every day and are always learning something new,” Martin told the reporter.
Our mother wrote to a friend, “We’ve made it through three bad years, which was almost too much for the boy. He loved and respected his father very much, and his world collapsed [when his father left]. He took refuge in drugs, even morphine, and by late 1971 I had truly given up hope. But then the miracle happened and he pulled himself together.”
[ 1 ] This is an outrageous nickname for the “Kulturzentrum,” because “KZ” is the common abbreviation for the Nazi concentration camps (“Konzentrationslager”).
[ 2 ] Oswalt Kolle was a German popularizer of information about sex; his works played a cultural role more or less analogous to The Joy of Sex .
CHAPTER TWO
HAMBURG
It’s a commune and that means communication.
— MK
Martin didn’t choose Hamburg at all—our mother and our uncle Erich did.
“The only thing that helps with Martin is prayer,” our mother once wrote. She said she felt like “a chicken that had hatched a duck, and now is clucking anxiously on the shore while the duck happily paddles around in the pond.” Martin himself never worried that he hadn’t finished high school, that he’d ditched his job, that he took drugs. He knew he was an artist!
But this time, in 1971, when our mother took him to the hospital in Essen—maybe he really had taken too much, maybe it was just a particularly histrionic acid trip, maybe our mother simply didn’t know what else to do—he ended up in a large hall in the men’s ward where most of the patients were old, coughing miners. He felt pushed aside and abandoned. In any case, he told Hans Meister it was a traumatic experience. Meister was one of the founding members of Release, the “Association for the Struggle against the Narcotics Threat”: the first self-help group that aimed, with the support of the Hamburg city government, to wean addicts from hard drugs by using softer ones. Martin described Hans Meister in a letter to our mother: “Hans, formerly an assistant window-dresser, four years morphine, shot heroin, founder, married, to Vaveka the Swede, two kids, responsible for drug advice, repairs, interviews, makes music and sound pieces.” Our mother had begged her brother Erich, a banker in Hamburg, for help with Martin, and he had found out about Release. They signed Martin up and he agreed to go.
Via Hamburg, Martin ended up at Otterndorf (near Bremerhaven), where the Association had a commune in the countryside. It was a huge farmhouse with a converted barn where Martin, as he wrote to our sister Tina, “could relax after that whole screw-bang-nail-fuck-do it-screw it thing in Stockholm.” There he could do what he wanted to do: make art.
Martin played the drums and danced, and at Release you could drum on pots and pans for three days straight if that’s what you needed to do. He jumped over a dike naked, long hair flying, and used the photo for a poster fifteen years later (“The Battle against Bedsores”). Most of all, he painted. There was a studio for radio plays and music in Otterndorf, and the artist Hermann Prigann had a space “where they painted like crazy,” Hans Meister recalled. Martin even dyed his underwear “in every color,” which was the fashion at the time, and he learned how to enlarge photographs and sew on a sewing machine.
He had a remarkable talent for making himself at home immediately wherever he was. As soon as he got to Otterndorf he felt better: “accepted, not abandoned,” as Meister put it. “He realized he wasn’t crazy, he had just had visions on acid that he couldn’t explain.” There, sympathy was based on mutual understanding. He had a new family. That’s what the commune was: a kind of extended family, with fixed rules and a daily schedule, including cooking and eating meals together. For the first and last time in his life, Martin stuck to a healthy diet. He was so enthusiastic that he even thought the macrobiotic food tasted good.
“It’s a commune and that means communication,” he wrote euphorically to our mother after two weeks. “It’s going brilliantly! The day before yesterday I built myself a bed as well as a table and much more! My pad is slowly getting homey.” The table stood by the window with a view of the landscape, cows, and clotheslines. Eighteen people lived there, and Martin described every one in his letter:
Wastel, 6 yrs old, going to school. Anna, 3, wants to be Winnetou! [1] Holm, 25, nine years on heroin, been here two months, they got him out of the insane asylum, officially labeled “a serious threat to public safety,” very nice and totally normal and very smart!!! Uwe, 23, five years on heroin! Just done with withdrawl, still gets seizures, colapses a lot! And finally: Martin, 18, going to AofA (Academy of Fine Arts) in the fall! Me!!
He added his requests in a P.S., just as he had done from boarding school: “I need sheets, lots of stamps, pocket money, Plaka paints from my room, and my big phone book!”
He had pulled it off: been accepted to study art at the Hamburg Academy of Art without a diploma, with only a portfolio and talent (something possible only after the changes of the sixties). He would have to take a preliminary class first, and then he could enroll in the summer of 1972.
Martin stayed with Release in Otterndorf for six months, maybe as long as nine months, then moved to central Hamburg. There was always something happening there; visitors from ev
erywhere showed up constantly, and he met Gil Funccius, a graphic artist ten years older than him who had just moved from Berlin to Hamburg “to do something social.” But she soon found the group at Release too alternative and their constant discussions too self-flagellating, so she spent most of her time with “Kippi,” as everyone called him back then, “because that was the most fun. Kippi knew how to go out, how to get out of obligations, too.” As Martin would later write in Through Puberty to Success, Gil “was the very only one at Release who allowed herself not to suggest me on the message board in the kitchen that had topics to discuss at night sitting in a circle in the attic after two joints (‘Tell us about your problems!’).”
A lot of people were always roaming around, just like the hippies in our Frillendorf garden. Then again, there were repeated conflicts at Release, “highs and lows that everyone always has to discuss!” as Martin wrote to our mother.
Because we’re living in a collective, that’s exactly why we’re criticized more, and I’m trying to figure out the reasons for lots of things! In the past few days I’ve gone into myself amazingly sharply. Over the weekend I saw the core of the problems in my brain, and it was almost too much for me! Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll flip out!
Martin was always on the move, “always had to put on some show or another”: set up a tea-room, swim across the Alster River, change apartments.
Our father was enthusiastic, in any case. “That’s great, everything you guys are doing!” he wrote to Martin in Otterndorf in the summer of 1971. “I wish I could join in, building and woodworking and painting and all that. That’s what I’ve always done. When I was just 18 like you, I painted the insides of all the barracks in bright colors.” Did they have pillows and a sewing machine in Otterndorf? “The ladies could sew something like that very well.” He would get Martin some brightly colored fabric on clearance. Maybe they could start a whole production line.
Later, when Martin was working on his idea for a tea-room, in 1972, our father gushed: “That idea might have come from me, if it hadn’t come from you!” He went on and on about Japanese ladles and started thinking about the tea service, never mind that they didn’t have much money: “teacups are not the same as coffee cups, you know.” By the next letter, he was furnishing the tea-room with armchairs, lamps, books, underground books, and magnifying glasses, and hanging pictures on the wall: they had to be “soft,” like the tea. “Modern landscapes maybe. Better yet: Faces. Faces are expressive and even intellectual, so to speak. — But then something poetic, something that tells a story. Narrative has almost disappeared from painting since the Blue Rider.” [2]
ONE OF YOU – AMONG YOU – WITH YOU
“Maaaaartin!”
Martin doesn’t hear. He is racing around the garden, jumping high up in the air and having fun, almost tumbling and falling on his face. He wants to play, not listen to anybody. This Martin is tall, dark, and shaggy—a dog like a teddy bear. Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger had named their giant schnauzer Martin “because it’s a name you can say both forcefully and affectionately.”
The garden is enormous. After the fall of the Wall in 1989, the artist couple moved from Berlin out to Brandenburg, into an old village inn, to retreat and recover from their excessive lifestyle. They had come to Berlin in the first place because of the other Martin: when my brother had moved from Hamburg to Berlin, he convinced them to come along, not go to New York as they had planned. He said the show was on in Berlin now. Where he was. The fact was, he didn’t want to go to Berlin alone.
Thomas Wachweger knew what was what the first time he saw Martin—or rather, heard him. (“He couldn’t stand me either at first,” Martin later wrote in a catalog.) It was in the cafeteria of the Hamburg Academy of Art in Lerchenfeld. Even when it was full, everyone could always hear Martin—he led the conversations and was always surrounded by people. “His big mouth was his greatest weapon,” Gil Funccius says, “his entree.” For him, the cafeteria and the Ganz on Grindel Lane were stage, living room, and workspace in one. “Have some fun, drink some beer, meet some people”: that is how his friend, fellow student, and housemate Jochen Krüger described the course of study. The academy was small and easy to get a handle on; students often met in the cafeteria for breakfast in the morning and boozed there at night too. Their meal program included beer.
“Where do you go to school? At U of Cafeteria?” was a favorite saying at the time. But it was only half true. He once got a letter from the Lübeck district court addressed to “Mr. Martin Kippenberger, Worker,” and he kept the envelope until the end of his life. He was, in fact, a hard worker to the very end. He gave one of his pictures the title Work Until Everything’s Cleared Up.
When Ina Barfuss remembers Martin, she hears four slaps so hard they sound like fireworks. They were in the same class, taught by the Vienna artist Rudolf Hausner, who painted only his so-called Adam pictures and almost never showed his face at the academy: “he would swing by once a semester, deliver some Viennese nonsense, and disappear again.” He had an assistant, nicknamed Plato because of his bald head, who also didn’t like showing up to class. On this particular day he was hours late, but Martin wanted to show him some work and discuss it anyway. Martin wasn’t just there for fun: he really did want to learn something there, especially different techniques (lithography, etching, bookbinding—he took the most varied courses he could). So the assistant received a few thunderous slaps from his student: “Left, right, left, right, I’ve been waiting for you! It was like a movie,” Barfuss recalled.
Martin “always wanted to prove that he could really do something, despite everything: You might say I’m a do-nothing, a good-for-nothing, but I’ll show you! ” He called one of his first large series of self-portraits, using photographs of himself from each year of his life to make a collection of postage stamps to mark his twenty-first birthday, One of You – Among You – With You : explicitly staking his claim to belong.
Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger were a couple of years older than Martin. They had begun their studies in the sixties and were more experienced; they had already had some success and—this was very important to Martin—knew Sigmar Polke. They were kindred spirits: Thomas’s parents were also divorced, and he had also hated school and suffered from being sent away to boarding school. “He’s smart,” Wachweger’s father, a judge, said of Martin. “Smarter than you.” In Thomas’s view, Martin had above all “an extreme emotional intelligence: he could feel what was inside another person right away, and immediately imitate it.”
Thomas and Ina were what they still are (and something relatively rare at the time): a stable couple. Like a little family. Other people found it bourgeois and “square,” and some tried to break up their relationship, but not Martin. He sometimes told Thomas that he envied him for not having to look for a woman anymore. Martin changed girlfriends more often than sheets, which wasn’t a big deal since a lot of other people were doing the same thing, but he also went to the movies and saw Dr. Zhivago over and over again: Wachweger says Martin was in love with Lara.
Martin forced himself on them, or at least that’s how they saw it at first: that he was pushy. But then they became friends after all. They went out to bars together. Sometimes he would drop by every day, and if they weren’t home he would leave a message, card, or letter. He ate at their house at least once a week and always wanted stuffed cabbage—nothing else was allowed. He usually brought someone else along with him, for instance, our father: “to show him that it is in fact possible to survive as an artist.”
Together with Thomas, Ina, and Achim Duchow, he met Sigmar Polke: in Martin’s view the great artist of the seventies. Martin often traveled from Hamburg to Düsseldorf to visit Polke and lived in the country with him in 1974: “it was very funny, lots of hippies, music, drugs, and dark beer.” When Polke became a professor in Hamburg, Martin stuck by his side and once even went with Polke, Ina, Thomas, and Duchow to Berlin for a week. Polke gave him an assignment: “Take pho
tos of drunk people.” Martin later made a poster out of one picture, showing Martin with a camera in front of his belly and his pants pulled down, and Polke in the background with his pants unbuttoned. A lot of people resented Martin for working his way into the star’s inner circle like that.
But at that time they still went around together—“they were unstoppable,” Gil Funccius said. Beer and words flowed in torrents; Polke’s sharp tongue impressed Martin. Martin’s admiration for Polke’s humor, irony, confidence, and artistic impudence and lack of inhibition never wavered, though he did, like many people, come to find Polke as a person more and more difficult, even vicious. Near the end of his life, some six months before he died, Martin told a friend that Hamburg in general and Polke in particular had ruined him by giving him the idea of turning his own life into art, “throwing one’s physical, bodily existence onto the scales. We had to, back then, at the price of destroying ourselves.” But by then, in 1996, Martin felt it was too late to change course.
ALL YOU EVER DO IS MOVE, CHILD!
Thomas Wachweger and Ina Barfuss were happy when Martin came over to visit, but they certainly never wanted to live with him. “He was too dictatorial. Everyone else had to be subordinate.”
In his first years in Hamburg, he constantly moved apartments—whenever he had finally finished renovating one place, he moved on to the next. “All you ever do is move, child!” our mother wrote to him. His answer:
To find your own milieu you need to gather a lot of different life experiences. Every apartment—every roommate—is a step in that proccess. — Whenever you realize that theres no more room to move, no way to develop, you have to move out. Every change is a new beginning, and it all ends up being a development. Progress. People don’t only invest financially, its more important psychologically— thats what I’m after.
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