Our father knew why. In 1988, he wrote to Martin in Spain from the hospital where he was a regular patient with one new metastasis after another. After advising Martin that “in Jerez the sherry tastes best outside, in the sun, at a little marble café table,” our father wrote that he wanted to live long enough to see Moritz, his youngest son, then fifteen years old, “find his footing. The way I feel these days, it must surely be possible.” But it wasn’t—he was dead a year later.
Painting was our father’s consolation and delight in those days, and he enjoyed doing it in the hospital, “sitting as well as standing. It’s a real hobby.” He regretted only that he had not succeeded in making a career out of art, any more than his grandmother had. “So it’s good,” he wrote to Martin in that same letter, “that at last you’ve been able to give art its due.” Martin saw his role in the family in similar terms: “I rose in the world, for example—my great-grandmother was an art student in Düsseldorf, my grandmother painted, my father painted, but none of them did it professionally. I am the first one to do it professionally and really pull off the concept of Kippenberger Art.”
Martin wrote on our father’s gravestone “One Family One Line.” He designed the stone with Hubert Kiecol, and it was responsible for the fact that our father had to be dug up from his grave: the simple stone was laid lengthwise along the grave, rather than across the head, as per German cemetery regulations; the sculpture director of the Marl museum tried in vain to declare the stone and thus the grave a protected work of art, but the city council was merciless. So our father had to be reburied, in a corner, where, it was hoped, he would cause less offense.
Martin’s friends were shocked when they first met our father. Carmen and Imi Knoebel said, “We always thought Martin was the original,” until they met him, who had the same total lack of inhibition in public, whether dancing, giving a speech, or singing—the same sentimentality, excessive artistic production, need to arrange everything and enforce good cheer, and striving toward an all-encompassing total work of art. Some of Martin’s friends thought our father was even worse than Martin; Albert Oehlen called him “the extreme version of Martin.”
In his wedding newspaper, our father had requested “pictures in all sizes and price points” and hoped for “a son with red hair and jutting ears”—he even drew the son he wanted, exactly the way that Martin would later portray himself as a child, with jutting ears and a crew cut.
As for Martin, he said, two years after the birth of his daughter, that he under no circumstances wanted a son himself. “They look like you and say the same things, too.” He knew that there was no escape: as he wrote in a poem in 1981, “Whether in Stuttgart, Rome, or Frankfurt / I am always the son of Gerd.”
They were both Pisces, with Martin born on February 25 and our father on March 1. “My father always signed his paintings, drawings, and photographs with ‘Kip,’” Martin said. “That’s why, when I was seven, I came up with ‘Kippy.’” Gerd signed his letters to us “Your father,” while Martin signed his “Your brother,” as though to make sure of their roles. “I will have no other God but me,” our father told our mother once, and he called himself “a textbook egoist”: “The only thing I do energetically is what I want to do. That’s why I sometimes manage more than other people in such cases.” Martin could have said the same.
Martin learned from him that you can’t wait to be discovered. You have to take matters into your own hands: organize your own shows, publish your own books, build stages for your own performances. And no false modesty, either: our father always said that his pious grandmother had told him to put his light on the bushel, not under it. That’s what it actually says in the Sermon on the Mount, after all.
Our father’s taste in art shaped Martin’s while at the same time provoking a reaction in the opposite direction. Martin felt Gerd’s skepticism as an incentive: he wanted to prove to his father that it actually is possible to make a living as an artist. Martin often told the story about how our father had said that an artist needs a style, so he, Martin, had tried with all his might to find his style, until he realized that his style was to not have a style. He also told a story about how our father promised a one-mark reward to whichever one of us found the best painting in the Folkwang Museum in Essen, so of course we looked for the one we thought he liked best. In the end, every one of us got a mark, which Martin thought was especially awful.
Martin’s view of art was different from our father’s, but Martin was always proud of him and his work, no matter how unlike his own work our father’s was. He gave Gerd’s books to his friends, for example. He was proud of the family he came from, too, even if he had very little in common with most of its members. He was proud that our father, too sick to walk after a new bout of cancer, had had himself carried to Martin’s opening at Gisela Capitain’s gallery. It mattered to Martin that Gerd meet his gallerists. Martin brought Max Hetzler to a show of our father’s at a barn in Marl. “He didn’t make fun of it,” Hetzler said. “He respected it.” Our father was proud of his son, too, who was living the life he had only dreamed of for himself. Once, when Martin did not have a single work on show at the Cologne Art Fair, he rented rooms in the city to show his work after all, and our father stood on the street in front, in a white scarf, pointing the way to interested parties.
There was one thing our father may have been too proud to do: buy his son’s pictures. It may have been painful for him, too, seeing the wild, free life he himself had missed out on—where you can do whatever you want and nothing but. Martin had celebrated 1/4 Century Kippenberger as an extravagant “happening” in S.O.36, filled with excessive behavior. When our father turned 25, by contrast, he had just escaped the war after six years. As he later wrote in one of his many autobiographical texts, “We were a Nazi, militaristic generation of young people. We let ideas that weren’t our own seduce us and wrap us around their little fingers. We didn’t resist as much as we needed to. I can only hope that our children realize better than we did which way that path leads.”
Along with their mutual pride, however, there was another feeling, on both sides: jealousy, unfulfilled longing, competitiveness. Hubert Kiecol sensed it the first time he met our father, when Gerd sang the miner’s song “ Glück auf ” after an exhibition opening, as Martin himself liked to do with his drinking buddies at midnight. But while Martin contented himself with a single verse (“For they wear leather on their asses at night...”), our father sang ten or more and still didn’t stop. “It was one too many,” Kiecol said.
One time, Martin had a show together with our father, in the CCD Gallery in Düsseldorf: Sand in the Vaseline. The show included photographs by both of them—Martin’s from Brazil, from 1986, and our father’s from Zandvoort an Zee, from 1968. But Gerd wanted to be more than an adjunct or a point of contrast; he wanted to have pictures he had chosen himself shown in a real gallery, a wish that Martin never fulfilled for him. When our father showed up at Gisela Capitain’s gallery with a pile of drawings he had made blind, in a dark theater, Martin quickly disappeared. “It was embarrassing for him,” Capitain said. Martin later asked Peter Pakesch in Vienna—far enough from Cologne, no doubt—if he would show some of our father’s pictures, together with work by Oehlen’s father. Pakesch says,
It was important to Martin that he organize an exhibition for his father before his father’s death. That was another reason he and I were not on good terms for a while, because it didn’t happen. But I had told him, OK, you can do it, I just don’t want to do any of the work, you have to do it yourself. Then the whole thing melted away.
After our father’s death, Martin considered publishing Gerd’s books with Martin Prinzhorn in an edition annotated by Prinzhorn. Prinzhorn was always seated at our father’s table at exhibition openings and parties, “because Martin thought I would understand him and the others wouldn’t.” Martin always made an effort to get our father’s praise and approval, which made him seem like a little boy: “he couldn
’t use his usual weapons and defuse tense situations with irony.”
When Martin came home for family holidays (Christmas, weddings, baptisms), he was calm, fun, uncomplicated, “normal”—never the wild man. Of course, he couldn’t keep it up for long, and by the time night rolled around at the latest he would be off, to a bar with our brother-in-law Andreas, or to the Marl disco with our little stepbrothers Jochen and Claus, furthering their education (for instance, teaching them how to get past the bouncer).
Martin surprised us by coming home for Christmas as usual in 1988, when our father was so sick. He called at noon on the 24th from the Recklinghausen train station, and the surprise was a happy one. Both father and son were moved. It must have taken a certain amount of willpower for him to come—he may have been fearless about everything else, but coming into contact with death scared him. When he visited our father in the hospital, he had to drink for courage and bring friends for protection; he had to gather all his strength to be at home with our father when he died. He popped copious pills to survive the funeral.
That summer and fall our father had been in bad shape: confused and apathetic like never before. But for Christmas, the family holiday, he too pulled himself together. Martin called it “furnishing proof.” “It’s about proving yourself. The same with me. I’m not so different from my father that way.” Our father wanted to make it to January, to his first gallery opening—our sister Babs, a lawyer, had recently opened a gallery in Cologne, the K. Gallery. (Martin hadn’t wanted her to use the name Kippenberger—Cologne was his domain when it came to art.) Our father, dressed up and lying on the sofa, held court at the opening, and on February 22, three days before Martin’s birthday, he was dead.
Six months later, Martin’s daughter was born. Two years later, Martin would say, “Just as she was born, he died. I saw him lying in bed like a baby. The rhythm, it makes you think.... The real reason I had a child was because my father was dying. I wanted life to go on.” He gave his daughter our mother’s name: Helena Augusta Eleonore. If it had been a boy, he would have been named Hans Otto Oskar (Hans and Otto were our grandfathers’ names).
Martin had always been thrilled to be a godfather: first for our half-brother Moritz and later for Reiner Opoku’s daughter. Now he had decided to start a family of his own. A big family, too. When Joachim Lottman asked him in 1989 how he imagined his future, Martin said: “I will live to 72, have four children, all girls. If it’s a boy I’ll put him out on the street, with a sign around his neck: Please don’t send me home. Bundled up nice and warm of course.” It was easier to cope with girls, he thought. “If only the mothers weren’t around.”
He was obsessed with the idea of becoming a father and ran around the bars and restaurants of Cologne announcing it. And then he found the woman who would be the mother of his child: Gabi Hirsch, a young, beautiful, lively, and good-natured woman who was a family person, like him. They had just started dating when she got pregnant. Martin soon realized that the reality was different than his fantasy: more stressful, complicated, and banal. Gabi’s pregnancy had complications, and she was put on bed rest at the hospital. Martin couldn’t handle how she changed under the influence of her hormones, and his friends had to give him some private tutoring about the female condition. They were shocked at how little he seemed to understand about women.
Martin and Gabi Hirsch with Helena, August 24, 1989. Martin later used this birth-announcement photo for an exhibition invitation.
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
Helena’s birth on August 24, 1989, was the most emotional experience of Martin’s life. He called up friends and family afterward, ecstatic and excited, and described the birth “almost like a science fiction movie,” Martin Prinzhorn said, “as though some alien life form had appeared.” He was normally scared of blood, “and I absolutely can’t stand screaming,” he said, but none of it bothered him during the birth, not even the afterbirth: “I was so overjoyed.” One female friend said, “He was so happy that you simply had to be happy with him.” In the years to come he would say again and again, and always with the same astonishment, “that new worlds open up when a child is born, just like a little green man on the runway, out of nowhere, and everything is perfect and everything is there, I didn’t make it, you wonder where it came from.” From biology, the person he was talking to might say. “Well maybe I wasn’t paying attention in class,” Martin would answer, “but I’m no Maya the Bee” [a popular cartoon character; “the birds and the bees” are used for sex education in Germany as well]. Biology was not the answer to the questions he was suddenly starting to ask himself, which wouldn’t let him go and which he couldn’t explain. “It’s such a decisive break in your life.”
When an interviewer remarked how surprised he was that Martin was talking so much about his daughter, Martin said that after all she was a part of him: “Intelligence and beauty from her mother and the rest from me. Half is definitely from me. What we can’t decide is where she gets the hysteria from, her or me.”
The birth announcement, which Martin later used as a poster, is the photograph of a family that could not be more beautiful, happy, and perfect.
They tried to lead a family life for a while, but maybe their twelve-year age difference was too large, their interests and views of life too different. They led that life in the apartment on the Hansaring in Cologne, then in L.A., and then he bought an apartment on Eifelstrasse back in Cologne; Gabi renovated and furnished it, “everything really great, almost finished a year later, almost finished, almost finished, then you realize: That’s not the apartment you want at all.”
“I have a commandment for myself,” Martin told the Artfan interviewer two years after Helena was born. “I will never ever go back to a double cell, or six-person cell, or four-person cell, whether it’s boarding school or a kid’s room or whatever, I will never set foot in them again. I think I’m damaged, I wouldn’t want to live in the same room with a woman either. I managed it once in my life [with Inka Hocke in Hamburg] but there I had my own apartment too, and slept with the woman every night. That was different. Together in a single apartment, that would be hell. Sometimes I am not strong enough to rely on myself, so you cling to the next person you want to rely on. Doesn’t work though. Won’t ever work. I have a much much greater number of weaknesses than other people maybe, other people can accept the situation, I never accept it. I just get annoyed. I’m too sensitivey for it.”
Martin repeated the rituals of his childhood with his new family: vacations in Holland with Gabi and Helena; French fries and croquettes there; visiting our uncle in Siegen; traveling with them and Bine and her family to Cappenberg to spend St. Martin’s Day with the Jansens; and spending almost every Christmas together with us, whether in Cologne, Holland, Berlin, or Jennersdorf, complete with turkey, presents, and a Christmas tree. That’s what he wanted, and even when they were separated, Gabi always came with Helena. But all Martin’s ritual activities didn’t help. You can’t go home again.
Homesickness could not be reconciled with the highway. As soon as he could, Martin took flight—into his work, to another place, to friends. “Father insisted on freedom!” he said by way of explaining his first separation from his family, in L.A. “The new situation made me too tense.” He had pictured an idyllic existence with a family that was simply there and that supported him, the artist. He hadn’t counted on the banality of everyday life. “Everyday life,” his friend Uli Strothjohann said, “was poison for him.”
Martin carried Helena in a sling when she was a baby and later pushed her around in a stroller. When Meuser was there with his daughter, the same age as Helena, Martin used to brag about his own daughter: “Yours is cross-eyed and mine has beautiful eyes and long lashes too.” He took mountains of photographs of her and bought presents by the bagful—stuffed animals, T-shirts, but also Munch’s Scream figure as a life-size inflatable doll. He loved her very much, but he couldn’t live that lo
ve. Later, too, when she came to stay with him, he didn’t try to make up for lost time—he continued to paint and see friends. And then he was proud and moved when she fell asleep next to him in bed. His relationships with other children were usually fun and uncomplicated, but he seemed almost bashful with his own daughter, as though she remained an alien being for him. Still, there was an intensity between father and daughter that you can see in the photographs Elfie Semotan took of them together.
“As soon as you have some warmth,” Martin once said, “you don’t know how to handle it. I’m the world champion not-know-how-to-handler.”
Gabi and Helena remained permanent parts of our family, and that was important to Martin—he knew that he could never have found a better, more loving mother for his child. But the project of a happy little family of his own had failed. It was the greatest defeat of his life, and he fell into despair.
MARTIN, INTO THE CORNER,
YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF
Finally, 1989 was also the year the public backlash against Martin began, over the course of which, as one Australian critic was amazed to discover, Martin was increasingly presented in the German media (when not ignored altogether) as a “neo-Nazi playboy.” Two legendary articles were published in 1989 in which the authors absolutely pounced on him. One was simply a tirade of hate, and the other was a strange combination of repulsion, envy, and admiration.
“HE is disgusting. HE boozes, farts, and says ‘cunt’ to every woman. But HE is probably the greatest German artist since Beuys. Joachim Lottmann brings you Martin Kippenberger the way you never wanted to see him”: this was how the April 1989 issue of Wiener put its readers in the mood for Lottmann’s article. The New Journalist seemed to get almost carried away, bringing up everyone from Muhammed Ali to Adolf Hitler as Martin’s forebears (“A man like him could scare Khomeni stiff”; or, he wrote, after one of Martin’s endless shows, he collapsed “like old Adolf used to do after his five-hour speeches in the beer cellars of Munich, sinking into desperate dreamless unconsciousness”). Then, having launched Martin into the pantheon of evil, Lottmann (who had himself done assignments for Martin, such as writing the essay “Mr. Kippenberger” and conducting the interview with Michael Krebber for Café Central ) tried to bury him in the depths of harmlessness: “The man is a child. His art is good, but the child himself is a disaster. He is unbearable. He is a world-champion blowhard who ruts around like a filthy pig.”
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