who constantly wipe their children’s snotty noses and pull up their socks. Our underwear peeked out from under our clothes. She never fretted when we started to go off on our own, and we never had to call home to say we had arrived safely; she knew we would. Bad news, she liked to say, comes anyway, and soon enough. Her child rearing methods were laissez-faire, although she could be strict and sometimes even a bit hysterical. All three of them were drama queens: father, mother, and son.
Lore Kippenberger in the mid-1970s
© Kippenberger Family
Giving presents was her passion; organization was not her strong suit. She was constantly looking for her glasses, or buying Christmas presents in summer and hiding them so well that she never found them again. Cleaning was a nightmare for her and when, after a long vacation, she finally had to do it, she gave us a few coins, if we were lucky, and sent us off to the vending machines so that she could take out her bad mood on the vacuum cleaner instead of on us. In day-to-day life, keeping house oppressed her: we didn’t help out enough and were too messy. “If I was your cleaning lady, I would have given notice a long time ago,” she said once.
She liked to quote the English saying “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.” For one thing, she felt that cleaning—even more than cooking—was a thankless task, the results of which were obliterated swiftly and unremarked, as though it had never happened. Secondly, she felt that “maintaining cleanliness and order, if you put too much time and care into it, works against the peace and happiness of the household.” So she did what absolutely had to be done, and that was more than enough. Even the laundry, which she had to haul out to dry in the yard or on the roof, would have been enough, but then there was also shopping, helping with homework, and battling our teachers.
In the only year when all five of us children passed all of our classes and moved up a grade, our father gave her a large brooch with our names on the back as a “Maternal Order of Moving Grades.” He knew she had earned it. “Tell me the truth,” she said to her friend Christel Hassis once, “are we all actually idiots, since our children do so badly? I always thought we were the crème de la crème .”
She gave us names with an eye to our future, names that could be pronounced easily in other languages and which would go well with titles of nobility. That said, she didn’t raise her daughters just to get married—we should have careers first. And driver’s licenses (the only one of her children who never got one was Martin). She cared more that her first son-in-law, Lars, was “a nice boy” than whether or not he had a successful career.
She wore her hair permed—sometimes even wigs, when there wasn’t enough time for visits to the hairdresser—and never left the house without lipstick and pearls. Not real pearls, of course, and she especially liked that they were fake. Thanks to her high-class background and way of carrying herself, she thought, no one would ever suspect it.
After bearing five children, she had lost her slender figure and was constantly on a diet. She liked to moan and groan that she had only to eat half a praline to gain three pounds. In fact, she had probably eaten half the box, after a day of starving herself. She usually wore big dresses, brightly colored and patterned; Marimekko was her favorite brand. Her glasses and rings were large, too, and later so were her hats. Only her shoes were flat and practical.
She could lie and read in bed for hours, or in the sun on the beach for weeks. On the bookshelves was literature that hadn’t been available under the Nazis, in the early series of inexpensive paperbacks published by rororo : Fallada, Hemingway, C. W. Ceram, Carson McCullers, Truman Capote, Harper Lee, Roald Dahl, Siegfried Lenz, Christa Wolf, Marie Luise Kaschnitz. She devoured them. When she was finished, the book would be loaned to a friend, with a letter full of commentary. She was a critical reader: not even Goethe and Schiller were safe: “Schiller’s Don Carlos is also utterly out-of-date. . . . What bombastic nonsense!” She started an imaginary correspondence with Goethe, among other things suggesting improvements to certain lines of verse that, in her opinion, fell short of the mark.
Then her husband met Petra Biggemann and her marriage fell apart. She died her first death then, she told a friend, and mourned the love of her life. The big, loud house soon grew even quiet and emptier: Tina left to become a midwife, and Martin spent more time in bars than at home.
For decades her main occupation had been wife and mother, and now she was a divorcée. A rarity in the late sixties, especially in her circle: I was the only child in my class whose parents were divorced. She was forced to face the fact that the society she lived in was a kind of Noah’s Ark: “Entrance permitted only in pairs!” Single women were not invited anywhere because they would ruin the even number of seats at the table.
She missed her old social life. Our sister Tina took a vacation to Wales once. Our mother had been to Wales too in her day. When Tina wrote home, she asked, “How many people did you meet here?! Everyone seems to know you.” People meant more to her than things, our father thought: “You can talk to people, you can write to them, they let you give them things when you have too much. The danger is just that you give away too much of yourself.” She made people laugh and made herself laugh, too, until tears ran down her face, especially with her female friends.
As a child she had been raised as her brothers’ equal. There was no question that she would go to a real academic high school, not some girls’ school home-ec nonsense. Thirty years later, she learned that the world was not as emancipated as she had thought. But she still had her family: she never broke off contact with her in-laws or with our father. She even took care of his new sons sometimes.
Then, twice, she almost really died. After a hysterectomy she had an embolism, and shortly afterward she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She took it with gallows humor, writing to Wiltrud Roser in high style, with an allusion to Schiller no less: “Grant me my wish to be your third confederate! On Tuesday I am having my right breast removed. Who would have thought! No longer full-bosomed—now half-bosomed. Warmest wishes, Your Lore.” On her New Year’s card, for which Martin drew an apocalyptic picture, she printed as a motto the Goethe quote “ Allen Gewalten zum Trozt sich erhalten” (Despite all the violent forces against us, we will overcome).
Despite everything, she flourished again in the years after her divorce. By the standards of the time, she was an old woman. When she was forty-two, the photographer in a Munich photo studio told her she had so many wrinkles that there was no point in retouching the photo; besides, it would be too expensive. Our mother put a big hat on her head and sailed out into the world. “The older my mother got,” Martin later said in an interview, “the more beautiful she became. She had no womb and no breasts left but grew more and more beautiful, free, and open. More open. She got so much older, and learned that she had cancer, and then suddenly: Pow! Everything opened up.... She would say, ‘Come on, kids, let’s go to Paris! And no squabbling about your inheritance!’”
Having left her career almost twenty years before, she started working again, as a doctor in the Gelsenkirchen public health department, and liked it very much. For years she had not driven a car—the husband was always in the driver’s seat back then—but now she bought herself a Citroen 2CV, a car that at the time was driven mostly by college students. Not that she shared all their views—free love didn’t interest her in the least, she categorically opposed the pill, and she often gave lectures condemning drugs after Martin started taking them. It was just that she liked the little Deux Chevaux, and it was cheap.
Change-of-address card: “Mother Kippage and Her Children” (MK, 1971)
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie
