Kippenberger. Susanne Kippenberger

      From our guestbook in Zandvoort, the Netherlands

       © Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

      “Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes the sadness easier,” she told a friend after she inherited money. Until then she had lived frugally, which was how she was raised and what she was used to from the war and the early postwar years. Nothing was ever thrown away, whether it was used wrapping paper, old food, or even moldy bread; as a teenager, she wore her long-dead mother’s clothes, retailored; her father wore the coats of his brother who had fallen in WWI. We children had to share everything too: clothes, knapsacks, first-day-of-school candies. Martin was lucky: as the only boy, he had lederhosen of his own. Our mother adored shopping, but, as our father wrote, “She could only get really excited about affordable things.”

      Babs said, “It’s good to know that in the end she finally took taxis, stayed in good hotels, and wasn’t addicted to shopping only at clearance sales. Any extra money she took in was frittered away within the family, at the city’s better restaurants.” This extra income was from the “Prostitute Control Board,” where she filled in for a colleague. She loved it and soon knew all the women who came for checkups every week, including a grandmother. She liked talking to them, and then she again had stories to tell us. She certainly liked the prostitutes more than the teachers she had to deal with at the public health department.

      Finally, she rediscovered her Spanish blood—allegedly slightly blue as well. She had always been proud of it and did in fact look slightly Latin: tall, with black hair and long, thin fingers. As early as 1954, the first time she crossed the Pyrenees, she no sooner caught sight of the customs officials than she fell under the spell of Spain’s beauty, and that of its men, especially the “bold and elegant” men who fought the bulls in the ring. She, who usually kept the peace by doing whatever our father wanted, could not get enough of the bullfight and her Spanish blood surged so powerfully that at the end of the fight she almost threw her purse into the ring like the Spanish women. Only her German frugality held her back. Of all her ancestors, her favorite was Don Antonio, a nobleman who, it was said, had been forced to immigrate to Venezuela after a duel. “He was an adventurer.” That was exactly why our mother loved him. “Everything that we possess of charm and generosity, our inborn kindness, that ‘certain something’—it all comes from Don Antonio,” she wrote. After the divorce she learned Spanish, in Malaga and at the Berlitz school in Essen; during breaks she would step out for a coffee and chat with the bums. When she traveled to Andalusia with Babs on a cheap package holiday, “she insisted on going to flamenco and bullfights and shouted Olé! with the Spaniards.” Martin drew her in this role once, dancing flamenco-style on the table, with OOLEE OOLEE next to her. It was New Year’s Eve, 1974.

      By then she had long since had what Virginia Woolf wanted all women to have: a room of her own where she could write. After the war, she had traded her accordion for a typewriter, on which she would write her long letters. The mailman mattered more to her than the milkman.

      Before long she was composing not only letters but humorous little articles, about, for example, “our beloved dust,” or Tupperware parties, “happenings,” visitors, teachers. Always, frugal as she was, on scrap paper: the back of junk mail, invitations, day planners, and discarded drafts. She wrote about the comic side of our life, for the Doctor’s Paper, the German Sunday Magazine, the Christian Friendly Encounter : “The words just flow from my pen, even if it’s all just mental masturbation.”

      One evening in 1974, she appeared at an event of the National Association of Writer-Doctors in Göttingen. After a Beethoven performance, poems were recited, philosophical disquisitions held on “the significance of the pause,” and reflections aired on “solitude.” Then our mother came onstage to present her piece: “Daddy Dummy.” She knew that everything she experienced could be turned into a story, and that nothing was ever so bad that it couldn’t sound hilarious on paper later.

      She liked that no one could boss her around. Once, at an event for the Social Democratic Party “on the position of women in the modern world,” when she expressed her own opinion and was then accused by a party member of being a traitor, she said, “That’s what I want to be. I’m neither ‘us’ nor ‘them,’ I want to say what I think.” She never wanted to subordinate herself to a party and its pragmatic electoral politics. “What’s the use of working and struggling to emancipate myself from a husband just to dance to other men’s tunes? They’re probably less intelligent than he was, and I don’t even love them enough to forgive them when they make me mad.”

      All of which is not to say that she never sought others’ approval. Even her advisor’s praise of her dissertation made her happy: “What author would not be delighted at such a response to his or her first work?” She was livid when a story of hers wasn’t printed, and was proud when Brigitte, Germany’s largest women’s magazine, solicited a piece from her: “So now I’ve come far enough that they want something from me, not the other way around!”

      Soon she started to dream of becoming famous. In 1968, having given herself the assignment to write a book that year, she traveled to Hamburg for the twentieth anniversary of the Lutheran Sunday Magazine, “to put myself out there.” She drank champagne to boost her spirits and fortify her self-confidence, and met accomplished writers like Ernst von Salomon and Isabella Nadolny. She made an impression, and not only because she was one of fifteen women among the two hundred guests: “I may not be so impressive by nature, and not a famous writer, but I put a wagon wheel of a hat on my head, and it worked like it always does.” A few hours later, she took the train back to reality: “At home I was met with the news that Sanni had thrown up, Bettina had fainted, and the boy had gotten into trouble.” Now she didn’t want any more children. “From now on I will give birth only artistically.”

      She also wrote about her cancer, which caused quite an uproar. That wasn’t done at the time—you were supposed to “bear it stoically,” as the death notice would always say.

      Like our father, she planned her own funeral: compiled an address list for the guests, warned us to get the cheapest coffin and not fall for any scams, since after all it would just be burned anyway, and asked to be decked with carnations, her favorite flower.

      She was at the threshold of a new life phase. Her two youngest children were about to leave home—Bine was going to be a medical assistant in Munich and I was off to university in Tübingen—and she was dividing her duplex apartment to rent out a floor. The apartment was full of contractors when the call came: the accident happened during lunch hour, while our mother was coming home from the health department. In his book Café Central, Martin would write about how “his mother made the transition from living mother to dead mother (a truck overloaded with EuroPallets took a curve too fast and lost some of its freight, which caused my mother’s death) (so she didn’t have to die a slow and painful death of cancer).” She died a week later without regaining consciousness, in 1976, at age fifty-four. She was buried in Wiesbaden, where she was born, in the Leverkus family grave.