We lived in Essen-Frillendorf. After our father was made director of the mine, he moved us from Dortmund into the heart of the Ruhr, right next to mines and brickworks, where we grew up among miners and laborers.
Our parents loved Anton the pitman and his curt sayings, and laughed at Jürgen von Manger, who didn’t even come from the Ruhr region (like them). The people’s warmth and humor, their self-confidence, ease, and readiness to help, shaped all of us. Here you didn’t make a big to-do, you just did what needed doing. People were strong characters, open and very direct, always ready to laugh at themselves. No one took themselves so terribly seriously. They drank beer, told stories, made fun of each other, and accepted people as they were, faults and all. They teased with affection.
The Kippenberger family (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)
© Reiner Zimnik
Frillendorf was a real village, with everything that entails: candy kiosk, cemetery, public primary school, village idiot, and church. But it was a village in the middle of the city, only three streetcar stops from the center of Essen. Farmer Schmidt had his farmstead right near us, and large fields lay alongside the streets.
A Mrs. Böhler watched over the entrance to the yard and the alley of chestnut trees that led to our house, which was at the end of a cul-de-sac. Mr. Böhler only ever appeared in the background, in his undershirt. She put her pillow in the window, rested her heavy breasts on it, and looked out at everyone, sending curses after them. There was hardly any television in those days—only three stations for a couple of hours a day—and what we had to offer was apparently more interesting to her. She shows up several times in Martin’s books.
“St. Nicholas at the Kippenberger’s’” (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)
© Reiner Zimnik
Our parents had moved often since the start of their marriage, several times in and around Dortmund during the previous few years. All five of us children were born in Dortmund and the apartments got bigger with the increasing number of children. But only now, in 1958, did they move into a house where they could really stretch out—a stage on which to perform their life. It was a paradise for us children. “A crazy house at the end of a cul-de-sac” is how the local newspaper described 86 Auf der Litten in an article about Martin when he showed his work for the first time, at eighteen years old. “The rooms and studios are stuffed full of pictures, posters, and objects. On the stairs, an outer-space hotel made of radiator parts that Martin’s father put together. The chaos is welcoming, clean, and cozy. And when the sunlight plays across the garden with its naive stone sculptures of horses and cowboys, it is almost possible to believe in an ideal world again.”
Or, as our mother once wrote, more soberly, “We lived in a huge house with countless rooms and just as many side rooms, nooks, and crannies. It was a nightmare for cleaning ladies—almost every time a candidate interviewed, she turned around and left. A paradise, but with its flaws: it never warmed up past sixty-three degrees, because the old heating system couldn’t manage anything higher; mice would run around in the bedrooms every now and then.”
The Kippenbergers in Essen-Frillendorf, 1961: Bettina, Martin, Susanne, Lore, Barbara, Gerd, Sabine (l. to r.)
© Ilse Pässler
There were always children running around, with bows untied and underpants slipping down—no one watched or tended them when they were playing. Life consisted of homework and playing and nothing else: no hockey practice, no saxophone lessons, no carriage rides through the city. There were a good dozen other children besides us who were always there in the yard to play. It was a life lived in public, in company. You didn’t retreat into your room when you wanted to play; you went outside.
Or else to the Kinderhaus , or kids’ house. They redid the old laundry shed in the garden for us, and for the grown-ups to use for holiday celebrations. In fact, in our family everybody had their own house: the ducks, the chickens, the pigeons, our father, and Martin, too. There was a wooden hut, the “Martin hermitage,” tucked away in a little woods connected to the garden, but he rarely used it. What would he want with an isolated hut in the woods? He was never a recluse. He wanted to be with other people.
Behind our Kinderhaus was a playground with a slide, merry-go-round, swing, sandbox, and seesaw—all from a miners’ kindergarten that had just closed. The mining crisis had already begun, and the feudal world was crumbling around us. A big slate blackboard hung on the fence, with a tree trunk in front of it as a bench—that was the school. We could sit behind the wheel of an old, brightly painted BMW and play driving. We used the nearby brickworks as a kiln for our little clay bowls and figurines. We could play croquet on the grass, hopscotch and double Dutch on the sidewalks. There was a big suitcase in the attic with costumes for dressing up.
The gigantic garden, as big as a park and surrounded by huge old trees and two little wild forests, was there to enjoy. Everything practical—vegetable garden, greenhouse—our father tore down and then started to rebuild. So the garden filled up with bushes and trees, lilacs, goldenrain, tree of heaven, roses and sumacs, classical columns and billboard posts, a flagpole, a bathtub for cooling the drinks at parties and then the guests. More and more sculptures populated the garden: Genevieve the Pretty and others of less classical beauty—a cowboy and horse, and a hunter with dachshund, made by a retired miner who caused a sensation as an outsider artist. There was a large terrace, where later the Hollywood swing stood, and next to the old weeping willow was a lake where the ducks swam.
Other people had dogs and cats. If it were up to our mother, we would have had no animals at all—she didn’t care about them, and they made extra work for her when she had more than enough to do. But since it was up to our father—who at least knew enough not to buy monkeys; if he had, our mother threatened, she would leave him—we did have animals: bantam chickens, goldfish, turtles, and two ducks, Angelina and Antonius. Nobody in the family, our mother wrote, had any more of a clue about animals than she did, but “in place of actual knowledge they substituted enthusiasm. The consequence for the turtles was a rapid death.” The exotic birds that our father bought all quickly died off, too. The only animal tough enough to survive in our family was Little Hans, the canary.
“The Kippenberger Children’s Carnival,” with our father as clown
(Reiner Zimnik, 1961) © Reiner Zimnik
Our house was always full of children, full of pictures, full of visitors. You were never alone. “House others happily” was the pastor’s parting advice for our parents at their wedding, but they would have done so anyway. A year later, in Aachen, they had cards printed up with our father’s drawings to use for inviting guests. In Frillendorf, the door was always open: whoever came, invited or not, was welcome to sit down and join in.
There were nannies and au pairs, live-in maids and men who helped around the house (or didn’t). Friends’ and relatives’ sons and daughters who needed a place to stay while at school or in a residency lived with us; so did various children stranded in Frillendorf. Petra Lützkendorf, the artist, brought her son Pippus to stay with us for a couple of weeks. The “Belgian fleas” spent their holidays there too: two siblings, a brother and sister, whose mother was in a psychiatric ward and whose professor father had his head in the
