Mother, and two au pairs (l. to r.)© Kippenberger Family
On Pentecost we went to Siegen, to the little manor house where our gay great-uncle lived with his Silesian housekeeper; in early summer, it was off to Drachenfels, where the first thing we did was have our picture taken in a photography studio—draped on and around a donkey, or behind a cardboard cutout of an airplane, with our arms hanging loose over the side. We children had never been on a real plane. Then it was time for a donkey ride or a hike on foot up the mountain, where we stopped into a hiker’s restaurant and were shoved into a corner, since families with lots of children were considered antisocial at the time.
All of our activities and celebrations were recorded—in pictures, home movies, photos, and words—by our mother, our father, and our artist friends. Petra Haselhorst-Lützkendorf, Karin Walther, Ernst and Annemarie Graupner, Elisabeth and Bernhard Kraus, Reiner Zimnik, Luis Delefant, Wiltrud Roser and her sister Hildegund von Debschitz, Janosch, and so on. Our life was turned into art. We were embroidered, painted, sewn, woven—all hanging on our own walls. It wasn’t a matter of good likenesses, only of the idea: like Wiltrud Roser, many of the artists didn’t know us in person at all when they received the assignment.
Polonaise at a summer party on the Frillendorf lawn
© Kippenberger Family
We look beautiful, harmonious, and cheerful in all of these family pictures except one: the large group portrait painted by Ilse Häfner-Mode, a small, lively woman with a pageboy haircut and a pipe in her mouth. We had to spend hours in her Düsseldorf studio—as tiny a room as she was a person, though it nevertheless also served as her apartment—sitting and standing as her models with the puppets and figurines that populated her house. We never looked so sad in our lives. The painting is as melancholy as all her other pictures. She was an expressionist who had studied in Berlin in the twenties, and a Jewish woman who had been in a concentration camp, but that was never spoken of, only whispered. Later, after our mother’s death, there was never any conflict between us siblings about our inheritance except over this one piece: Martin, who had been sent to study painting with her as a boy, absolutely wanted it at all costs.
Contemporary art wasn’t something our parents bought anonymously from unknown artists—they wanted to meet the artists in person. They became friends with most of them, and most of them came to visit us. Janosch was over once as well: still young at the time, not yet famous, he bewitched us children with his magical art and sold our parents “two large oil paintings, one to Father because Mother liked it so much, and one to Mother because she wanted something to give Father for his birthday.” He also made a little illustrated book, From the Life of a Miner, clearly based on our father.
Like many of the other artists, Janosch lived in Munich. Munich and Düsseldorf were the cities our parents visited to see exhibitions, go to plays and restaurants, see friends and relatives, and shop for art and crafts, loden coats, jewelry, pottery, furniture, and presents.
Our large house filled up. In our living room were Arne Jacobsen’s “Swan” and “Egg,” Braun’s “Snow White’s Coffin,” and plastic stools from Milan that you could spin around. No wall units, no matching living room sets: individual pieces were mixed together. Our parents wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things, and what was modern was beautiful: Olivetti typewriters, Georg Jensen silverware. They were confident in their tastes, and they were right to be: things they bought at the time as avant-garde are now shown in museums as classics.
The heavy Biedermeier furniture they inherited was exiled to a room of its own that was actually never used, except when a great many people were visiting. “So fancy we are!” our father wrote. “Or at least: So uncomfortable our chairs are!” Still, our parents were thoroughly bourgeois. We all had to wear pigtails until our confirmation, except for Babs, the oldest (this was one of our father’s ideas); we all had to be home in the evening precisely on time. Our mother was not conceited but she could not stand stupidity, and she also knew the limits of her own tolerance. One of her favorite movies was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play a liberal couple who are anything but pleased when their daughter brings a black man home.
We always prayed before going to sleep and said grace before meals. “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, / And let these gifts to us be blest”—here we clasped our hands—“ Bon appetit! Let’s all eat!” Then we threw ourselves on the food. The god we believed in was not a threatening, punishing god but a protector. Our mother believed in guardian angels, she had favorite saints (St. Anthony, finder of lost things, and St. Barbara, protector of miners), and she named her son after St. Martin, who shared what he had. Our parents’ religion was a rather worldly kind: political, artistic, and, above all, social. In 1961 they founded a youth group in Frillendorf, “in a battle against Pastor B.’s pious club”; our mother helped care for the needy; our father, as a presbyter, had influence in the parish. Later he gave up his office, over an artistic argument with the church: the paraments (hangings for the pulpit, altar, and lectern) that the pastor had commissioned from one artist were opposed by the other presbyters, and “Father cannot bear intolerance.” It was said of Pastor Wullenkord that he wanted to be a musician but was the son of missionaries; at Martin’s baptism, in Dortmund, he spoke “more about Mozart and Goethe than about our dear Lord.”
Every Christmas Eve morning, we were sent around the community to visit the old people. Our mother was glad to be rid of us during the final preparations, and the old people were glad to have someone to talk to. They told the same stories every year, mostly about their time as refugees in 1945. Every year, old Mr. Jäger told us what it was like when he and his wife had fled from East Prussia, now Poland, to Frillendorf on a horse cart. Every year, old Mrs. Haupt baked us New Year’s cookies and delighted us with her humor. When her health took a turn for the worse, at over ninety years old, and she lay on the sofa moaning, “Ah! Ah! Ah!” Finally she yelled at herself, “Say B for once, for God’s sake!”
Eventually, the house was emptier, quieter too—we were no longer children—and in 1971 we left Frillendorf and moved to a new building in Bergerhausen. Everything there was middle-class, green, and boring. “Whoever, like us, has felt true joy / Can never be unhappy again,” our mother wrote in a letter to a friend. The Ruhr District as we knew it came to an end as well. “Have you been to Essen?” asked the Dannon blueberry yogurt container that Martin reproduced in Through Puberty to Success. “Today there is only one coal mine operating in Essen, and the derricks are almost all gone. Essen’s biggest business today is retail. Essen is the Ruhr’s number one shopping city. Come take a shopping trip to Essen today!”
THE KIPPENBERGER MUSEUM
Our parents were hungry when the war ended—hungry for art, too. They went to the movies, to the theater, to exhibitions, including the very first documenta. Martin later told and retold the story about our grandfather wheeling him to the show in a stroller in 1955.
“Kippenberger knew perfectly well, ever since he was a child, that pictures, as the surrounding for sometimes worn-out feelings, can have an immensely positive effect,” Martin wrote about himself in Café Central. Pictures, our parents thought, make a house a home. In their wedding newspaper, our father said he wanted “pictures in all sizes and price points.” Once, when they were spending a week in Munich in a hotel near the train station, they unpacked their things, stowed their suitcases, and realized that “something was missing.” The pictures. The figurines. The books. “They healed the wound by using the shelf to display pictures, statues, and a tiny library.” By the end of the week, the soulless hotel room looked like their own apartment.
Decades later, when our mother was very sick in the hospital, she complained, “If only it wasn’t so
