style="font-size:15px;"> Martin in the Kinderhaus in Frillendorf© Ilse Pässler
He was always something special, always different from the other boys. More imaginative, more anxious. “Seeing a mask and screaming are one and the same thing for the boy,” our father wrote once. “His fear of rigid faces cannot be overcome. For months before and after Carnival, he dreams about it. We can’t take him into the city for the Rose Monday parade [at Carnival] for that reason.” All of big sister Babs’s efforts to explain masks to him were in vain. At the same time, he loved to celebrate Carnival, dress up, and dance in the Kinderhaus. “Kerl,” our father said, “dances like a young god.”
Some of the other boys were afraid of him. Not physically—he was on the weak side, with “bad posture due to lack of exercise,” as the doctors attested. But they were afraid of his ideas, the same way children are afraid of Grimm’s fairy tales: fascinated by their fear. Tobias von Geiso, a friend the same age as Martin, says Martin’s ideas were “incredible and uncanny,” provocative, they made him tingle. For example, “to piss and shit in our dollhouse’s chamber pot. He was always ready with something I couldn’t understand.” He seemed older than he was to Tobias; Tobias had the feeling of not being up to his level.
He was never short of ideas. That’s why he was always invited along with me to younger children’s birthday parties: to help play games. He was always good with small children. As a teenager he went to Düsseldorf on weekends to babysit. “He’s great at it,” our mother wrote to a friend, “Antonia says ‘Martin’ again and again all week.” Martin’s best friend was a girl, Ute Böhler, who went to school with him and lived next door. (Ute was the quiet—and, later, depressed—daughter of the same Mrs. Böhler who shows up over and over again in Martin’s books as the epitome of Frillendorf.) He got along better with girls. He didn’t have to act the big man with them.
He cried often, including at his confirmation—moved to tears by his own speech. The same thing had happened to our father at Babs’s confirmation, which Martin had missed because he was in boarding school; our mother had described it to him: “A man isn’t necessarily a weakling if he cries with emotion in an especially solemn and impressive moment.”
Martin liked to annoy other people, but he himself “started to cry at the least little thing,” as our mother complained. “I don’t know what’s going on inside that boy. He’s got a long way to go.” Martin is never crying in his childhood photographs, though. He grins, beams, makes faces, strikes poses. Later, though, he always remembered himself as the one who was harassed and defenseless.
He was never a good boy. We had to be home at six, and Martin was the only one who would be late, showing up whistling a happy tune half an hour late. He did what he wanted and did it emphatically, without thinking about the consequences. He could be good-natured but could just as easily be fresh—if he didn’t feel like shaking a visitor’s hand, he didn’t do it. “He wanted to shock,” says Ulla Hurck, our parents’ friend. “He would look at people and see how far he could go. He did that with everyone. And we were taken in a lot of the time. I always had the feeling that he was thinking, ‘God, are they stupid? Don’t they realize why I’m doing this?’”
MARTIN, OUR ARTIST
He always asked for art supplies—for his birthday, for Easter, for Christmas. As soon as he could hold a pencil, he drew and painted, glued and stapled. “Nonstop,” our mother wrote, “since he was never without ideas.” At nine, he drew Adolf Hitler as a pitiable figure, like the one in Munch’s Scream. At family gatherings he would pull out his pencil and draw portraits of the people there. He sold one of these pictures for ten marks.
He received what he longed for all his life: attention and recognition. Our father praised “his beautiful drawings,” especially the one “of Father sitting with his thriller, you can hardly believe how good it is.” Encouraged by him, Martin drew his way through the art history course that hung on our walls. But he didn’t copy the pictures—he copied the styles. “Sometimes like this, sometimes like that—I imitated every style,” he later told the Swiss curator Daniel Baumann. After doing so, he came to the conclusion that “it wasn’t so incredible, what they’d done.” Klee and Chagall failed his test; Kokoschka passed. He needed conflict with others, friction, from the beginning. When he was ten he hung a photo of one of Picasso’s bull plates on an imaginary wall, drew a window next to it, and glued colorful curtains over the window.
SCHOOL
“I wasn’t born to go to school,” he later said. He was born to make art, and that’s what he insisted on again and again, but to no avail: he passed his first test in 1959 (like every other child who could reach his arm over his head to the opposite ear) and was admitted to the Frillendorf Protestant State Primary School. There he did what he always did: goof around. He stuck out his little leg and tripped the teacher on his first day of school. He preferred looking out the window to looking at the blackboard; what happened outside seemed to him like a movie, and he recounted it like a movie when he came home. The world seemed strange to him, strange and exciting. In Café Central, he describes a seaside scene from his childhood: “I still remember sitting on the edge of a grotto with my little dirty diving gear, watching the fresh fish through the diving mask clouded over with my breath, and they looked back at me the same way, and suddenly I had the impression that their eyes were actually the eyes of the sea itself.”
He couldn’t sit still. Rather than listen to the teacher, he filled his notebooks and textbooks with drawings and caricatures. Homework was torture for everyone involved. “Martin, pay attention!” our mother would warn, and plead, and threaten, with growing despair. “Martin, just read this!” But Martin didn’t want to read. He wanted to look, listen, play, be amazed. The official diagnosis: dyslexia. “He hates books,” our father wrote when Martin was thirteen. “Letters of the alphabet and sentences rub him the wrong way; he prefers picture books.” But we didn’t have picture books—comics weren’t allowed in our house (which is not to say we never read them). And there were certainly lots of other pictures: on the walls, and on television, since eventually we, too, had a TV. Lassie, Flipper, Fury , Bonanza, The Little Rascals, and I Dream of Jeannie were our picture books. Later, on vacations, we acted out scenes with the characters, Martin out in front and our father behind the Super-8 camera.
Maybe, too, like our father, Martin just didn’t have the time or patience to read. Deciphering a word letter by letter just took too long when you could take in a picture in one glance. Spoken, not written, language was his element. Even as a child he was an actor and entertainer, telling stories and doing imitations. Whoever laughed he had on his side. Miss Linden, a teacher, called him “Harlequin,” but from her it wasn’t a compliment.
So he used school in his own way, as a stage, a studio. A struggle began that would last his whole life: he would always be on battle footing with institutions, whether art schools, hospitals, or museums. He had something against fixed walls, narrow limits, hierarchy, and authority. He wanted to make decisions himself. He had no fear of people in power, so he got on their nerves, and they got on his case in return. He called one of his series of sculptures, all self-portraits, Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself.
His first report card could hardly have been much worse. “Participation in Class: Acceptable.” Out sick this semester: twenty-three days. Scholastic results overall: “M. has made an acceptable beginning.” The next semester didn’t look any better. “M. will have trouble in his second year,” the headmistress wrote. Only in drawing and handicrafts did he get a “Good.” Everything else was “Satisfactory” or “Acceptable” except spelling, which was “Poor” (and by the third year would be “Unsatisfactory”). The drawings he filled his notebooks with didn’t count for anything—his teachers cared only about the spelling mistakes.
