Zippelhaus room a professional art cabinet with drawers for graphic work, all his colored pencils, and a Rolodex where he noted down, in neat, beautiful handwriting, the addresses of all the attractive women he met. And there were many, especially tall blondes. Almost every morning, when Joey was having breakfast in the common room, “another naked young woman came gamboling out of Martin’s room.”
Life in the building took its easygoing course; everyone who lived there was tolerant. Noodle casserole was more or less the only thing Martin could cook, and he wasn’t into washing dishes or cleaning rooms. Once, lying hungover in bed, he himself was taken aback by the chaos and mess, “which had once again reached one of its most extreme states.” His room looked gruesome, our father reported after visiting him there. “And he pays 380 marks a month rent plus 50 for the telephone,” our mother wrote angrily. Visits from our uncle Erich, who was supposed to keep an eye on him and who gave him the money he needed to live and work, got Martin to straighten up the place and to draw “day and night” so that he would have something to show when Erich asked “So, what have you been doing?”
The only real disruption in this idyllic student life came from without. The Schleyer kidnapping [3] had whipped the mood in Germany into a frenzy, and someone thought that a terrorist or terrorist-sympathizer was hidden in the house. “There was a raid,” Martin said years later in an interview. “They stormed whole buildings. They showed up at the door wearing bulletproof vests, knock knock knock, I go to the door thinking the mailman’s early today, you know, my sense of time, go to the door naked and open it and wham I’m up against the wall.” He was in shock—the idea of being locked up in prison, of no longer being his own master, was Martin’s greatest fear. So he behaved well, well enough not to cause any trouble with the police, in any case.
He drew a lot in that apartment, very precise drawings with colored pencils, working all night long for months at a time. “A perfectionist,” Jochen Krüger called him—a worker. What did he draw? Himself (“I sit for portraits of myself—big freehand pencil drawings”), friends, and family. He made the wedding announcement for our sister Bettina, a double portrait of her and her husband Lars, and our father congratulated him on it: “You are definitely on the right path, not least because in everything you draw or paint you work out something that has to do with you.” His style was realistic. Krüger had no patience for such fussy things, but when he told Martin about an exhibition of Blinky Palermo’s in Bremerhaven, it was Martin’s turn to be dismissive: “Four chalk lines in the corner, OK, OK, that’s art?!”
Soon, however, drawing was not enough for Martin: it took too much time and resulted in only one picture, when he wanted to be visible, to be seen, to be everywhere. So he started copying. “He couldn’t walk past a Xerox machine without sitting his naked ass on it,” Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger wrote. The photocopier was a brand new technology at the time and a toy that artists loved to play with. He made hundreds of address labels that he stuck up everywhere, designed postage stamps, left behind lighters with sayings of his and Jochen Krüger’s in bars. He also took a lot of pictures with the new camera he had asked for as a present from the family, and one of his favorite occupations was to sit in a photo booth, alone or with other people, make funny faces, and have his picture taken. The medium fit well with his natural tempo: hundreds of pictures, just like that.
He wanted to put himself out there and get himself known, by any means necessary. “Mr. Kippenberger, since you were kind enough to leave your card in each of the three garbage bags that you placed at the emergency exit of the garage between the dates of Friday 1/11 and Sunday 1/13, we are happily in a position to convey to you our heartfelt thanks for your filthy mess,” wrote the proprietors of a parking garage around the corner from Zippelhaus. “If it ever crosses your mind to leave your garbage bags in or in front of the garage again, we will pursue legal action against you.” Martin would later reprint the 1974 letter in one of his books.
Warnings were always turning up: from the tax office, from the printer’s. Money was always tight; his bank account was constantly overdrawn. He looked for jobs and had a special talent for “finding jobs where he didn’t have to work himself to death,” as Jochen Krüger recalls. He painted three hundred windows for a health insurance company, licked envelopes, set up chairs, and signed up when the labor office needed “2 Men, strong” to load trucks for seven marks an hour. Once he got a job as a bookkeeper “even though he couldn’t even read his own bank statement,” Jochen Krüger said. “And he charmed the ladies so much that he wasn’t fired right away.” Our mother, from a safe distance, was especially impressed by this job and the fact that, as he reported, he washed, shaved, and shined his shoes for it every day. (“Next thing you know I’ll have to make him black satin sleeve protectors!”) Sometimes he said yes to two jobs at the same time, so he could call in sick to one and make twice as much money.
Our mother wrote him long letters that were a mix of worrying, warnings, and declarations of love. They often got on his nerves. She reminded him to send a thank-you letter to his grandma (“if you don’t do it now you never will”) or to show up for his military service exam (even if he would never be called up, given the drug use in his past, he shouldn’t get on the authorities’ bad side). “Stop smoking,” she warned in a letter, and included a newspaper clipping (“Did you know that every year in West Germany approximately 20,000 legs—so-called ‘smoker’s legs’—have to be amputated as a result of excessive nicotine use?” or “Did you know that constant exposure to loud thumping music can lead to permanent hearing loss?”). “Please go to the oral vaccination between Jan. 21 and Jan. 26, you’re not vaccinated for anything.” “You’re a boundless egomaniac, darling, there’s no one else in the world besides you who is worth your notice, including your little mother, who has spoiled you for far too long,” and then underneath: “Kisses, kisses, your little mother.”
She was always “terribly worried” about the “boy of my heart,” as she called him in her letters. “Or maybe I should say boy of my hurt?” she wrote once, when it was going particularly badly with his teeth and he needed to have several extracted. She was also, naturally, annoyed when he called her up in the middle of the night yet again, or brought a new girlfriend along every time he visited Essen. In his early Hamburg years, his visits brought her to despair—hanging around, sleeping late, suddenly disappearing and just as suddenly showing up again, “blind drunk for a change and getting on my last nerve.” It was a badly needed break for everyone whenever she gave him a trip to Berlin, “where he could stay with one of his countless girlfriends.” Afterward, at Christmas, he would be a friendly, happy kid again.
THE GOOD COUNTERPART
Meanwhile, Martin had fallen in love, with a pretty, brash, strong, lively, and capricious woman named Inka Hocke: his first long-term relationship. According to Gil Funccius, Inka “was a calming influence”; she also “had a giant apartment she had lived in forever, while we were constantly moving.” “Prewar building 4th floor nice neighborhood,” as Martin summarized. They had met at a costume party at the art academy. Inka was there with her friend Meheret, an Ethiopian woman whom Martin married in 1975 so that she could stay in the country (they divorced two years later). He looked bold that night, in his leather pants, loden coat, cowboy boots, and henna-red hair. He was twenty-one, and she four years older. “Red curly hair—covered with freckles all over her body—ex-married—8 yr old daughter—good mother—part time model—not histerical—balanced + quiet—good counterpart-not pretensious, doesnt want to conquer the world” was the description he gave to friends in Berlin.
Martin with Inka Hocke, ca. 1975
© Kippenberger Family
He didn’t have her address, but right after the party he asked all the neighbors where the woman with the red curly hair and the child lived. He showed up while
