sentence she had spoken written down on paper. She was won over.
From then on he was always there.
He got along wonderfully with Inka’s daughter, Mimi—“they were on the same level” and they played cards and squabbled with each other. The three of them “made a family.” They painted Easter eggs, cooked noodles, played Battleship. He liked that Inka made him get a haircut or take a bath; outside he was wild and crazy Kippi with a big mouth, but in private he could feel sorry for himself “and he would be pitied and taken into someone’s arms. He could be a little boy.” He could be childishly jealous as an artist, too: he couldn’t stand it when someone else was more successful than he was. “He was always proving himself, always going full throttle,” Inka says. When they went out, he would introduce her as “my girlfriend who has absolutely no interest in art.”
When she told him that she didn’t like his long red hair and mentioned that she liked the actor Helmut Berger, “he turned himself into Helmut Berger within two days. He was changing all the time anyway, and always looked different.” He had an antique mirror behind the door in his Zippelhaus apartment, he wrote in a letter, “something I inherited, and what I see in it changes all the time and every now and then gets quite seriously on my nerves.” At night he told Inka bedtime stories; during the break he went to Zandvoort with her, to show her where we had spent our school holidays; he took her to Marl to meet our father and told her that our mother had been so strict with him that she had often pinched him on the arm. When they were apart, he wrote her “moving, very loving letters.” They often went for a drive in the country on weekends, “with daughter + kit + caboodle + ex-husband + holding hands,” as he wrote to a friend. Even if their day trips weren’t quite as idyllic as he made them out to be, Inka’s home was a safe place for him. “As soon as he went out, it was a different world.”
And that world was his stage. One time he went to a concert in the Market Hall with Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger: a father, mother, and two sons were playing “terrible music. They acted like they were satirizing someone but they were the joke. Then Martin jumped onto the stage, danced the boogie-woogie (with the mother as well), and saved the night. The whole audience, three hundred people, went wild.” When the musicians handed out autographed photographs afterward, Martin naturally signed his name too.
He was with Inka for three years, although they never officially lived together. “I go back and forth from my place to hers,” he wrote to friends, “usually I work at my place and sleep there.” Inka gave him the key to her apartment only when he was going to Florence and already knew that he was moving on. Inka said she had already known as much: “Martin’s a wanderer.” To console her, he gave her a trip to New York as a farewell present.
He himself took a major trip in 1974, to Mexico. When he died, he still had the souvenirs in his possession: sugar packets and moist towelettes from the plane, tomato-can labels with pretty girls on them, stickers showing Mexican women in folkloric costumes, a big pile of postcards, a thick plastic plaque that he must have pried loose from the airplane (“Please. Lock. Door.”), and pages on local foods and drinks torn out of his guidebook: “The Mexican eating customs are a mix of pre-Columbian and Spanish traditions. The cuisine is full of flavor and dishes that are very spicy are called ‘hot’ even if they are served cold....” “Don’t throw this away” is not only written on one of his early works from Berlin (a silkscreen print, called “colander prints” in German, that he made with a kitchen colander—“It can still be used for noodle casseroles,” he added), it was clearly one of his life mottos.
He booked the trip at a student travel agency, the cheapest possible. But in Mexico City, “the trip’s home base and starting point for side trips,” he lived as he so often would later: “comfortably. Work space, bedroom, private bath, maid who cooks meals, straightens up, and does the laundry.” He did it by borrowing money from Ralph Drochner, a friend from Essen who happened to be in Mexico at the time. He never paid it back, and Ralph was left with nothing by the end of Martin’s trip.
In terms of art, Martin found the trip disappointing. “Historical museums are the only thing interesting here. Modern art hasn’t really arrived yet. They crown the one modern artist they have like a king over and over again: Diego Rivera, who painted the struggling masses, liberation, and social issues in large format. The content may be right but the style is like Nazi sculptures.” Despite speaking no Spanish, he got by, cracking jokes, making faces, and dancing: “Everyone likes that.” Whenever anyone grumbled about his taking their photograph, he grumbled back at them in German for as long as he needed to until they stopped.
WE LIVED WHATEVER LIFE HAD TO OFFER
In December 1975, Martin moved in with Gil Funccius, his old friend from Release. Gil and her boyfriend, Tony Petersen, lived on Feldbrunnenstrasse, and a third roommate had just moved out. “The apartment is totally art nouveau (window, furniture, doors), parquet floors, 15-foot ceilings. One giant room 400 sqft & one 190 sqft. The big one will be my studio, the small one my bedroom.” Just because he moved so often doesn’t mean that he didn’t care about where he lived: he always wanted it nice. “Kippi always hustled the best room,” Gil says.
The situation went well, even if Gil’s boyfriend didn’t always like it. There were no big arguments: “Kippi was always very bossy, but since he could also be so adorable people forgave him.” They would sit in the kitchen all afternoon long and talk for hours. “She gave me a boost and I gave her a boost,” Martin wrote later.
Gil says, “Kippi brought people home, I brought people home, Tony brought people home.” As was common in shared apartments, the doors were always open. Even while Martin was in the bathtub there would be guests around, drinking and talking with him and each other. If a door wasn’t open, Martin just opened it, and if he found two people in bed together, all the better—Martin especially liked starting a conversation in those circumstances. At night it was time to tour the bars: the favorites were the Ganz or the Marktstube, the Madhouse for dancing, and by midnight at the latest, Hamburg’s red-light district, the Reeperbahn. “We lived what life had to offer,” Gil later said. “People lived without being settled.” It was a time of not yet being grown up, of playing, of experimenting. Everything wasn’t so serious, including art. Gil remembers it as a happy time.
In the big apartment in the old building on Feldbrunnen-strasse, Martin worked on his pictures, was photographed, and offered, as he put it, “the simplest ideas and my face as a model for record covers.” He was an ideal model for Gil because “he always knew exactly what I wanted,” she said; he was delighted to act out in front of the camera, striking the most varied poses. Here Martin did for the first time what he had been groping toward in our house in Essen-Frillendorf, and what he would later elevate to an official policy at Kippenberger’s Office in Berlin: he turned his home into an exhibition space, an art space. Two shows took place there, both in 1977: Chimerical Pictures, with Ina Barfuss, Hajo Bötel, Anna Oppermann, Thomas Wachweger, and Jochen Krüger, and then al Vostro servizio (At Your Service), with Achim Duchow and Krüger again. They were two big parties; “Kippi invited everybody,” Gil Funccius later said, “and I invited everybody, too.” The drinks weren’t free, though—Martin sold them. “He was always very practical about such things.”
Striking Poses, Feldbrunnenstrasse, Hamburg
© Gil Funccius
Hamburg was the right city at the right time for Martin, in the view of Gisela Stelly-Augstein, wife of the founding editor of Der Spiegel and a filmmaker and author herself. It was a port city, a “transit city”: “Something really got started for him there. He was seeking something, and he found it, and then he really put it into practice in Berlin.” She and Martin met each other near the end of his time in Hamburg. She remembers
