only a distant figure—he worked as a puppeteer in Stuttgart; the aunt was a Chiemsee painter; Wiltrud worked on her picture books; the grandmother took care of the children. Martin did what he would so often do later in life: he got other people to work for him, hiring Wiltrud’s son Sebastian to do his homework. His grades in math and writing improved, though only temporarily—school remained torture for him and for everyone around him. The boys spent a lot of time with Wiltrud in her studio, each one busy with his own picture. One time, “with a fabulous gesture,” Martin swept everything in front of him off the tabletop.
“Martin, what are you doing?!”
“Making room.”
And, she thought, he was right. Other people might have called it naughty. She called it kingly. “He was never bad, just kingly: bossy but generous.”
He sat for her as a model, too, and our mother said that when the book with those drawings came out, he showed it “to everyone, whether they wanted to look at it or not.”
Martin was “terribly easy to take care of,” a darling boy, and Wiltrud, a short woman with short hair, cheerful and sassy and always a straight talker, was certainly right for him. At eighty she can still laugh about the gaudy kitsch in the Cham Catholic church. She has lived in Cham her whole life, in her parents’ house at the edge of a small town, but has few ties with the locals. She just lives there.
She told me that Martin wasn’t homesick, “not at all,” but that he made presents for his sisters the whole time he was there. Martin stayed six weeks; it seemed like months and months to her. And at the end of the stay he went back to Essen just as eagerly as he had left.
The thank-you letter that our mother sent to Wiltrud Roser sounds euphoric: Martin regaled the family with his stories, like the one about Vicar Bear and his cane, until we cried with laughter. “Already on the first morning he danced the polka, around to the right and around to the left, in his long nightshirt, it was a scream. He can sure dance, and paint too!” He’d been painting what he had seen in Bavaria, including Sebastian (“it couldn’t have been any more like him”) and Vicar Bear (“who looks terrifying”). “His stay with you was so good for him, in body and mind and spirit, that I can’t thank you and everyone else in Cham enough.”
Delight over his scholastic progress didn’t last long, in any case. After summer vacation Martin went back to school in Essen-Frillendorf to repeat third grade. Everything was like the old days again, and soon he would be sent off to a boarding school in the Black Forest, and from there to the next boarding school, and so on.
The Rosers were his first “second family,” and he kept in contact with them. Cham was the beginning of his life far away from home. One of his most haunting self-portraits is called Please Don’t Send Home : Martin peers out like a little runaway child, with no home any more, imploring the viewer to take him in because there is no going back. He wanted to move forward, get ahead, achieve something, conquer ever-new territory.
Still, according to his friend Michel Würthle, there was one place among all the many places in his life where he was always happy to return: “Childhood. The family house. Mama and Papa.”
OUR PARENTS
A person doesn’t create himself out of nothing, after all.
—MK
[Did your parents play a part in your personality?] Massive, massive, massive. I have to admit it. A huge part.... Both parents. Both extremes.
—MK
They fell in love with each other through writing. Writing letters.
Actually, they had already known each other for a long time: they were in the same dancing school without really noticing each other. Their parents moved in the same circles in Duisburg. And long before he received letters from her himself, he had read her letters.
It was during the war, in Hungary, and the doctor in his regiment, one Wiechmann, always showed him what she’d written. Wiechmann didn’t know what to make of the dry letters and couldn’t understand why he wasn’t getting anywhere with her. The young lady just wouldn’t catch fire. Our father gave him good advice but it didn’t help.
Later, after the war was over, our father’s father invited her over to dinner—not without thinking, perhaps, that she might make a good match; he would have known that as a manager at Deutsche Bank. After a stroll in the woods, our father took her to the streetcar: “the only thing I remember was her unusual way of walking. She just galumphed along.” He found it touchingly awkward. And that was that, until he wrote to congratulate her on her recent graduation from medical school, just to be polite. She wrote to thank him for his thanks, “and from that bungled thank-you-no-thank- you ” arose an exchange of letters.
He gently accused her of maybe being too cold to the other man, Wiechmann, and our mother got furious: she had only written to him on the front in the first place out of pity! But then, wounded in his masculinity, this Wiechmann had started insulting her, accusing her of being a “sexless workhorse”—her, Dr. Lore Leverkus, a young doctor who had just started her first job at the Göttingen Clinic for no salary because the paid positions were reserved for the men returning from the war. “I don’t care to answer letters like that.”
The two of them debated the meaning of love and discussed art. She told him about Beethoven concerts she had heard, live or on the radio, and he told her about the pictures he was painting and the classes he was taking. “A ten-page letter two or three times a week,” our father said later, “no one can withstand that.” For his twenty-sixth birthday, March 1, 1947, she typed up their letters, bound them, and gave him the volume, illustrated with the little pictures he used to send her to accompany his words. She wrote as the dedication “You for me and me for you.” And next to the dedication was a bookplate he had drawn for both of them to use: someone sitting in an armchair and reading a newspaper that said “Lore” on one side and “Gerd” on the other.
They called each other “Little Man” and “Little Mouse.” She sent him care packages with oatmeal, bacon, textbooks, ribbons, brushes, and Rilke poems. He, a mining student in Aachen, sent her stockings, and also work: reports to type up and send on to the senior office. He sent her drawings and watercolors, which she tacked to the wall of her room. Whenever he painted, “burning with zeal,” he forgot everything, including the stove he was supposed to keep hot while she cooked for him and did the laundry. Sometimes she read to him while he was painting. Art, he would later say, was what he had really wanted to study, really wanted to do. If only the war hadn’t gotten in the way.
When she was offered a position in Odenwald, she turned it down: “There’s not the slightest intellectual stimulation there, I’d go brain-dead.” She liked to go to concerts, to the theater—a Shakespeare production in a ruined cloister, for instance. She was an enthusiastic reader of what people were reading in those days (Manfred Hausmann, Frank Thiess), and she liked telling him, a “specialist in the field,” her impressions of various art exhibitions in Wiesbaden. She worshipped the Old Masters (Dürer, Grünewald, Bosch) and complained about contemporary artists: “All their works have nothing to say except ‘Me, me, me.’” Within six months, she had revised her opinion and said she recognized genius in modern painting; she didn’t want to “label it as smears of color on the wall any more.”
In one of his early letters, Gerd had told her that he was more afraid of marriage than of the war. But on August 2, 1948, the banker’s son and the factory director’s daughter were married: Gerd, son of Gertie née Oechelhäuser and Hans Kippenberger, and Dr. med. Eleonore “Lorchen” Augusta Elena, daughter of Otto and stepdaughter of his new, third wife Dr. med. Lore
