Kippenberger. Susanne Kippenberger
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Lore Leverkus and Gerd Kippenberger (in miner’s tunic) on their wedding day, 1948
© Kippenberger Family
The groom himself had illustrated the “wedding newspaper” that was handed out to all the guests, and had written most of the poems in it as well. Like so many other family occasions to come, this festive day was recorded for posterity: “Mother-in-law Lore greeted the guests at the front door in her slip. Father-in-law Abba stood in the bedroom in his long underwear, unashamed, while Little Mouse had a wreath pinned up in her hair. Meanwhile little female cousins of every shape and size shuttled back and forth through the house, being either fed or put to work. The sexton didn’t want to let us into the church until we paid the marriage fee.”
Their honeymoon was in the Bergisches Land: hiking in the mountains. He shoved rocks he found geologically interesting into her backpack, and she secretly took them out again and dropped them. Almost as soon as they got home—by boat to Düsseldorf and from there by streetcar—he was off again, for a month in England with his fellow students. She had a job by then with a country doctor, near Aachen, and she supported her husband while he was in school.
DAD
He was born on March 1, 1921, the oldest of four brothers, so in 1939 he had just graduated high school and finished his time in the national labor service. He began his hands-on training in the mines: “I had chosen the career of the old Siegerland families: coal miner. But then, of course, came the war.”
Later, when he would tell stories about the war years, they were almost always comic. He was determined to see the beautiful side of things and refused to let even a war quash his worldview. His memoirs of the time read like stories of adventure tourism: when he transferred in Berlin on the way to Poland as an eighteen-year-old soldier, for example, he felt “a tingly sensation from being abroad, not knowing what to expect.” In Poland, he went to bars and enthused about the Masurian lake country; in France, he visited Joan of Arc’s birthplace, flirted with a little French girl from Dijon, came to love Camembert, climbed the church tower in Amiens, and held hands with a girl named Adrienne in Nahours, drinking a glass of wine with her father. He named his horse in Pommern “Quo Vadis” and used him to reenact scenes from Karl May, the beloved German writer of American-style Western novels. In Russia he jumped naked into the icy water. Then things got unpleasant. “We woke up from the dream of playing at war into the reality. Commands, orders, standstills, eyes left, eyes right, dismissed.”
The CV that he later wrote up for an exhibition makes it sound as though the only thing he did during the whole war was art: diary sketches, landscape pictures, illustrations; invented scenes, real events, horses, people, caricatures, village idylls, Hungarian scenes, transferring ordnance maps onto three-dimensional sand-table models, and whittling with a pocketknife while a prisoner between May and July 1945.
He would later write to his young fiancée that he was rarely in a bad mood. “My recipe for the war is: whistle a tune whenever you get sad.” He must have had a lot of opportunities to whistle. There was a period when no one wanted to be in the same regiment as him because he was always the only surviving soldier from his last regiment.
He never spoke of the horrors—only dreamed about them. Well into the 1950s he would scream in his sleep at night, according to our mother. Later, in a letter to us children, he would write that he was not allowed to yell at the guys in the mine, even when he got angry at them: “If I did, they’d report me for rudeness, which they call bad personnel management now and really frown on. Nowadays they want only good personnel management. I can understand that—good personnel management is actually a beautiful thing. When I was still a soldier, I always craved some decent personnel management, but it wasn’t in fashion at the time. On the contrary. We had to yell and scream if we wanted to impress our superiors—whoever screamed the loudest was automatically the best. You can see from this how attitudes change over time.”
After a few months in an American prisoner-of-war camp, he returned home and started to study mining in Aachen. It was a booming industry after the war: the mines smoked and reeked, and “everyone was clamoring for coal,” as he wrote in 1950. The miners were the heroes of the postwar period—they provided warmth for the freezing Germans—and they were thanked with the annual Ruhr theater festival in Recklinghausen. Our parents would see many plays there over the years.
It was backbreaking work under ground: dirty, hot, and dangerous. “The mine shaft is the dairy cow of the place,” he wrote about his first workplace in Altenbögge, “except that it’s sometimes not quite as docile.” He would often experience just how hard it was to control this wild cow. “Sometimes I feel like the annoyances never stop.” There were explosions in the pit, or water would flood in; he often had to spend all night in the mine. But the worst was bringing dead bodies up out of the pit. He attended many funerals. Once, when Martin wrote from boarding school for our father’s birthday, he wished him three cheers: “once for luck in the mine, once for a very happy day, and third, most important, that you stay healthy.”
“The Mine,” Gerd Kippenberger
© Gerd Kippenberger
Still, maybe because of the danger, he found the work fascinating. “It’s important to be possessed in a way by your job.” Our father, as a young man, discovered in mining “all the oppositions and dualities of life itself”: cruelty and solidarity, friendship and backstabbing, crudity and humor, tradition and innovation. At a time when the Ruhr region was officially ashamed of being the Ruhr (it would later call itself “Rustia,” punning on “Russia,” in a self-deprecating publicity campaign that was heavily criticized), he saw the beauty in the ugliness: the austerity of the industrial architecture, the coexistence of shafthead frames and meadows, and especially the people—the workers’ direct and natural ways, their warmth and humor and pride. In the Ruhr region, he would later write, he, the Siegerlander, found his second homeland.
He had barely started his first job, in Dortmund, when our oldest sister, Babs, was born: July 28, 1950. “Barbara” was what most miners named their firstborn daughters, after their patron saint.
Mining turned out to be a feudal world. “We live on Mine Street, the royal road of Altenbögge, so to speak,” our father recorded. “The senior officials—the highest caste in the place—live there, so we are only tolerated and suffered.” But soon he himself belonged to that highest caste: he was made director of the Katharina Elisabeth Mine in Essen-Frillendorf in 1958 and given a giant house as a residence, with a huge garden, tended by gardeners. Sometimes our father had a chauffeur, Uncle Duvendach, who took trips with us.
But no sooner had he arrived in Essen than the great crisis in the mining industry began, as did worrying, anxiety, and fear for his job. “Now we need to get tough,” he wrote in September 1963 to friends in Munich. “The coal crisis continues, and whoever doesn’t go along (with the crisis) gets fired. Whoever fires the most people is the champion marksman.” His mine was shut down too; he was transferred to a desk job and eventually let go. In September 1972, just back