secure a foothold in the construction industry—likewise in crisis—did he find another position: as a manager at a plastic tubing company in Mülheim.
His fascination with mining and its traditions only grew in this period. He continued to do research, reading books on mining’s history and practice in other countries. When he died, he was buried in his miner’s tunic, meant for special occasions—the same one he had married our mother in.
He could be crude as well as charming and tended to find the shortest path from one social blunder to the next. He loved provocation and making fun of people. Once, introducing our sister Bine’s boyfriend—a mining engineer like him—to some colleagues in Aachen, he did not say the young man’s name, which he had probably already forgotten. He said, “Here’s the kid who wants to be my son-in-law.” It was a test, and Andreas passed it. Our father said what he thought, loud and clear, and also what he knew: for example, that there were safety problems down in the mine because the wooden supports for the shaft, from a company executive’s forest, were rotten. That got him into a lot of trouble. Still, he didn’t go as far as his son would later; he also paid court to his superiors. As he wrote to our mother once: “I think Mrs. Wussow [a friend] is right after all: I’m a revolutionary, but only in secret—someone who never makes the move.”
He was an exotic species in a conservative world, along with his whole family and their lifestyle. A “rare bird,” as they say. Our parents’ friend Ulla Hurck said that “he made the sober mining folks uneasy—he was a shock for them.” In a children’s story that he wrote for us, where he is recognizably the father, he is the only one not to laugh at the child who wanted a skating rink in the middle of summer. “He knew how much it hurt to be laughed at.”
“Diagram,” Gerd Kippenberger, 1965
© Gerd Kippenberger
“If he had not been the company director at the Katharina Mines, he would certainly have been a painter,” a newspaper wrote in an article about our father’s exhibition at the House of the Open Door in Frillendorf in 1960, one of the many exhibitions that he organized himself as a member of the artists’ society. He showed landscapes and city views, and his art, according to the newspaper critic, was “a beautiful, free expression of modern creativity.”
He usually painted on vacation and signed his pictures “kip.” But he didn’t need a canvas to make art. In the 1960s, the era of Pop Art, he made constructions from flotsam and jetsam he found on the beach, painted picture books for his grandchildren, built brightly colored wooden cities, and threw parties. He laid out gardens, first in Frillendorf and then, in his second life (for there would be another wife and more children), in Marl. There he bought an allotment, where he built hills, a frog pond, and a trellis for grapevines. He planted blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries. He named the path that the bushes were on “Blackcurrant Way” and placed his wooden figures everywhere as a special kind of scarecrow: The Passionate Lover, The Blue Angel, St. Francis of Assisi, The Market Lady with Sagging Breasts.
He wrote books about his travels, our house, the neighbors, parties, the Siegerland area, and his early years. The worse the crisis in the mining industry became, the more he clung to his private life. The stories were not invented, but he did fictionalize the truth, exaggerating, distorting, and embellishing. His brother called him a “magical realist.” The world was a stage in his books, and life was a play, or more specifically, a farce, with everything more comic than it actually was. He referred to himself in the third person, as “Father”; his wife was “Mother.” In one of his little books, Hike, 1963, about a walk he took with our mother and the two oldest children, he gave the “cast” at the beginning and ended with “The End.” He was everything in this theater—director, writer, star, and cameraman—except the audience. The camera was always there. Whenever we left the house, he hung the “photey” around his neck and over a belly that slowly grew fatter with the postwar economic recovery. He had no interest in taking snapshots, though—he directed us: behind this window, on that bridge, between those columns. We sisters hated it, but Martin loved it. He later turned one of these photos, where we’re standing with raised arms on the front steps of our great-grandparents’ little manor house, into a work of art, a postcard with the title “Hey, hey, hey, here are the Monkeys.”
On the front steps of our great-grandparents’ manor house in Siegen-Weidenau: Martin, Barbara, Sabine, Susanne, Bettina (bottom to top). Photo by our father, which Martin turn into a postcard in 1985: “Hey, hey, hey, here are the Monkeys.”
© Gerd Kippenberger/Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
Every big party was planned from beginning to end, with a written program. The guests had to sing on cue. Since his first talk as a student, he had loved to give speeches entirely improvised—“I talked myself into such a state that everyone there listened, entranced.” He did not need a podium to be seen, of course, or a microphone to be heard: like all the men in his family, he had an impressive voice. It grew even stronger as he became hard of hearing, like many men in his profession—it often got so loud down in the mine that you had to scream to be heard.
To make completely sure that he would get speeches for his own birthday, he assigned them himself, along with suggested topics. Our instructions, printed in the invitation, were “Our father as he really is. Only my four daughters are qualified to speak, and they are requested to please agree on the content beforehand and on who should deliver the address.” The only one of his children who could have performed the task without any difficulty was Martin, but he was in Brazil at the time. Our protests meant nothing to him—he just threatened to write the speech himself. So he got what he wanted: our father as he really was.
Afterward his cousin came up to us with a serious face and a sepulchral voice: someday we would be sorry we had given such a speech. But our father—who knew he had skin cancer and not long to live—had enjoyed himself immensely.
Not even at the very end, after seven years of fierce struggle against the cancer that finally defeated him, did he give up the reins. Our father staged his own funeral. In the weeks before his death, when he could barely hold a pen any more and his handwriting was growing more and more shaky, he wrote out his stage directions: whom we should invite (and whom we should not); where the funeral meal should under no circumstances take place; that a bagpiper should play; that he should lie in state in his miner’s tunic; and that his coffin should have eight handles, one for each child and stepchild. He got everything he wanted, and speeches to his taste, too.
Indecisiveness irritated him. “I’m not the type to hesitate for a long time,” he wrote as a young man, before he was our father. Once, when he heard that his semester would begin later than expected, he got on the next train, stayed with his grandmother in Siegen, and rode from one mine to the next, meeting geologists and getting new ideas. When our mother once again didn’t order anything to drink at a restaurant in Munich, our father later wrote, “Either she wasn’t thirsty, or she was thirsty but didn’t know what to do about it.” Both possibilities were equally incomprehensible to him. He liked to drink—beer, wine, liquor—this last with the guys from the mine, usually. He sometimes came home a little drunk and smelling of cigarette smoke.
Even though he was an engineer, he understood nothing about technology in everyday life. Maybe he didn’t want to understand. Whenever something needed fixing, the clever neighbors had to help out; when they weren’t around—if the camera broke on vacation or the film projector wasn’t working on Christmas—a major marital crisis ensued. He lacked both the calm and the patience to fix things. When it was time for us to set out, whether for the day or for six weeks, he got in the car and leaned
