to shut—when he was determined, he was determined, and he charged ahead deaf and blind, as he himself said, unwilling to even hear whatever the various members of the family wanted or were whining about. Otherwise, he knew he would never reach his goal. And he wanted to.
When he was diagnosed with skin cancer, he was determined to live, even if it meant having an operation every week. He managed a few years more than the doctors and the statistics had allotted him. “Onward and upward!” he scribbled in a shaky hand six months before his death, adding a stick figure climbing up a flight of stairs and sinking into an armchair. He was held up as a model patient in the hospital and even gave a lecture about how to do it: how to live your life anyway.
He always moved forward, never backward, except in his memories, which were as important to him as new experiences. He preserved these memories in little books, usually illustrated and always self-published—memories of his mother, whose name he bore (she was Gertie); of his childhood, his hometown, family celebrations; of Pastor Noa, who took his own life under the Nazis. He made the most beautiful of his books out of several hundred family letters. It’s not that he lived in the past, but that for him the past was the foundation of everything that came in the present. “Remember,” he told me to give me courage the night before my university exams, “you’re a Kippenberger!” He meant it not as a threat or a warning, but casually and naturally: nothing bad can happen to one of us! He was as proud to be a Kippenberger as he was to be a pigheaded Siegerlander, or a miner, or a father of five (and later eight) children. “One Family One Line,” Martin inscribed on our father’s gravestone. This is the attitude we grew up with.
Always forward, no backtracking: that was the ironclad rule of all our walks and travels. Never walk the same road twice. On the way back, we had to seek out another path, no matter how complicated or hard it was to find, or whether we would get lost. He always ran ahead, even on vacation. How was he supposed to notice when our mother clumsily stumbled and fell in Barcelona? “The husband, three steps ahead as usual, didn’t even turn around.” Courteous Spaniards helped her to her feet.
He rarely found downtime, as he put it, for reading—sometimes a thriller, but usually not even that. “You called it restlessness in my blood,” he wrote our mother once. She was someone who, wherever she went, looked for a place to sit and read a book, while his gaze was always directed out at the landscape or the sunset. “There’s probably some truth in that. Maybe I’m only running away from myself. Sometimes life is only a kind of running away, after all.”
He enjoyed life, and he loved to eat—preferably big, hearty meals. Every Saturday at our house there was thick, rich soup—split pea, lentil, vegetable—because he liked it so much. After his in-laws served him half a piece of meat and counted out the potatoes for lunch, he avoided going back. He also liked to cook, for guests and on weekends, on vacation and out camping. He cooked the same way he painted: improvising, without recipes and definitely not measuring cups. And as with his painting, writing, and celebrating, it had to be big. For him, cooking was also art, though not a pure art for art’s sake—the important thing was the eating, in as large a group as possible, along with wine and conversation.
“Father Kip: Leader of the Family. Mother Kip: His wife and mother of five children.” So ran their descriptions in the dramatis personae of his book Hike, 1963. Day-to-day matters and child rearing were her responsibility. During their years in Essen he left the house at seven in the morning, came home for lunch, lay down for fifteen minutes (during which there had to be absolute silence in the house), then drank an enormous cup of tea (he allowed himself coffee only on vacation: “it gets me too excited”) and left until seven at night.
He was responsible for weekends, and sunshine. Monday through Friday our mother hauled groceries home from the co-op in two giant bags, food for a large family plus guests and the help. On Saturday our father went to the market, chitchatted with the market women, tasted the cheese, bought too much of everything (and not necessarily what we needed), and was our maître de plaisir for the rest of the weekend. On Sunday our mother often lay in bed with a migraine, and was finally left in peace while the rest of us took a day trip.
He was constantly getting ideas. That’s when our mother got scared. Ideas meant that he would suddenly turn everything upside down, redecorate the house, maybe buy some exotic birds. Just three years after we moved into the house in Essen, when our mother had taken us children away on vacation, he wrote to her that he had “girded his loins and decided to thoroughly change some things in our house (no half measures). First the dining room. Out with the piano. We found a good place for it in the large children’s room (everything with Heia’s agreement). The other junk is being spread around the house too. Now the furniture will stand clean and pure in the pared-down room. Some of the pictures were already taken down off the walls—now the rest. Everything has to be rethought from its foundations.”
He had found new lighting for the dining room, “five simple, clear plastic tubes in a row to emphasize the length of the table and the shape of the room.” Plus it was finally bright enough: “I can’t stand this gloom any longer.” He was looking for a carpet to tie the room together: “Colorful, but strictly vertical stripes to emphasize the lines, you know, not scitter-scatter everywhere,” he told the carpet dealer.
Maybe his family was another of his “ideas.” He liked the family best when it was gathered around a long table, as multitudinous and loud as possible. He sat at the head of the table, of course. We called him “Papa,” but he usually signed his letters “Your Father.” And then he retreated. First he would go to the wooden loft, two comfortable rooms, that he had built above the garage in the garden and named “Father’s Peace.” Soon he started sleeping there, too. Then he slipped even farther away, to the apartment in Marl that our mother had bought for them to share in their old age. He seemed to grow younger: he let his muttonchops and beard grow long, adopted a Caesar haircut, traded in his old Opel Captain (the biggest family sedan available at the time) for a small, sporty Opel two-door, and took a vacation, alone for the first time, to Greece, to try to find himself among the men’s-only monasteries.
He had, as he put it himself, a weakness for the romantic. And for women. As was already printed in their wedding newspaper, “From Siegerlan’ / He’s a ladies man / And whoever sees him can understand / He’s someone no girl can withstand! / When Gerd rolls his rrrr ’s all full of charm / Even the coldest heart gets warm.”
He met Petra Biggemann in 1968, at a union dance, and married her in 1971. She already had two young sons, Jochen and Claus, and a third arrived in 1973: Moritz. When he told Martin the news, Martin immediately asked to be named the godfather. And he was.
MOM
Born February 11, 1922, she was an Aquarius and so, in her words, prone to creative flights of fancy but without a trace of ambition. And incapable of logical thought: “The Aquarius thinks in zigzags.”
She studied medicine during the war, in Frankfurt, Freiburg, and Göttingen. During vacations she had to perform her national labor service, first in a factory and later in a military hospital. Our parents were barely engaged when she started imagining their future life with children, calling him “Pappes,” and enthusing about the little Hansie and little Conrad they were going to have soon. “It can be a Barbara, too,” he would throw in. She didn’t want one child—she wanted lots of children. She couldn’t wait to be a mother.
She was eight years old when her mother, Paula Leverkus, died at thirty-four. Paula had helped take care of her husband’s factory workers as a nurse and had caught tuberculosis. Our mother had nothing except a few vague memories of her, a few photographs and letters; she didn’t miss her mother, she would later say, since she never knew what it was like to have one.
She was not like other mothers. She couldn’t cook, except spaghetti and noodle casseroles. She never buttered our toast. We had to pack our own
