Every Christmas Eve morning, we were sent around the community to visit the old people. Our mother was glad to be rid of us during the final preparations, and the old people were glad to have someone to talk to. They told the same stories every year, mostly about their time as refugees in 1945. Every year, old Mr. Jäger told us what it was like when he and his wife had fled from East Prussia, now Poland, to Frillendorf on a horse cart. Every year, old Mrs. Haupt baked us New Year’s cookies and delighted us with her humor. When her health took a turn for the worse, at over ninety years old, and she lay on the sofa moaning, “Ah! Ah! Ah!” Finally she yelled at herself, “Say B for once, for God’s sake!”
Eventually, the house was emptier, quieter too—we were no longer children—and in 1971 we left Frillendorf and moved to a new building in Bergerhausen. Everything there was middle-class, green, and boring. “Whoever, like us, has felt true joy / Can never be unhappy again,” our mother wrote in a letter to a friend. The Ruhr District as we knew it came to an end as well. “Have you been to Essen?” asked the Dannon blueberry yogurt container that Martin reproduced in Through Puberty to Success. “Today there is only one coal mine operating in Essen, and the derricks are almost all gone. Essen’s biggest business today is retail. Essen is the Ruhr’s number one shopping city. Come take a shopping trip to Essen today!”
THE KIPPENBERGER MUSEUM
Our parents were hungry when the war ended—hungry for art, too. They went to the movies, to the theater, to exhibitions, including the very first documenta. Martin later told and retold the story about our grandfather wheeling him to the show in a stroller in 1955.
“Kippenberger knew perfectly well, ever since he was a child, that pictures, as the surrounding for sometimes worn-out feelings, can have an immensely positive effect,” Martin wrote about himself in Café Central. Pictures, our parents thought, make a house a home. In their wedding newspaper, our father said he wanted “pictures in all sizes and price points.” Once, when they were spending a week in Munich in a hotel near the train station, they unpacked their things, stowed their suitcases, and realized that “something was missing.” The pictures. The figurines. The books. “They healed the wound by using the shelf to display pictures, statues, and a tiny library.” By the end of the week, the soulless hotel room looked like their own apartment.
Decades later, when our mother was very sick in the hospital, she complained, “If only it wasn’t so bare in this room! No pictures, everything so insistently hygienic, all washable with disinfectants. Would a picture really mean a risk of infection? Or anything else that could give you something to look at and think constructive thoughts about?”
Our father called one of his first books—typed, illustrated, and properly bound— The Kippenberger Museum . Print run: one copy. The reader is led through the young couple’s miniscule apartment, ten by twelve feet, as though it were an actual museum, with the sink and coffee pot and and furniture and other objects described as works of art.
Our house in Essen was as large as a villa but absolutely without ornamentation and frills—the ideal “white cube.” It didn’t stay white for long, though. Soon even the outside walls had paintings on them, when our father followed an artist friend’s sketches and painted portraits of her figures on the walls. “The Kippenberger Museum,” one of the artist friends wrote on the drawing he’d made of the pictures on our Frillendorf wall, including a picture that showed the family from behind. The walls of the high, open staircase in the middle of the house were crammed with pictures hanging right next to each other, salon style. “Images hung on the walls from the baseboard to the ceiling in our house,” Martin would later say in an interview with Daniel Baumann. “Works by Beckmann, Corinth, Heckel, the German expressionists, Marino Marini, Picasso, and a lot of kitsch, too. I was faced with art on all fronts, end to end.” There was Barlach, too, and Chagall, and Grosz—many artists our parents had not been allowed to see in their own youth. Still, the contemporary art in our living room was decoration more than provocation, and often more crafts than art.
HOLIDAYS
Every year our parents went on a four or five week vacation by themselves, without us. The first time, in 1953, when Martin was six months old, they took the train to Italy and stayed in a hotel. Later it was always by car, with a tent and a cooking stove. Only in the beginning did our mother hold out hope that he would take pity on her and opt for comfortable accommodations: “I’m no pioneer. I get cold too easily.” But he preferred what he called the “straw sack” to normal sheets and a normal bed.
They devoured Europe. The war was over and now they could travel from the Arctic Circle to the Algarve, the west coast of Ireland to Helsinki, from Paris to Prague, the Norwegian fjords to the Hungarian plains. They drove and drove, every day somewhere else. On one trip they saw Utrecht, Amsterdam, Antwerp, Ghent, Bruges, Paris, Chartres, the Loire, Carcassone, Perpignan, Barcelona, Avignon, Bern, Freiburg, and Baden-Baden; another trip covered all of Great Britain. No sooner were they back than they sent out printed invitations for a matinee at the House of the Open Door (a kind of village center in Frillendorf) and showed four hundred slides, together with our father’s paintings, to the accompaniment of “new record purchases,” such as sea shanties or Welsh miners’ songs.
In Sweden they went swimming in the morning and dancing in the evening. Other people always assumed they were English, or Belgian, or even American; anything but German: they were nothing at all like the caricatures they knew from the movies. When they returned from a trip to the south and were met by a grumpy German customs official, it was like a slap in the face “after four weeks accustomed to the wonderful laissez-faire” elsewhere.
There were nannies and au pairs and neighbors and aunts to take care of us children, and we were well taken care of. When our parents came home, they spread out around the dining room everything they’d brought back, and they told us all their stories in the living room. Every trip resulted in material: for stories, for paintings, for writings. It was clear that, as our father remarked once, “they focused on people” when they traveled. The people they visited or met were more important to them than any churches and monasteries.
On school holidays we always went with our mother to Holland for as long as the vacation lasted. We had a vacation home in Zandvoort an Zee—nothing special, a modern apartment in a big apartment block with bunk beds and big windows through which you could see the ocean. After the basic furnishings were taken care of, “more pictures and more friends came with every succeeding visit: everything that makes a home homey.” Petra, the artist whose portraits already decorated the outside of our Frillendorf house, painted the cupboards and the walls. We only had to cross the street and we were at the beach, where we spent the greater part of every day; when it rained, we took the train to Haarlem or Amsterdam, to go shopping or go to the Frans Hals Museum or Rijksmuseum.
Martin and Susanne in Amsterdam, 1964
© Kippenberger Family
Holland was paradise for all of us. “In Zandvoort I never despaired,” Martin wrote in his book Through Puberty to Success. Our father called Holland his third homeland. In Holland you could buy pudding in bottles and French fries from stands. Our mother once wrote her friend Christel, while we were there recovering from Christmas, that “We spend our time sleeping—til 10 a.m., with no energetic husband slash father to hustle us out of bed—and eating and reading. Now and then we play some games too”: concentration, rummy, and mau-mau. She could read as much as she wanted and didn’t have to cook: every night we got dinner in a big pot from the French fry stand.
Our mother settled in for six weeks at the seaside with us, our friends, and her friends; our father came on weekends in a generous mood, entertaining us with trips to the pannekuchen house, the tourist attractions in Volendam and Madurodam, or the Alkmaar cheese market. In Holland we could ride motorized scooters and jump on trampolines—children were welcome everywhere, and there were big playgrounds built for them. When we got older, we went to the flea markets and mingled with the “beatniks” on the beach.