The only school he liked and did well at was Aenne Blömecke’s dance school. Chubby Miss Blömecke fell prey to his charm and dancing ability, though she did occasionally admonish him, “Mr. Kippenberger, not so much shaking your behind back and forth, please.” For the ball at the end of the year, he had our mother dress him up: velvet suit, tailored white shirt, giant black bow tie. “He looked like Franz Liszt, The Early Years.”
At ten, along with pencils (black and colored), erasers, drawing paper, and an easel, he asked for a camera (“since Father has one too”), plus a wristwatch, long pants, and a tie. He carried the camera like our father did, proudly hanging down over his belly like a part of his clothing. “He is more vain than all four girls put together,” our mother noted down when he asked for more clothes and a fancy Schmincke paint box for the next holiday.
Martin and our father, passport photo booth, mid-1970s. Martin used this photo as the title image of his Homesick Highway 90 catalog
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
He knew that an artist needs appropriately artistic clothes, just as an actor needs a wardrobe. So he always decked himself out for his appearances. Before embarking on his first long trip (a couple of weeks in South America at age sixteen, working his way there and back as a cabin boy), he equipped himself in Hamburg with two Hawaiian shirts, sunglasses, polo shirt, straw hat, belt, and pipe. At home, our mother loaned him her Indian shawl of brightly colored silk—out of pity, she said: “He has such a sense for beauty, color, and form, and what is he allowed to wear? Practically nothing decorative with bright, happy colors.”
It turned out, though, that men’s fashion was changing more quickly in those years than our mother was comfortable with. “He looks like Rasputin,” she wrote when Martin was seventeen, the same year that she saw him as young Liszt. She continued, writing to her friend Wiltrud Roser:
That center part, that sheep’s-wool overcoat (old Finnish military surplus, not to say very old, and with bullet holes in various places! or holes of some kind). He wears it night and day now, he got it for Christmas from Gerd, he said it was what he wanted most of all and we had no idea how filthy the thing was since he bought it in a store with a good reputation. Now it’s even filthier, and it takes a certain social courage to show myself in public as the mother of a son in clothes and a haircut like that. Gerd’s parents have already disowned him in their thoughts, totally written him off. No lack of complaints from that side too, but what can you do. Now I’ll go make some dinner, since there’s nothing else I can do!
He liked to wear a long bedouin robe, long hennaed hair, bright orange overalls, and red toenails. Martin’s friend Hanno Huth said that Martin “was a Gesamtkunstwerk [a total, multimedia work of art]. He not only was loud, he looked loud too.”
Now he was starting to perform the Gesamtkunstwerk in public, too. He had his own domain at home—a large room cut off from the rest of the house—but he was hardly ever there. Instead he was out at the Youth Cultural Center, nicknamed the KZ, [1] where kids met up, played go, and smoked a little pot; or at the Pop-In, a disco; and most of all at the Podium, a tiny basement bar that was the first of the many “locals” he would have in his life. He spent every evening there, literally every single evening. It opened at seven, and by six thirty at the latest Martin would be sitting on the little wall in front. Martin would later think of Manni, the owner, with his “predilection for Western-style behavior,” as akin to Michel Würthle, the proprietor of the Paris Bar in Berlin.
Helge Schneider describes the Podium in his autobiography as “the only drug and jazz bar to go to” in the city. There was everything there, and lots of it: pot, LSD, and “Dutch capsules,” a kind of Ecstasy, with the appropriate live music to match. Among others who played there were Withüser and Westrup, “two German marijuana-folk-bards from the seventies,” as the German newspaper taz later described them; “German dope music,” another critic wrote. “Have a Joint, My Friend” was the title of one of their songs, from the album Trips & Träume ( Trips & Dreams ). Helge Schneider also describes seeing “a strange band” at the Podium, with “the woman playing the drums naked while the man blew into his bamboo tube. It was Limpe/Fuchs, a so-called ‘free jazz formation.’” The musicians from Kraftwerk played there, too.
Essen, “the shopping city,” “the Ruhr’s white-collar city,” had a flourishing music scene, with one of the most important pop-music venues in the country, the Gruga Hall. Everyone played there: the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, Nat King Cole, Joan Baez, Louis Armstrong, and German acts like Heintje and Willy Brandt. The rock and pop festivals there were famous nationwide, and people came from all over to see Pink Floyd, Fleetwood Mac, or Frank Zappa, to smoke their first joint, to lose their virginity. Martin saw Hair and Fiddler on the Roof there and pushed his way ahead to meet the actors at the stage door. One of the two short-lived conceptual bands he founded later, in Berlin, was called the Grugas. He painted a picture of the Gruga Hall, too, called From Zappa to Abba.
Martin was one of the youngest patrons of the Podium—in truth he was too young to be allowed in, but he wouldn’t let that stop him. Besides, he was so entertaining. No matter what he was drinking or smoking, his friend Hanno Huth says, he had “as much of a need to communicate as ever.” He also had “the all-important thing,” or “the admission ticket,” in Huth’s words: long hair. Helge Schneider, in his autobiography, describes feelings that Martin must have shared: “Now I feel totally groovy, I’m a hippie. I dance by myself and throw my head back and forth, my long hair needs to fly out, far, far out!” Martin’s first public exhibition was at the Podium: Esso S, an oilcan made out of wood; For the Rhine Fishermen; and a little crab in a box of Lord cigarettes ( Krebs in German means both “crab” and “cancer”), which he called Oh Lord, what have you done to me .
Martin with his friends Birgit and Willi, in the Frillendorf yard, with the artworks they had exhibited in the Podium
© Kippenberger Family
He had long since discovered women, and he fucked them, banged them, screwed them, nailed them—he never ran out of words for it, or of girls either, it seems. Our mother was amazed: didn’t he have horrible, sweaty feet? He was obsessed with sex and apparently had it in the disco itself, at friends’ houses, at whorehouses. One time, after breaking up with a girlfriend who was older than him (as they so often were in those days), he stood grinning in front of our mother and said, “You have your son back, chaste as Joseph!” “I always wished that originality was rewarded more at school,” she commented. “Then our children would do a lot better.”
Our mother was by no means always amused by his drifting life. They had serious fights about it all the time. Every other week he would be screaming into her face that he wanted to run away from home, but he never did it and never would. Instead, he brought home a girlfriend who had run away from her home. “There they stood at the door, St. Martin the Protector and a delicate blonde little thing, trembling like an aspen leaf, wrapped in a maxi coat.” She had gotten into a fight with her mother because her mother had opened a letter from Martin addressed to her, which started with a collage that the mother found obscene, “and what Kerl wrote after the collage was even more obscene (what wouldn’t a boy in puberty write who feels enlightened? Thanks a lot, Oswald Kolle!)” [2]
Martin held his first “happening” in the garden of our house, on a Sunday, with a hundred and fifty people invited. “‘This afternoon a few people and a great band will be coming by,’ Martin announced. What came was an invasion,” our mother wrote. “They camped out in little groups on the grass, like happy cows, chewing the cud and staring into space. Cows chew cud but what