CHAPTER TWO
HAMBURG
It’s a commune and that means communication.
— MK
Martin didn’t choose Hamburg at all—our mother and our uncle Erich did.
“The only thing that helps with Martin is prayer,” our mother once wrote. She said she felt like “a chicken that had hatched a duck, and now is clucking anxiously on the shore while the duck happily paddles around in the pond.” Martin himself never worried that he hadn’t finished high school, that he’d ditched his job, that he took drugs. He knew he was an artist!
But this time, in 1971, when our mother took him to the hospital in Essen—maybe he really had taken too much, maybe it was just a particularly histrionic acid trip, maybe our mother simply didn’t know what else to do—he ended up in a large hall in the men’s ward where most of the patients were old, coughing miners. He felt pushed aside and abandoned. In any case, he told Hans Meister it was a traumatic experience. Meister was one of the founding members of Release, the “Association for the Struggle against the Narcotics Threat”: the first self-help group that aimed, with the support of the Hamburg city government, to wean addicts from hard drugs by using softer ones. Martin described Hans Meister in a letter to our mother: “Hans, formerly an assistant window-dresser, four years morphine, shot heroin, founder, married, to Vaveka the Swede, two kids, responsible for drug advice, repairs, interviews, makes music and sound pieces.” Our mother had begged her brother Erich, a banker in Hamburg, for help with Martin, and he had found out about Release. They signed Martin up and he agreed to go.
Via Hamburg, Martin ended up at Otterndorf (near Bremerhaven), where the Association had a commune in the countryside. It was a huge farmhouse with a converted barn where Martin, as he wrote to our sister Tina, “could relax after that whole screw-bang-nail-fuck-do it-screw it thing in Stockholm.” There he could do what he wanted to do: make art.
Martin played the drums and danced, and at Release you could drum on pots and pans for three days straight if that’s what you needed to do. He jumped over a dike naked, long hair flying, and used the photo for a poster fifteen years later (“The Battle against Bedsores”). Most of all, he painted. There was a studio for radio plays and music in Otterndorf, and the artist Hermann Prigann had a space “where they painted like crazy,” Hans Meister recalled. Martin even dyed his underwear “in every color,” which was the fashion at the time, and he learned how to enlarge photographs and sew on a sewing machine.
He had a remarkable talent for making himself at home immediately wherever he was. As soon as he got to Otterndorf he felt better: “accepted, not abandoned,” as Meister put it. “He realized he wasn’t crazy, he had just had visions on acid that he couldn’t explain.” There, sympathy was based on mutual understanding. He had a new family. That’s what the commune was: a kind of extended family, with fixed rules and a daily schedule, including cooking and eating meals together. For the first and last time in his life, Martin stuck to a healthy diet. He was so enthusiastic that he even thought the macrobiotic food tasted good.
“It’s a commune and that means communication,” he wrote euphorically to our mother after two weeks. “It’s going brilliantly! The day before yesterday I built myself a bed as well as a table and much more! My pad is slowly getting homey.” The table stood by the window with a view of the landscape, cows, and clotheslines. Eighteen people lived there, and Martin described every one in his letter:
Wastel, 6 yrs old, going to school. Anna, 3, wants to be Winnetou! [1] Holm, 25, nine years on heroin, been here two months, they got him out of the insane asylum, officially labeled “a serious threat to public safety,” very nice and totally normal and very smart!!! Uwe, 23, five years on heroin! Just done with withdrawl, still gets seizures, colapses a lot! And finally: Martin, 18, going to AofA (Academy of Fine Arts) in the fall! Me!!
He added his requests in a P.S., just as he had done from boarding school: “I need sheets, lots of stamps, pocket money, Plaka paints from my room, and my big phone book!”
He had pulled it off: been accepted to study art at the Hamburg Academy of Art without a diploma, with only a portfolio and talent (something possible only after the changes of the sixties). He would have to take a preliminary class first, and then he could enroll in the summer of 1972.
Martin stayed with Release in Otterndorf for six months, maybe as long as nine months, then moved to central Hamburg. There was always something happening there; visitors from everywhere showed up constantly, and he met Gil Funccius, a graphic artist ten years older than him who had just moved from Berlin to Hamburg “to do something social.” But she soon found the group at Release too alternative and their constant discussions too self-flagellating, so she spent most of her time with “Kippi,” as everyone called him back then, “because that was the most fun. Kippi knew how to go out, how to get out of obligations, too.” As Martin would later write in Through Puberty to Success, Gil “was the very only one at Release who allowed herself not to suggest me on the message board in the kitchen that had topics to discuss at night sitting in a circle in the attic after two joints (‘Tell us about your problems!’).”
A lot of people were always roaming around, just like the hippies in our Frillendorf garden. Then again, there were repeated conflicts at Release, “highs and lows that everyone always has to discuss!” as Martin wrote to our mother.
Because we’re living in a collective, that’s exactly why we’re criticized more, and I’m trying to figure out the reasons for lots of things! In the past few days I’ve gone into myself amazingly sharply. Over the weekend I saw the core of the problems in my brain, and it was almost too much for me! Sometimes I’m afraid I’ll flip out!
Martin was always on the move, “always had to put on some show or another”: set up a tea-room, swim across the Alster River, change apartments.
Our father was enthusiastic, in any case. “That’s great, everything you guys are doing!” he wrote to Martin in Otterndorf in the summer of 1971. “I wish I could join in, building and woodworking and painting and all that. That’s what I’ve always done. When I was just 18 like you, I painted the insides of all the barracks in bright colors.” Did they have pillows and a sewing machine in Otterndorf? “The ladies could sew something like that very well.” He would get Martin some brightly colored fabric on clearance. Maybe they could start a whole production line.
Later, when Martin was working on his idea for a tea-room, in 1972, our father gushed: “That idea might have come from me, if it hadn’t come from you!” He went on and on about Japanese ladles and started thinking about the tea service, never mind that they didn’t have much money: “teacups are not the same as coffee cups, you know.” By the next letter, he was furnishing the tea-room with armchairs, lamps, books, underground books, and magnifying glasses, and hanging pictures on the wall: they had to be “soft,” like the tea. “Modern landscapes maybe. Better yet: Faces. Faces are expressive and even intellectual, so to speak. — But then something poetic, something that tells a story. Narrative has almost disappeared from painting since the Blue Rider.” [2]
ONE OF YOU – AMONG YOU – WITH YOU
“Maaaaartin!”
Martin doesn’t hear. He is racing around the garden, jumping high up in the air and having fun, almost tumbling and falling on his face. He wants to play, not listen to anybody. This Martin is tall, dark, and shaggy—a dog like a teddy bear. Ina Barfuss and Thomas Wachweger had named their giant schnauzer Martin “because it’s a name you can say both forcefully and affectionately.”
The garden is enormous. After the fall of the Wall in 1989, the artist couple moved from Berlin out to Brandenburg, into