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 knapsacks, and when we fell she would just tell us, “Go put some iodine on it.” She was definitely not one of those mothers who constantly wipe their children’s snotty noses and pull up their socks. Our underwear peeked out from under our clothes. She never fretted when we started to go off on our own, and we never had to call home to say we had arrived safely; she knew we would. Bad news, she liked to say, comes anyway, and soon enough. Her child rearing methods were laissez-faire, although she could be strict and sometimes even a bit hysterical. All three of them were drama queens: father, mother, and son.
Lore Kippenberger in the mid-1970s
© Kippenberger Family
Giving presents was her passion; organization was not her strong suit. She was constantly looking for her glasses, or buying Christmas presents in summer and hiding them so well that she never found them again. Cleaning was a nightmare for her and when, after a long vacation, she finally had to do it, she gave us a few coins, if we were lucky, and sent us off to the vending machines so that she could take out her bad mood on the vacuum cleaner instead of on us. In day-to-day life, keeping house oppressed her: we didn’t help out enough and were too messy. “If I was your cleaning lady, I would have given notice a long time ago,” she said once.
She liked to quote the English saying “My house is clean enough to be healthy and dirty enough to be happy.” For one thing, she felt that cleaning—even more than cooking—was a thankless task, the results of which were obliterated swiftly and unremarked, as though it had never happened. Secondly, she felt that “maintaining cleanliness and order, if you put too much time and care into it, works against the peace and happiness of the household.” So she did what absolutely had to be done, and that was more than enough. Even the laundry, which she had to haul out to dry in the yard or on the roof, would have been enough, but then there was also shopping, helping with homework, and battling our teachers.
In the only year when all five of us children passed all of our classes and moved up a grade, our father gave her a large brooch with our names on the back as a “Maternal Order of Moving Grades.” He knew she had earned it. “Tell me the truth,” she said to her friend Christel Hassis once, “are we all actually idiots, since our children do so badly? I always thought we were the crème de la crème .”
She gave us names with an eye to our future, names that could be pronounced easily in other languages and which would go well with titles of nobility. That said, she didn’t raise her daughters just to get married—we should have careers first. And driver’s licenses (the only one of her children who never got one was Martin). She cared more that her first son-in-law, Lars, was “a nice boy” than whether or not he had a successful career.
She wore her hair permed—sometimes even wigs, when there wasn’t enough time for visits to the hairdresser—and never left the house without lipstick and pearls. Not real pearls, of course, and she especially liked that they were fake. Thanks to her high-class background and way of carrying herself, she thought, no one would ever suspect it.
After bearing five children, she had lost her slender figure and was constantly on a diet. She liked to moan and groan that she had only to eat half a praline to gain three pounds. In fact, she had probably eaten half the box, after a day of starving herself. She usually wore big dresses, brightly colored and patterned; Marimekko was her favorite brand. Her glasses and rings were large, too, and later so were her hats. Only her shoes were flat and practical.
She could lie and read in bed for hours, or in the sun on the beach for weeks. On the bookshelves was literature that hadn’t been available under the Nazis, in the early series of inexpensive paperbacks published by rororo : Fallada, Hemingway, C. W. Ceram, Carson