the book would be loaned to a friend, with a letter full of commentary. She was a critical reader: not even Goethe and Schiller were safe: “Schiller’s Don Carlos is also utterly out-of-date. . . . What bombastic nonsense!” She started an imaginary correspondence with Goethe, among other things suggesting improvements to certain lines of verse that, in her opinion, fell short of the mark.
Then her husband met Petra Biggemann and her marriage fell apart. She died her first death then, she told a friend, and mourned the love of her life. The big, loud house soon grew even quiet and emptier: Tina left to become a midwife, and Martin spent more time in bars than at home.
For decades her main occupation had been wife and mother, and now she was a divorcée. A rarity in the late sixties, especially in her circle: I was the only child in my class whose parents were divorced. She was forced to face the fact that the society she lived in was a kind of Noah’s Ark: “Entrance permitted only in pairs!” Single women were not invited anywhere because they would ruin the even number of seats at the table.
She missed her old social life. Our sister Tina took a vacation to Wales once. Our mother had been to Wales too in her day. When Tina wrote home, she asked, “How many people did you meet here?! Everyone seems to know you.” People meant more to her than things, our father thought: “You can talk to people, you can write to them, they let you give them things when you have too much. The danger is just that you give away too much of yourself.” She made people laugh and made herself laugh, too, until tears ran down her face, especially with her female friends.
As a child she had been raised as her brothers’ equal. There was no question that she would go to a real academic high school, not some girls’ school home-ec nonsense. Thirty years later, she learned that the world was not as emancipated as she had thought. But she still had her family: she never broke off contact with her in-laws or with our father. She even took care of his new sons sometimes.
Then, twice, she almost really died. After a hysterectomy she had an embolism, and shortly afterward she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She took it with gallows humor, writing to Wiltrud Roser in high style, with an allusion to Schiller no less: “Grant me my wish to be your third confederate! On Tuesday I am having my right breast removed. Who would have thought! No longer full-bosomed—now half-bosomed. Warmest wishes, Your Lore.” On her New Year’s card, for which Martin drew an apocalyptic picture, she printed as a motto the Goethe quote “ Allen Gewalten zum Trozt sich erhalten” (Despite all the violent forces against us, we will overcome).
Despite everything, she flourished again in the years after her divorce. By the standards of the time, she was an old woman. When she was forty-two, the photographer in a Munich photo studio told her she had so many wrinkles that there was no point in retouching the photo; besides, it would be too expensive. Our mother put a big hat on her head and sailed out into the world. “The older my mother got,” Martin later said in an interview, “the more beautiful she became. She had no womb and no breasts left but grew more and more beautiful, free, and open. More open. She got so much older, and learned that she had cancer, and then suddenly: Pow! Everything opened up.... She would say, ‘Come on, kids, let’s go to Paris! And no squabbling about your inheritance!’”
Having left her career almost twenty years before, she started working again, as a doctor in the Gelsenkirchen public health department, and liked it very much. For years she had not driven a car—the husband was always in the driver’s seat back then—but now she bought herself a Citroen 2CV, a car that at the time was driven mostly by college students. Not that she shared all their views—free love didn’t interest her in the least, she categorically opposed the pill, and she often gave lectures condemning drugs after Martin started taking them. It was just that she liked the little Deux Chevaux, and it was cheap.
Change-of-address card: “Mother Kippage and Her Children” (MK, 1971)
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
What was left of the family moved out of the big house into a new duplex apartment she set up. Its great luxury: floorboard heating. No more cold feet ever again!
Martin drew the change-of-address card himself and called it “Mother Kippage and Her Children,” a reference to Brecht’s play Mother Courage and Her Children. He drew himself sprawled out in an armchair, grinning and exhausted, with long hair, and our mother in a large hat, smoking a cigarette. She had started smoking, or puffing, to be exact—she never inhaled her Lord Extras.
From our guestbook in Zandvoort, the Netherlands
© Estate of Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne
“Money can’t buy happiness, but it sure makes the sadness easier,” she told a friend after she inherited money. Until then she had lived frugally, which was how she was raised and what she was used to from the war and the early postwar years. Nothing was ever thrown away, whether it was used wrapping paper, old food, or even moldy bread; as a teenager, she wore her long-dead mother’s clothes, retailored; her father wore the coats of his brother who had fallen in WWI. We children had to share everything too: clothes, knapsacks, first-day-of-school candies. Martin was lucky: as the only boy, he had lederhosen of his own. Our mother adored shopping, but, as our father wrote, “She could only get really excited about affordable things.”
Babs said, “It’s good to know that in the end she finally took taxis, stayed in good hotels, and wasn’t addicted to shopping only at clearance sales. Any extra money she took in was frittered away within the family, at the city’s better restaurants.” This extra income was from the “Prostitute Control Board,” where she filled in for a colleague. She loved it and soon knew all the women who came for checkups every week, including a grandmother. She liked talking to them, and then she again had stories to tell us. She certainly liked the prostitutes more than the teachers she had to deal with at the public health department.
Finally, she rediscovered her Spanish blood—allegedly slightly blue as well. She had always been proud of it and did in fact look slightly Latin: tall, with black hair and long, thin fingers. As early as 1954, the first time she crossed the Pyrenees, she no sooner caught sight of the customs officials than she fell under the spell of Spain’s beauty, and that of its men, especially the “bold and elegant” men who fought the bulls in the ring. She, who usually kept the peace by doing whatever our father wanted, could not get enough of the bullfight and her Spanish blood surged so powerfully that at the end of the fight she almost threw her purse into the ring like the Spanish women. Only her German frugality held her back. Of all her ancestors, her favorite was Don Antonio, a nobleman who, it was said, had been forced to immigrate to Venezuela after a duel. “He was an adventurer.” That was exactly why our mother loved him. “Everything that we possess of charm and generosity, our inborn kindness, that ‘certain something’—it all comes from Don Antonio,” she wrote. After the divorce she learned Spanish, in Malaga and at the Berlitz school in Essen; during breaks she would step out for a coffee and chat with the bums. When she traveled to Andalusia with Babs on a cheap package holiday, “she insisted on going to flamenco and bullfights and shouted Olé! with the Spaniards.” Martin drew her in this role once, dancing flamenco-style on the table, with OOLEE OOLEE next to her. It was New Year’s Eve, 1974.
By then she had long since had what Virginia Woolf wanted all women to have: a room of her own where she could write. After the war, she had traded her accordion for a typewriter, on which she would write her long letters. The mailman mattered more to her than the milkman.
Before long she was composing not only letters but humorous little articles, about, for example, “our beloved dust,” or Tupperware parties, “happenings,” visitors, teachers. Always, frugal as she was, on scrap paper: the back of junk mail, invitations, day planners, and discarded drafts. She wrote about the comic side of our life, for the Doctor’s Paper, the German Sunday Magazine, the Christian Friendly Encounter : “The words just flow from my pen, even if it’s all just mental masturbation.”