performance, poems were recited, philosophical disquisitions held on “the significance of the pause,” and reflections aired on “solitude.” Then our mother came onstage to present her piece: “Daddy Dummy.” She knew that everything she experienced could be turned into a story, and that nothing was ever so bad that it couldn’t sound hilarious on paper later.
She liked that no one could boss her around. Once, at an event for the Social Democratic Party “on the position of women in the modern world,” when she expressed her own opinion and was then accused by a party member of being a traitor, she said, “That’s what I want to be. I’m neither ‘us’ nor ‘them,’ I want to say what I think.” She never wanted to subordinate herself to a party and its pragmatic electoral politics. “What’s the use of working and struggling to emancipate myself from a husband just to dance to other men’s tunes? They’re probably less intelligent than he was, and I don’t even love them enough to forgive them when they make me mad.”
All of which is not to say that she never sought others’ approval. Even her advisor’s praise of her dissertation made her happy: “What author would not be delighted at such a response to his or her first work?” She was livid when a story of hers wasn’t printed, and was proud when Brigitte, Germany’s largest women’s magazine, solicited a piece from her: “So now I’ve come far enough that they want something from me, not the other way around!”
Soon she started to dream of becoming famous. In 1968, having given herself the assignment to write a book that year, she traveled to Hamburg for the twentieth anniversary of the Lutheran Sunday Magazine, “to put myself out there.” She drank champagne to boost her spirits and fortify her self-confidence, and met accomplished writers like Ernst von Salomon and Isabella Nadolny. She made an impression, and not only because she was one of fifteen women among the two hundred guests: “I may not be so impressive by nature, and not a famous writer, but I put a wagon wheel of a hat on my head, and it worked like it always does.” A few hours later, she took the train back to reality: “At home I was met with the news that Sanni had thrown up, Bettina had fainted, and the boy had gotten into trouble.” Now she didn’t want any more children. “From now on I will give birth only artistically.”
She also wrote about her cancer, which caused quite an uproar. That wasn’t done at the time—you were supposed to “bear it stoically,” as the death notice would always say.
Like our father, she planned her own funeral: compiled an address list for the guests, warned us to get the cheapest coffin and not fall for any scams, since after all it would just be burned anyway, and asked to be decked with carnations, her favorite flower.
She was at the threshold of a new life phase. Her two youngest children were about to leave home—Bine was going to be a medical assistant in Munich and I was off to university in Tübingen—and she was dividing her duplex apartment to rent out a floor. The apartment was full of contractors when the call came: the accident happened during lunch hour, while our mother was coming home from the health department. In his book Café Central, Martin would write about how “his mother made the transition from living mother to dead mother (a truck overloaded with EuroPallets took a curve too fast and lost some of its freight, which caused my mother’s death) (so she didn’t have to die a slow and painful death of cancer).” She died a week later without regaining consciousness, in 1976, at age fifty-four. She was buried in Wiesbaden, where she was born, in the Leverkus family grave.
Essen-Frillendorf (Gerd Kippenberger);
bottom center: Number 86, our house
© Gerd Kippenberger
ESSEN-FRILLENDORF
We lived in Essen-Frillendorf. After our father was made director of the mine, he moved us from Dortmund into the heart of the Ruhr, right next to mines and brickworks, where we grew up among miners and laborers.
Our parents loved Anton the pitman and his curt sayings, and laughed at Jürgen von Manger, who didn’t even come from the Ruhr region (like them). The people’s warmth and humor, their self-confidence, ease, and readiness to help, shaped all of us. Here you didn’t make a big to-do, you just did what needed doing. People were strong characters, open and very direct, always ready to laugh at themselves. No one took themselves so terribly seriously. They drank beer, told stories, made fun of each other, and accepted people as they were, faults and all. They teased with affection.
The Kippenberger family (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)
© Reiner Zimnik
Frillendorf was a real village, with everything that entails: candy kiosk, cemetery, public primary school, village idiot, and church. But it was a village in the middle of the city, only three streetcar stops from the center of Essen. Farmer Schmidt had his farmstead right near us, and large fields lay alongside the streets.
A Mrs. Böhler watched over the entrance to the yard and the alley of chestnut trees that led to our house, which was at the end of a cul-de-sac. Mr. Böhler only ever appeared in the background, in his undershirt. She put her pillow in the window, rested her heavy breasts on it, and looked out at everyone, sending curses after them. There was hardly any television in those days—only three stations for a couple of hours a day—and what we had to offer was apparently more interesting to her. She shows up several times in Martin’s books.
“St. Nicholas at the Kippenberger’s’” (Reiner Zimnik, 1961)
© Reiner Zimnik
Our parents had moved often since the start of their marriage, several times in and around Dortmund during the previous few years. All five of us children were born in Dortmund and the apartments got bigger with the increasing number of children. But only now, in 1958, did they move into a house where they could really stretch out—a stage on which to perform their life. It was a paradise for us children. “A crazy house at the end of a cul-de-sac” is how the local newspaper described 86 Auf der Litten in an article about Martin when he showed his work for the first time, at eighteen years old. “The rooms and studios are stuffed full of pictures, posters, and objects. On the stairs, an outer-space hotel made of radiator parts that Martin’s father put together. The chaos is welcoming, clean, and cozy. And when the sunlight plays across the garden with its naive stone sculptures of horses and cowboys, it is almost possible to believe in an ideal world again.”
Or, as our mother once wrote, more soberly, “We lived in a huge house with countless rooms and just as many side rooms, nooks, and crannies. It was a nightmare for cleaning ladies—almost every time a candidate interviewed, she turned around and left. A paradise, but with its flaws: it never warmed up past sixty-three degrees, because the old heating system couldn’t manage anything higher; mice would run around in the bedrooms every now and then.”
The Kippenbergers in Essen-Frillendorf, 1961: Bettina, Martin, Susanne, Lore, Barbara, Gerd, Sabine (l. to r.)
© Ilse Pässler
There were always children running around, with bows untied and underpants slipping down—no one watched or tended them when they were playing. Life consisted of homework and playing and nothing else: no hockey practice, no saxophone lessons, no carriage rides through the city. There were a good dozen other children besides us who were always there in the yard to play. It was a life lived in public, in company. You didn’t retreat into your room when you wanted to play; you went outside.
Or else to the Kinderhaus , or kids’ house. They redid the old laundry shed in the garden for us, and for the grown-ups to use for holiday celebrations. In fact, in our family everybody had their own house: the ducks, the chickens, the pigeons, our father, and Martin, too. There was a wooden hut, the “Martin hermitage,”