preparations. I would say that they don’t have the heart, or the imagination.” For weeks leading up to the holiday, presents were wrapped, cookies baked, gifts put together; on the day after Christmas our mother would lie in bed, sick with exhaustion. “You love to overdo it,” our father told her. “Conserving your energy is not your strong suit.”
By New Year’s, everybody was worn out—except our father and Martin. Our father tried his best to keep us up, he wrote, but “Mother always gets tired and then there’s nothing to be done. Father is offended that no one appreciates his fireworks. Everyone’s yawning or snoring.” Only Martin went along with him to the neighbors next door, “since he likes dancing so much, and he’s right, it’s fun.”
Even when they were away from home our parents threw parties, for example in Munich at the house of our uncle Hanns, the youngest of our father’s three brothers. “Five Minutes Each” was the name of this party: only artist friends were invited, and “everyone is allowed to put on their own show, if they want, and if they don’t want to, they don’t have to.” One couple played guitars, a poet read, a sculptor brought out his sculptures, an illustrator told stories. The rest danced or contented themselves with being the audience.
The parties were always raucous, even when only the family members were there. In fact, those were often the loudest. No one went around on eggshells at the Kippenbergers’. “Uncle Otto made fun of Uncle Albrecht and father defended him. Then Leo was teased and Albrecht started defending him. In any case, it was all very lively.” Too lively for some people. At one legendary Christmas party, when the whole extended family had come over for turkey (three turkeys, to be precise), one uncle’s posh fiancée left the house in tears after a dirty joke and never returned to her intended again. Every party was a test of fortitude.
On weekends, we usually took day trips. We were dragged everywhere, to exhibitions, to Castle Benrath, to the Weseler Forest, and to the Münster area, with its moated castles and the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff’s Rüschhaus, which we visited again and again. Martin sought her out again later; for his 1997 sculpture exhibition, he set up a subway entrance next to the poet’s sculpture.
Every year on St. Martin’s Day, November 11, we traveled to Cappenberg to visit the Jansens, who also had five children. They had a big house with a fireplace and a dollhouse, and there was a lamplit procession with a real St. Martin on a real horse, which our Martin was allowed to ride, too. He was so proud of his namesake and this privilege that he was happy to share his bag of candy later. On All Saints Day we were allowed to go to the carnival in Soest with the Jansens: first came pea soup with the Sachses, then everyone got a roll of coins and could go crazy with it, and when we got lost we would be whistled back with the special family code-melody.
Trip to the Drachenfels: Father, Sabine, Susanne, Martin, Pippus (son of the artist Petra Lützkendorf), Mother, and two au pairs (l. to r.)
© Kippenberger Family
On Pentecost we went to Siegen, to the little manor house where our gay great-uncle lived with his Silesian housekeeper; in early summer, it was off to Drachenfels, where the first thing we did was have our picture taken in a photography studio—draped on and around a donkey, or behind a cardboard cutout of an airplane, with our arms hanging loose over the side. We children had never been on a real plane. Then it was time for a donkey ride or a hike on foot up the mountain, where we stopped into a hiker’s restaurant and were shoved into a corner, since families with lots of children were considered antisocial at the time.
All of our activities and celebrations were recorded—in pictures, home movies, photos, and words—by our mother, our father, and our artist friends. Petra Haselhorst-Lützkendorf, Karin Walther, Ernst and Annemarie Graupner, Elisabeth and Bernhard Kraus, Reiner Zimnik, Luis Delefant, Wiltrud Roser and her sister Hildegund von Debschitz, Janosch, and so on. Our life was turned into art. We were embroidered, painted, sewn, woven—all hanging on our own walls. It wasn’t a matter of good likenesses, only of the idea: like Wiltrud Roser, many of the artists didn’t know us in person at all when they received the assignment.
Polonaise at a summer party on the Frillendorf lawn
© Kippenberger Family
We look beautiful, harmonious, and cheerful in all of these family pictures except one: the large group portrait painted by Ilse Häfner-Mode, a small, lively woman with a pageboy haircut and a pipe in her mouth. We had to spend hours in her Düsseldorf studio—as tiny a room as she was a person, though it nevertheless also served as her apartment—sitting and standing as her models with the puppets and figurines that populated her house. We never looked so sad in our lives. The painting is as melancholy as all her other pictures. She was an expressionist who had studied in Berlin in the twenties, and a Jewish woman who had been in a concentration camp, but that was never spoken of, only whispered. Later, after our mother’s death, there was never any conflict between us siblings about our inheritance except over this one piece: Martin, who had been sent to study painting with her as a boy, absolutely wanted it at all costs.
Contemporary art wasn’t something our parents bought anonymously from unknown artists—they wanted to meet the artists in person. They became friends with most of them, and most of them came to visit us. Janosch was over once as well: still young at the time, not yet famous, he bewitched us children with his magical art and sold our parents “two large oil paintings, one to Father because Mother liked it so much, and one to Mother because she wanted something to give Father for his birthday.” He also made a little illustrated book, From the Life of a Miner, clearly based on our father.
Like many of the other artists, Janosch lived in Munich. Munich and Düsseldorf were the cities our parents visited to see exhibitions, go to plays and restaurants, see friends and relatives, and shop for art and crafts, loden coats, jewelry, pottery, furniture, and presents.
Our large house filled up. In our living room were Arne Jacobsen’s “Swan” and “Egg,” Braun’s “Snow White’s Coffin,” and plastic stools from Milan that you could spin around. No wall units, no matching living room sets: individual pieces were mixed together. Our parents wanted to be surrounded by beautiful things, and what was modern was beautiful: Olivetti typewriters, Georg Jensen silverware. They were confident in their tastes, and they were right to be: things they bought at the time as avant-garde are now shown in museums as classics.
The heavy Biedermeier furniture they inherited was exiled to a room of its own that was actually never used, except when a great many people were visiting. “So fancy we are!” our father wrote. “Or at least: So uncomfortable our chairs are!” Still, our parents were thoroughly bourgeois. We all had to wear pigtails until our confirmation, except for Babs, the oldest (this was one of our father’s ideas); we all had to be home in the evening precisely on time. Our mother was not conceited but she could not stand stupidity, and she also knew the limits of her own tolerance. One of her favorite movies was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, in which Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn play a liberal couple who are anything but pleased when their daughter brings a black man home.
We always prayed before going to sleep and said grace before meals. “Come Lord Jesus, be our guest, / And let these gifts to us be blest”—here we clasped our hands—“ Bon appetit! Let’s all eat!” Then we threw ourselves on the food. The god we believed in was not a threatening, punishing god but a protector. Our mother believed in guardian angels, she had favorite saints (St. Anthony, finder of lost things, and St. Barbara, protector of miners), and she named her son after St. Martin, who shared what he had. Our parents’ religion was a rather worldly kind: political, artistic, and, above all, social. In 1961 they founded a youth group in Frillendorf, “in a battle against Pastor B.’s pious club”; our mother helped care for the needy; our father, as a presbyter, had influence in the parish. Later he gave up his office, over an artistic argument with the church: the paraments (hangings for the pulpit, altar, and lectern) that the pastor had commissioned from one artist were opposed by the other presbyters,