the Cranger fair, hung out with friends and read thrillers. He got the playground under control with Köckel, put together his slide show, wrote talks, and redecorated the house. “There was time, time to think and time to do things.”
When we drove back, we could smell, by Oberhausen at the latest, that we were almost home. Then school started up again, “the nasty thing,” as our father wrote. “The boy won’t do his reading, Bettina puts up a fight, and Barbara gets sick. Sometimes the other way around.”
MARTIN’S CHILDHOOD
Still no boy. When Bettina was born, eleven months after Barbara, our grandfather came to the hospital, but this time he didn’t bring flowers.
Then, finally, Martin arrived: on February 25, 1953, in the middle of the week. “Father,” wrote the man himself,
had just started his first job as a supervisor. He was roughly shaken awake shortly before 3 a.m. Mother jumped out of bed and her water broke as usual. The taxi came, we hurried downstairs, and Father lost his house key.
Dr. Busse stood waiting at the hospital gate. Well, what have we here, he announced. Father told the doctor that his shift still started at 6:00. — At 4:45, the longed-for male heir appeared, with the powerful collaboration of Dr. Busse. Father showed up for his shift on time.
“We’ve got a boy!” Grandfather said with pride. He was the godfather, along with Martin’s other grandfather. Everyone else in the family took the news more calmly. Still, mother was especially happy. She had grown up among boys, an only sister with three brothers; the one she was closest to had fallen in Stalingrad.
Our father made Martin’s birth announcements himself. Our mother, to thank the doctor for not presenting her with a bill (since she was a fellow physician), gave him a poem she had written especially for him.
He was baptized Martin, but at first his only name was “Fatso.” Our mother also called him “Terrier,” “Mister,” and “Master,” but usually he was just “ Kerl,” “guy.” Or “Kerly Man.”
Martin in the Kinderhaus in Frillendorf
© Ilse Pässler
He was always something special, always different from the other boys. More imaginative, more anxious. “Seeing a mask and screaming are one and the same thing for the boy,” our father wrote once. “His fear of rigid faces cannot be overcome. For months before and after Carnival, he dreams about it. We can’t take him into the city for the Rose Monday parade [at Carnival] for that reason.” All of big sister Babs’s efforts to explain masks to him were in vain. At the same time, he loved to celebrate Carnival, dress up, and dance in the Kinderhaus. “Kerl,” our father said, “dances like a young god.”
Some of the other boys were afraid of him. Not physically—he was on the weak side, with “bad posture due to lack of exercise,” as the doctors attested. But they were afraid of his ideas, the same way children are afraid of Grimm’s fairy tales: fascinated by their fear. Tobias von Geiso, a friend the same age as Martin, says Martin’s ideas were “incredible and uncanny,” provocative, they made him tingle. For example, “to piss and shit in our dollhouse’s chamber pot. He was always ready with something I couldn’t understand.” He seemed older than he was to Tobias; Tobias had the feeling of not being up to his level.
He was never short of ideas. That’s why he was always invited along with me to younger children’s birthday parties: to help play games. He was always good with small children. As a teenager he went to Düsseldorf on weekends to babysit. “He’s great at it,” our mother wrote to a friend, “Antonia says ‘Martin’ again and again all week.” Martin’s best friend was a girl, Ute Böhler, who went to school with him and lived next door. (Ute was the quiet—and, later, depressed—daughter of the same Mrs. Böhler who shows up over and over again in Martin’s books as the epitome of Frillendorf.) He got along better with girls. He didn’t have to act the big man with them.
He cried often, including at his confirmation—moved to tears by his own speech. The same thing had happened to our father at Babs’s confirmation, which Martin had missed because he was in boarding school; our mother had described it to him: “A man isn’t necessarily a weakling if he cries with emotion in an especially solemn and impressive moment.”
Martin liked to annoy other people, but he himself “started to cry at the least little thing,” as our mother complained. “I don’t know what’s going on inside that boy. He’s got a long way to go.” Martin is never crying in his childhood photographs, though. He grins, beams, makes faces, strikes poses. Later, though, he always remembered himself as the one who was harassed and defenseless.
He was never a good boy. We had to be home at six, and Martin was the only one who would be late, showing up whistling a happy tune half an hour late. He did what he wanted and did it emphatically, without thinking about the consequences. He could be good-natured but could just as easily be fresh—if he didn’t feel like shaking a visitor’s hand, he didn’t do it. “He wanted to shock,” says Ulla Hurck, our parents’ friend. “He would look at people and see how far he could go. He did that with everyone. And we were taken in a lot of the time. I always had the feeling that he was thinking, ‘God, are they stupid? Don’t they realize why I’m doing this?’”
MARTIN, OUR ARTIST
He always asked for art supplies—for his birthday, for Easter, for Christmas. As soon as he could hold a pencil, he drew and painted, glued and stapled. “Nonstop,” our mother wrote, “since he was never without ideas.” At nine, he drew Adolf Hitler as a pitiable figure, like the one in Munch’s Scream. At family gatherings he would pull out his pencil and draw portraits of the people there. He sold one of these pictures for ten marks.
He received what he longed for all his life: attention and recognition. Our father praised “his beautiful drawings,” especially the one “of Father sitting with his thriller, you can hardly believe how good it is.” Encouraged by him, Martin drew his way through the art history course that hung on our walls. But he didn’t copy the pictures—he copied the styles. “Sometimes like this, sometimes like that—I imitated every style,” he later told the Swiss curator Daniel Baumann. After doing so, he came to the conclusion that “it wasn’t so incredible, what they’d done.” Klee and Chagall failed his test; Kokoschka passed. He needed conflict with others, friction, from the beginning. When he was ten he hung a photo of one of Picasso’s bull plates on an imaginary wall, drew a window next to it, and glued colorful curtains over the window.
SCHOOL
“I wasn’t born to go to school,” he later said. He was born to make art, and that’s what he insisted on again and again, but to no avail: he passed his first test in 1959 (like every other child who could reach his arm over his head to the opposite ear) and was admitted to the Frillendorf Protestant State Primary School. There he did what he always did: goof around. He stuck out his little leg and tripped the teacher on his first day of school. He preferred looking out the window to looking at the blackboard; what happened outside seemed to him like a movie, and he recounted it like a movie when he came home. The world seemed strange to him, strange and exciting. In Café Central, he describes a seaside scene from his childhood: “I still remember sitting on the edge of a grotto with my little dirty diving gear, watching the fresh fish through the diving mask clouded over with my breath, and they looked back at me the same way, and suddenly I had the impression that their eyes were actually the eyes of the sea itself.”
He couldn’t sit still. Rather than listen to the teacher, he filled his notebooks and textbooks with drawings and caricatures. Homework was torture for everyone involved. “Martin, pay attention!” our mother would warn, and plead, and threaten, with growing despair. “Martin, just read this!” But Martin didn’t want to read. He wanted to look, listen, play, be amazed. The official diagnosis: dyslexia. “He hates books,” our father wrote when Martin was thirteen. “Letters of the alphabet and sentences rub him the wrong way; he prefers picture books.” But we didn’t have picture