Fury , Bonanza, The Little Rascals, and I Dream of Jeannie were our picture books. Later, on vacations, we acted out scenes with the characters, Martin out in front and our father behind the Super-8 camera.
Maybe, too, like our father, Martin just didn’t have the time or patience to read. Deciphering a word letter by letter just took too long when you could take in a picture in one glance. Spoken, not written, language was his element. Even as a child he was an actor and entertainer, telling stories and doing imitations. Whoever laughed he had on his side. Miss Linden, a teacher, called him “Harlequin,” but from her it wasn’t a compliment.
So he used school in his own way, as a stage, a studio. A struggle began that would last his whole life: he would always be on battle footing with institutions, whether art schools, hospitals, or museums. He had something against fixed walls, narrow limits, hierarchy, and authority. He wanted to make decisions himself. He had no fear of people in power, so he got on their nerves, and they got on his case in return. He called one of his series of sculptures, all self-portraits, Martin, into the Corner, You Should Be Ashamed of Yourself.
His first report card could hardly have been much worse. “Participation in Class: Acceptable.” Out sick this semester: twenty-three days. Scholastic results overall: “M. has made an acceptable beginning.” The next semester didn’t look any better. “M. will have trouble in his second year,” the headmistress wrote. Only in drawing and handicrafts did he get a “Good.” Everything else was “Satisfactory” or “Acceptable” except spelling, which was “Poor” (and by the third year would be “Unsatisfactory”). The drawings he filled his notebooks with didn’t count for anything—his teachers cared only about the spelling mistakes. After his third year he was held back (“for health reasons,” according to the report card, since his teacher had been urging our parents for a long time to send Martin to boarding school).
“If he brought home report cards as good as Mr. Kaiser and Miss Linden were trying to help him get, he would be in good shape”: this was the report in St. Nicholas’s golden book about whether the eight-year-old Martin had been a good boy that year. “But since he is lazy, he doesn’t give anyone the pleasure of pleasing them. Like Bettina, he needs a slap on the backside now and then. Otherwise he is a good boy, he watches the workmen and gardeners working, visits the studio, and has lots of friends.”
HINTERZARTEN
In October 1962, at nine and a half, Martin was sent to the Black Forest, to the “state-licensed educational home” of Tetenshof, in Hinterzarten/Titisee. He wasn’t the first in the family to go to boarding school: after Babs had failed her high school entrance exam, she was sent to Bensheim, from which she would eventually be able to return to the Essen schools as a transfer student. Eventually she studied law. Tina followed Martin to boarding school the following year, as a preventative measure and to spare her the possible humiliation of failing. She stayed two years.
In Martin’s estate—among kitschy postcards from Florence, childhood drawings, letters from all periods of his life, cards he received for confirmation, photographs, and tickets—there was a brochure from the Tetenshof of those days. Children frolicked, fresh-faced, pious, and in harmony with nature, between the Black Forest cabin and the Alpine pasture, the girls with blond ponytails and the boys in lederhosen shorts with a front flap (like the ones Martin himself always used to wear). Happy children among happy cows, playing ball or shoveling hay, making pastoral music on recorders and guitars, washing up (caption: “Preparing for the Inspection of the Ears”). A letter from the housemistress that Martin reprinted in Through Puberty to Success. said: “We still have the courage to swim against the tide of the times: no television, newspapers, cheap tabloids, sensationalism, etc., of the kind that our children are exposed to every day in city schools and public advertising. Only good books, hikes, modest celebrations that the pupils organize themselves, making music, and closeness to nature.”
The boarding school included whole mountain meadows and real agricultural projects. “Inhibited children grow free and happy once again!” the brochure promised. “The work duty of 45 minutes a day is a great help toward socialization and fitting in. We have researched it as a positive factor in healing.” Parents, aunts, cousins, grandmas, grandpas, and anyone else who might take it into their heads “to visit the ‘poor child’ away at boarding school, to take him out and spoil him,” are explicitly brought back in line: just don’t! Tetensdorf is not a hotel, and every visit ruins the schedule and discipline of another child. “You have no idea how much it disrupts the classroom.” Such visits “are what make the child homesick, and prevent the creation of feelings of home here, which are necessary for the stay to be a success.” Half the children are from broken homes, the housemistress wrote to our mother, who had apparently written asking to visit. Visits that fly by are therefore not welcome—they only cause tension. Apparently not all the parents obeyed these demands. One time, Martin wrote in a letter, a father landed on the home’s meadow with a hang glider. “He wanted to see his son again, for once.”
Decades later, Martin would tell Diedrich Diederichsen how he had once stood howling and crying all alone on a hill. His classmates had told on him because he had “jerked off again, until the bed shook.”
Day-to-day life was strictly regimented. After the children woke up, beds were aired, teeth brushed, and shoes polished. Then came porridge for breakfast and, afterward, silent prayer. Respect, gratitude, and obedience were among the stated educational goals. “The Word of God is the foundation and guiding light of the house.” Everything was so pious that the children had to call the women who ran the school “Mother.” When Martin came home for vacations, he had a repertoire of prayers he could say and religious songs he could sing. Even our mother understood that all that silent prayer would “gradually drive him up the wall.”
Letters from home kept him up to date. Our mother told her “dear boy” about Babs’s confirmation in full detail, “so that it will be almost like you were there to see it yourself.” In November 1963 our father wrote, “It’s a shame you couldn’t be here, so here is a report about everything we’ve been doing in the past few weeks!” Ten typed pages telling him all about what he’d missed. There was a party for the Graupners, an artist couple, where nowhere near all the invited guests showed up, “only” a hundred. It started at the opening at the Schaumann Gallery, “where Father gave a speech and everyone clapped. It put everyone into a good mood, which was mutually contagious, so they were enthusiastic about the paintings and fought over who would get to buy which.” Afterward everyone came back to our studio, where our mother was waiting, “so she only heard Father’s beautiful speech secondhand. That’s too bad.” One of the guests was another painter, whom they had never heard of—“an abstract painter, wearing a shawl instead of the tie that you would expect. Ah, artists.” Our father had set up a canvas in the studio, and every artist there had to paint on it in oil: “They had no choice.” It was, as Thomas Wachweger would later call it, Zwangsbeglückung —mandatory cheer—followed by eating, drinking, and dancing.
Then came descriptions of the All Saints fair in Soest and St. Martin’s Day at the Jensens’. He sent a carbon copy of the same letter to Tina at boarding school, and she was furious:
Well I must say, you have a nice life! On Sunday you go to the fair. Who has to go for a nature walk? I do!
Who goes to St. Martin’s Day procession on Monday? You!
Who has to go beddy-bye? Me!
Soon it’ll go a step too far.
Everyone at home longed for Martin to return. “My dear little Kerl,” our mother wrote him, “Bine and Sanni are already counting how many bedtimes they have until you’re back.” When he came home for the first time, at Easter break, the whole family went to meet him at the station.
He doesn’t seem to have had a bad time at Tetenshof. “Martin is happily back in the whirl of things here,” Mrs. Tetens wrote to Essen after the 1963 Easter vacation. “Our Kerl was glad to go back again after the holiday,” our mother said in the summer of 1964, “and stuck to his opinion even though both his older sisters tried by any means possible to talk him out of it, those rascals! He is happy and in good spirits, he’s not causing problems,