looked the same. Our father was in his element and made soup from leftovers and whatever was around (“we never had more grateful guests”). The music was loud; the neighbors complained, and the police showed up; finally a real band performed, inside the house. “At ten at night, our son told them they had to go now, his ‘mommy’ (he really said ‘mommy’ and no one thought it was ridiculous, they thought it was sweet and nice, those hippies) was sick and needed to rest. Then they went home, quiet and well behaved, or went wherever, in any case they left.”
The proceedings were not always as well behaved as our mother described here. One time, when the family was away, Martin’s “strange friends” (as our mother called them) showed up, all tripping on LSD. “The earth opened up at our feet, the ceiling came down and rose back up, we couldn’t talk,” says Hanno Huth. When a few older musicians who were even higher came by, Martin gave them a special performance: he went upstairs, shaved off part of his hair in front, pulled on a striped bathrobe with a hood, and came back downstairs with a large, marmalade-smeared knife in one hand and a candle in the other, making horrible faces. It was like a scene from a horror movie. The people there really flipped out. At that moment, Hanno Huth decided that “this was a guy you want as your friend, not your enemy.”
People Martin’s age both admired him and hated him for daring to do the things they were too timid to try. For having such a big mouth and so many girls, and taking hard drugs, and cutting school.
For his sixteenth birthday, Martin got a letter from our grandfather, who was also his godfather. The retired bank manager explained that you can aspire to be free and independent only on a solid foundation:
Special talent alone is not sufficient. The effort to one day raise oneself above indolent mediocrity is inextricably bound with diligence and hard work, first and foremost with expanding one’s knowledge and abilities into as many areas as possible. . . . Your parents responsible for everything, and you living idly from their efforts? You know yourself that that is not right. You bear the responsibility for your own self and no one can take that responsibility away from you. . . . I cannot personally judge your abilities in drawing and painting. The predisposition toward it is in any case inherited, and comes at no charge, for which I hope you are grateful. But it is no less certain that it is not enough to build a life upon.
Discipline, order, and hygiene (“of body and soul”) are what it means to grow up, he wrote. “You must fight with all your strength to subdue yourself and any temptations that come at you from without.”
And since he hadn’t graduated high school, Martin should at least learn a respectable trade. So, under pressure from our parents, he applied to the Böhmer shoe store, which rejected him as an apprentice window-dresser (“and may we suggest a graphic career for you, given your drawing abilities”), and to the Boecker clothes store, which hired him as a decorator in 1970. He entertained the family with his imitations of the end-of-summer sale, but he didn’t find the course of vocational study nearly as entertaining. He cut classes, didn’t go to work, promised and promised to do better in the future but then did whatever he wanted. “But at the same time, he’s a total softie,” our mother wrote. “When he saw how I was in real despair yesterday, he almost started crying himself and gave his word that he would finish vocational school.” In the end, Martin proved to be incompatible with women’s outerwear, and shortly after this touching scene he quit anyway.
He was more interested in getting out and seeing the world. He traveled to Wales for the first time at fifteen, to visit our former au pair. At sixteen he took a ship to Brazil, sharing a cabin with a friend. It wasn’t a pleasure cruise—they worked on board, with Martin as cabin boy. “That meant I could have some of whatever the captain was having: chicken, sausage, potatoes, the best cuts.” After work, at night, he plunged into the swimming pool. “I hope he won’t go to any negro whorehouses or other dens of iniquity,” our mother wrote when he left. “I don’t even want to think about the dangers lurking in every corner, but they do need to leave home sometime.” She was right to be worried—in Brazil he did in fact go to a “negro whorehouse” and had his money stolen there, too. But she’d known for a long time by then that you couldn’t stop Martin from doing what he wanted.
Most of his trips produced more bad news than happy postcards: from England, for example, the telegram “Money stolen.” He was seventeen. Our mother wanted to send him more money but then changed her mind and sent these words instead: “Work, maybe a harvest-time job, be patient. Mother.” It was hard for her to be firm with him, and she consoled herself “by buying a dress, on clearance, 25 marks.” The girls he borrowed money from in England came to Zandvoort to get it back from our mother, and they liked it there so much that they stayed and had a little holiday with us. When Martin finally came back to Zandvoort, he kept Wiltrud Roser up all night telling her about what had happened, furiously repeating over and over again, “Work, child!” He could not comprehend how his own mother could leave him in the lurch like that.
Most of the time, though, no matter how annoyed she was, she gave in in the end. Once, when she went to the airport to meet him, furious about something he had done, he just came up to her with outspread arms: Mommy, you’re here, my darling mommy! “What was I supposed to do?” She took him in her arms and laughed. He attacked her with her own weapons. (“From my darling mother my cheerful disposition and fondness for telling stories.”) Whenever he needed money, he had only to make her laugh. Even when she was lying in the hospital, sick with cancer, he entertained her and her friends.
The low point came in 1971, the year our father remarried and we moved out of our house in Frillendorf. Martin ended up in the hospital with drug poisoning. He had, our mother wrote, “taken LSD on three consecutive days and various other things too. Then he collapsed.” The psychologist told her “what I knew myself, that he is insanely sensitive.”
Discharged from the hospital, he went back “to his drug den” that same night. So he was sent to Norway, to our dear friend Pelle, with the hope that the trip would cure him. Instead, as he put it, he shared with a girl “his free time, conversations, and her gonorrhea.” He traveled on, but tourism bored him: he didn’t care about the midnight sun; Stavanger seemed just like Recklinghausen in the Ruhr; the airport looked like barracks on a golf course. He fought off boredom by working in a photo shop and took pictures himself of whatever there was to see: birch trees, fjords, wood, more wood. Finally he left for Stockholm, a wild city. A poem came out of it later: “In Stockholm I took speed / Cigarettes I didn’t need.” He bummed around. Eventually the German embassy sent us a telegram saying that he was begging at their doorstep for his parents to please send money. Our father went and fetched him home.
Martin turned eighteen. That year, the first newspaper article about him appeared, in NRZ, the local paper. It described him, his art, and his friends Birgit and Willi, with whom he had mounted a group show at the Podium. A photograph shows the three of them with their artworks, in our garden, with the caption “And Venus has a hole in her head” (referring to a sculpture in our garden).
Martin works “on the side” as a decorator, while Birgit and Willi are studying graphic arts at the Folkwang School. They live day-to-day—which doesn’t mean that they’re beatniks. “Beatniks,” Martin protests, “are the people in the city who play their bongos and guitars, and usually just stare into space.” No, they’re not dropouts, these three. They want to “live life to the fullest” (that phrase is their magic formula) and then turn their experiences into art together. Without needing to follow a career, if possible.
Martin already had two movie projects in mind: one to restore the honor of the typical German, and a grotesque Easy Rider -style movie. “It’s enough for us when we see that we’ve made progress every day and are always learning something new,” Martin told the reporter.
Our mother wrote to a friend, “We’ve made it through three bad years, which was almost too much for the boy. He loved and respected his father very much, and his world collapsed [when his father left]. He took refuge in drugs, even morphine, and by late 1971 I had truly given up hope. But then the miracle happened and he pulled himself together.”
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