a glass of wine with her father. He named his horse in Pommern “Quo Vadis” and used him to reenact scenes from Karl May, the beloved German writer of American-style Western novels. In Russia he jumped naked into the icy water. Then things got unpleasant. “We woke up from the dream of playing at war into the reality. Commands, orders, standstills, eyes left, eyes right, dismissed.”
The CV that he later wrote up for an exhibition makes it sound as though the only thing he did during the whole war was art: diary sketches, landscape pictures, illustrations; invented scenes, real events, horses, people, caricatures, village idylls, Hungarian scenes, transferring ordnance maps onto three-dimensional sand-table models, and whittling with a pocketknife while a prisoner between May and July 1945.
He would later write to his young fiancée that he was rarely in a bad mood. “My recipe for the war is: whistle a tune whenever you get sad.” He must have had a lot of opportunities to whistle. There was a period when no one wanted to be in the same regiment as him because he was always the only surviving soldier from his last regiment.
He never spoke of the horrors—only dreamed about them. Well into the 1950s he would scream in his sleep at night, according to our mother. Later, in a letter to us children, he would write that he was not allowed to yell at the guys in the mine, even when he got angry at them: “If I did, they’d report me for rudeness, which they call bad personnel management now and really frown on. Nowadays they want only good personnel management. I can understand that—good personnel management is actually a beautiful thing. When I was still a soldier, I always craved some decent personnel management, but it wasn’t in fashion at the time. On the contrary. We had to yell and scream if we wanted to impress our superiors—whoever screamed the loudest was automatically the best. You can see from this how attitudes change over time.”
After a few months in an American prisoner-of-war camp, he returned home and started to study mining in Aachen. It was a booming industry after the war: the mines smoked and reeked, and “everyone was clamoring for coal,” as he wrote in 1950. The miners were the heroes of the postwar period—they provided warmth for the freezing Germans—and they were thanked with the annual Ruhr theater festival in Recklinghausen. Our parents would see many plays there over the years.
It was backbreaking work under ground: dirty, hot, and dangerous. “The mine shaft is the dairy cow of the place,” he wrote about his first workplace in Altenbögge, “except that it’s sometimes not quite as docile.” He would often experience just how hard it was to control this wild cow. “Sometimes I feel like the annoyances never stop.” There were explosions in the pit, or water would flood in; he often had to spend all night in the mine. But the worst was bringing dead bodies up out of the pit. He attended many funerals. Once, when Martin wrote from boarding school for our father’s birthday, he wished him three cheers: “once for luck in the mine, once for a very happy day, and third, most important, that you stay healthy.”
“The Mine,” Gerd Kippenberger
© Gerd Kippenberger
Still, maybe because of the danger, he found the work fascinating. “It’s important to be possessed in a way by your job.” Our father, as a young man, discovered in mining “all the oppositions and dualities of life itself”: cruelty and solidarity, friendship and backstabbing, crudity and humor, tradition and innovation. At a time when the Ruhr region was officially ashamed of being the Ruhr (it would later call itself “Rustia,” punning on “Russia,” in a self-deprecating publicity campaign that was heavily criticized), he saw the beauty in the ugliness: the austerity of the industrial architecture, the coexistence of shafthead frames and meadows, and especially the people—the workers’ direct and natural ways, their warmth and humor and pride. In the Ruhr region, he would later write, he, the Siegerlander, found his second homeland.
He had barely started his first job, in Dortmund, when our oldest sister, Babs, was born: July 28, 1950. “Barbara” was what most miners named their firstborn daughters, after their patron saint.
Mining turned out to be a feudal world. “We live on Mine Street, the royal road of Altenbögge, so to speak,” our father recorded. “The senior officials—the highest caste in the place—live there, so we are only tolerated and suffered.” But soon he himself belonged to that highest caste: he was made director of the Katharina Elisabeth Mine in Essen-Frillendorf in 1958 and given a giant house as a residence, with a huge garden, tended by gardeners. Sometimes our father had a chauffeur, Uncle Duvendach, who took trips with us.
But no sooner had he arrived in Essen than the great crisis in the mining industry began, as did worrying, anxiety, and fear for his job. “Now we need to get tough,” he wrote in September 1963 to friends in Munich. “The coal crisis continues, and whoever doesn’t go along (with the crisis) gets fired. Whoever fires the most people is the champion marksman.” His mine was shut down too; he was transferred to a desk job and eventually let go. In September 1972, just back from vacation, he got the news: “early retirement,” at fifty-one. A few months later, just days before Christmas, he had a heart attack. Only after several frustrating attempts to secure a foothold in the construction industry—likewise in crisis—did he find another position: as a manager at a plastic tubing company in Mülheim.
His fascination with mining and its traditions only grew in this period. He continued to do research, reading books on mining’s history and practice in other countries. When he died, he was buried in his miner’s tunic, meant for special occasions—the same one he had married our mother in.
He could be crude as well as charming and tended to find the shortest path from one social blunder to the next. He loved provocation and making fun of people. Once, introducing our sister Bine’s boyfriend—a mining engineer like him—to some colleagues in Aachen, he did not say the young man’s name, which he had probably already forgotten. He said, “Here’s the kid who wants to be my son-in-law.” It was a test, and Andreas passed it. Our father said what he thought, loud and clear, and also what he knew: for example, that there were safety problems down in the mine because the wooden supports for the shaft, from a company executive’s forest, were rotten. That got him into a lot of trouble. Still, he didn’t go as far as his son would later; he also paid court to his superiors. As he wrote to our mother once: “I think Mrs. Wussow [a friend] is right after all: I’m a revolutionary, but only in secret—someone who never makes the move.”
He was an exotic species in a conservative world, along with his whole family and their lifestyle. A “rare bird,” as they say. Our parents’ friend Ulla Hurck said that “he made the sober mining folks uneasy—he was a shock for them.” In a children’s story that he wrote for us, where he is recognizably the father, he is the only one not to laugh at the child who wanted a skating rink in the middle of summer. “He knew how much it hurt to be laughed at.”
“Diagram,” Gerd Kippenberger, 1965
© Gerd Kippenberger
“If he had not been the company director at the Katharina Mines, he would certainly have been a painter,” a newspaper wrote in an article about our father’s exhibition at the House of the Open Door in Frillendorf in 1960, one of the many exhibitions that he organized himself as a member of the artists’ society. He showed landscapes and city views, and his art, according to the newspaper critic, was “a beautiful, free expression of modern creativity.”
He usually painted on vacation and signed his pictures “kip.” But he didn’t need a canvas to make art. In the 1960s, the era of Pop Art, he made constructions from flotsam and jetsam he found on the beach, painted picture books for his grandchildren, built brightly colored wooden cities, and threw parties. He laid out gardens, first in Frillendorf and then, in his second life (for there would be another wife and more children), in Marl. There he bought an allotment, where he built hills, a frog pond, and a trellis for grapevines. He planted blackberries, raspberries, and blueberries. He named the path that the bushes were on “Blackcurrant Way” and placed his wooden figures