Käthe Kruse | "I'm always on edge"

What's the story behind your pseudonym?

My name is Elke Kruse, but since childhood, everyone always called me Käthe, after the famous dollmaker . I practically never went by any other name. So I said, so be it.

Looking at your biography, the drums were at the beginning of your career. Are you a bundle of energy?

Oh yes! I sometimes appear quite calm on the outside, even though I can't even sit still on a chair. I'm always on edge, and that's great because you can get a lot done with that excess energy. But it's also exhausting for me at times.

Was playing the drums the right choice?

As a child, I learned to play the recorder a bit, and later the guitar. But neither of those interests really interested me. The drums were the right instrument for me. I always had a kind of inner rage inside me, and that was the best way to express it.

Where does this anger come from?

My father was a child of war, dropped out of school after third grade, and his life plan was over. Later, with a lot of willpower, he made something of his life, but he was an alcoholic and physically abused me. This was simply swept under the rug. My mother had cancer and died young. My childhood was a complete contradiction of fear, overexertion, self-organization, sheltering, and being beaten. There were many great things, but also this physical violence, which my father couldn't shake off, even when he was running a large company.

You told me you're a war grandchild. How does that matter?

It's about the transmission of unresolved processes through generations. My grandparents influenced me primarily politically. Especially my grandfather. He was an open resistance leader and was arrested on September 1, 1939. He remained a political prisoner until the end of the war, protected at least enough by his brother, a Nazi general active in Hamburg, to allow him to survive.

Your artistic career is linked to the group "Die Tödliche Doris." How did you meet?

On September 4, 1981, I saw Die Tödliche Doris for the first time at the Festival of Genialen Dilettanten. The rest was coincidence. Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen had seen me performing fire-eaters on a stage at SO36 one Christmas Eve and invited me to one of their rehearsals. I hadn't studied art at the time, but I played drums. We ended up working together for seven years. We disbanded at the end of 1987, but one last concert took place in Tokyo in 1988.

What does the name Deadly Doris mean?

Wolfgang and Niki had already created the name. They said Doris was the most common girl's name in the phone book. But if you swap just one letter, you get the "lethal dose."

Did you want to emancipate art that was created amateurishly at the time?

Yes. It was an important topic in the early 1980s. Amateurism means that no one had shaped me beforehand. I found my own way, even with the potential mistakes. You could produce a record incredibly quickly. It was practically enough to bang two pot lids together. We took advantage of that, and this whole movement grew out of it. Of course, it also has to do with energy and ideas.

Was this the aftermath of the 1968 era? Or were the 1980s completely different?

They were completely different. We distanced ourselves greatly from hippie culture and the feminism of the 1960s. We wanted to be sexy in a different way. We had great style and makeup. We were the beneficiaries because the 1960s and the early feminists had been fighting for this for almost 100 years.

Does anything of this attitude to life remain?

I hope so! I'd say it's only now that I'm an active feminist. Now we have to make sure that all the achievements of a century don't end up in the trash.

Despite your dilettantism, you continued to study art in 1990.

Yes, exactly. I was no longer a dilettante by then. And by the end of The Deadly Doris, it wasn't that in its original sense either. We had already been to the MOMA in New York, Documenta 8 in Kassel, and the Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris.

What else did you gain from studying?

In my early thirties, I asked myself: Who am I as an artist without the band? I wanted to explore my horizons again, learn more. I loved my studies. It naturally boosted my self-confidence when I graduated top of my class. That's when I knew I'd made it. Now I'm an academic.

But you still hold dilettantism in high esteem?

I don't hold it up. It's now being imposed on me from the outside. The Berlinische Galerie in early summer was about my retrospective , and memories of my beginnings with Tödliche Doris are part of that. I love the works from that period, even though it wasn't always easy, and I want to carry the group's ideas into a new era.

How political is your art today?

I'm a political person, but I don't make political art. Everyone should think about it, and everyone thinks about it differently. I also did a piece about abortion. The next day, an elderly lady called me and told me how deeply moved she was after the performance. If I reach people and ensure that they don't forget my art over a glass of champagne, then the work is worth doing.

How would you describe your creative process?

Once I've decided on something, I don't stop. I'm in the flow and in the tunnel. This ability to concentrate is a huge potential for me. If I develop an idea that I believe is right, then all the effort is irrelevant.

When do you know, with regard to your serial work, when enough is enough? Do you need 30 sheets, or are 10 enough?

Let's take this sewing project on paper, which I've been pursuing for several years and still don't feel like it's enough. I come from a family of tailors. Along the way, I learned a lot about the quality of fabrics and clothing. I'm working on it now.

... with monochrome linear seams on paper. Was that a commission?

In a way, yes. The Bauhaus centenary was the occasion. The gallery owner Matthias Seidel asked me to do something for it. But it absolutely had to be a work on paper. I said, okay, but I sew, because originally I wanted to weave carpets. He was really excited, and so was I.

What is the work of the “366 days” all about?

For 366 days, I collected headlines from daily newspapers. I wanted to observe the development of the right-wing shift, which is increasingly creeping into our society, for a year. The work, consisting of photographic prints, dragged on through stays abroad and was finally completed in a leap year. That's how I came up with 366 days as a measure.

What exactly did you analyze?

I wanted to examine a significant area of ​​research into the shift from democracy to fascism. How does it actually work? Ten years later, now, I see how it works everywhere. I had never experienced firsthand what my grandfather warned about. The coarsening of language in public spaces is just the beginning.