Käthe Kruse – “I’m always under power”

What is your pseudonym about?

My name is Elke Kruse but since childhood all Käthe always called me, with the name of the famous doll maker. I was no longer called otherwise. I said that it should be like that.

If you look into your biography, the drums are at the beginning of your career. Are you an energy bundle?

Oh yes! I sometimes look very quiet, although I can’t even sit still in a chair. I am always under power and that is really great because you can get a lot about the over -shooting energy. But it is sometimes exhausting for me.

Was the drums the right choice?

As a child I had learned a little recorder and later also played guitar. But I didn’t interest both that. The drums were the right instrument for me. I always had such an inner anger in me, it could best out.

Where does this anger come from?

My father was a war child, school abortion after the third grade, end of the life plan. He later made something out of his life with a lot of willpower, but was an alcoholic and physically abused me. That was simply swept under the carpet. My mother was cancer and died early. My childhood was a single contradiction of fear, overwhelming, self -organization, protected and beaten. There were also many great things, but also this physical violence that my father, even when he managed a large company, could not take off.

They told me that they were a war skeleton. To what extent does that matter?

It is about passing on unresolved processes over generations. My grandparents primarily shaped me politically. Especially one grandfather. He was in open resistance and was arrested on September 1, 1939. Until the end of the war, he remained political prisoner, who was at least protected by his brother, a Nazi General active in Hamburg, that he could survive.

Your artistic career is linked to the group “Die Tötliche Doris”. How did you get together?

On September 4, 1981, I saw the deadly Doris for the first time at the festival of the brilliant amateur. The rest was a coincidence. Wolfgang Müller and Nikolaus Utermöhlen saw me on a stage of the SO36 as a fire spuck on a Christmas Eve and then invited me to one of their rehearsals. I hadn’t studied art at the time, but played drums. We finally worked together for seven years. At the end of 1987 we dissolved, but one last concert took place in Tokyo in 1988.

What does the name mean the deadly Doris?

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 only swap a letter, the “fatal dose” results.

Did you want to emancipate artistically created art at the time?

Yes. It was an important topic in the early 1980s. Dilettantism means that nobody has shaped me beforehand. I got on my trail myself, even with the possible mistakes. You could produce a record enormously quickly. It was enough to strike two pot lids together. We used this and this has created this whole movement. Of course, it also has to do with energy and ideas.

Were that the aftermath of the sixties of eight? Or were the eighties very different?

They were completely different. We also distanced ourselves very much from the hippietum or feminism of the sixties sixties. We wanted to be different. We were super styled and made up. We were the beneficiaries because the sixties of eight and the early feminists had been fighting again and again for almost 100 years.

Is there something of this attitude to life?

I hope! I would say that only now I’m an active feminist. Now you have to see that all all the achievements of a century do not end up on the garbage heap.

Despite dilettantism: from 1990 they still studied art.

Yes, exactly. I was no longer a amateur. And in the end it was no longer the fatal Doris in the original meaning. We were already in the MoMA in New York, on Documenta 8 in Kassel, and in the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris.

What else came about with studying?

I asked myself in my early thirties: Who am I as an artist without the band? I wanted to look around again. I loved my studies. Of course, it strengthened my self -confidence when I had the diploma in my pocket as the best year. I knew that now I have made it. Now I’m an academic.

But do you keep the amateurism as a term?

I don’t hold it up. It is now attached to me from the outside. It was about my retrospective in the Berlin Gallery in early summer, when the memories of my beginnings with the deadly Doris are part of it. I love the work from this time, even if it was not always easy, and I want to take the group’s ideas with me.

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How political is your art today?

I am a political person, but I don’t do political art. Everyone should worry and everyone is doing something else. I also did a job about abortion. The next day an older lady called me and said how much she was moving after the performance. When I reach people and make sure that they haven’t forgotten my art with the glass of sparkling wine again, the work is right.

How would you describe your creative process?

If I have chosen something, I don’t stop. Then I’m in the flow and in the tunnel. For me, this ability to concentrate is enormous potential. When I develop an idea that I think is right, I don’t care about all the effort.

When do you know when you are in serial work, when is enough? Do you need thirty leaves, are ten?

If we take this sewing work on paper here, I’ve been following it for several years and still don’t have the feeling that it is enough. I come from a Schneider family. I had also learned a lot about the quality of fabrics and clothing. I am working on that now.

…With monochrome linear seams on paper. Was that an order?

To a certain extent, yes. The 100th anniversary of the Bauhaus was the event. The gallery owner Matthias Seidel asked me to do something. But it should definitely be a paper work. I said, agree, but I sew, because I originally wanted to make carpets. Then he was very enthusiastic and I was too.

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

I collected headings from daily newspapers for 366 days. For a year I wanted to watch the development of the right back, which is becoming more and more creeping into our society. The work, they are photo prints, dragged on through stays abroad and finally ended in a leap year. So I came up with 366 days as a measure.

What exactly did you analyze?

I wanted to examine in a significant area, which shows the change from a democracy towards fascism. How does that actually work? Ten years later, now, I see how it works everywhere. Before that, I never experienced what my grandfather warned. The brutalization of language in public space is only a beginning.