Fritz Cremer (22 October 1906 – 1 September 1993) was a German sculptor. Cremer was considered a key figure in the art and cultural politics of East Germany.[1] He is most notable for being the creator of the "Revolt of the Prisoners" ("Revolte der Gefangenen") memorial sculpture at the former concentration camp of Buchenwald.[2]
Fritz Cremer was the son of the upholsterer and decorator Albert Cremer. One year after his father's death, his mother Christine Cremer moved to Rellinghausen with her children Fritz and Emmy in 1908. In 1911, the family moved to Essen, where Christine began a second marriage with a teacher. After his mother died in 1922, Cremer lived with a miner's family.[3][4]
In 1929, the Austrian expressive dancer Hanna Berger met Cremer and the two began a romantic relationship.[5][6] In autumn 1942, Berger was arrested by the Gestapo[7] for her work as a campaigner in Kurt Schumacher's resistance group. In 1944, Berger was able to escape from prison when she was being transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp during a bombing.[8] She lived illegally in Styria until the end of the war.[8]
In 1953, Cremer married Christa von Carnap (1921–2010), a painter and ceramicist who had divorced shortly before. She was the daughter of Alfred von Carnap (1894–1965), a merchant from the Wilmersdorf area of Berlin, and his first wife Susanne Schindler. Christa von Carnap had previously been married to the Schöneberg-based sculptor Waldemar Grzimek.[9]
Cremer trained as a stone sculptor under Christian Meisen in Essen from 1921 to 1925 after finishing grammar school.[10] During his subsequent work as a journeyman stonemason, he executed some sculptures based on models by Will Lammert and attended sculpture courses at the Folkwang School in Essen during this time.[11] In 1929, as a committed communist, he decided to join the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). He took up studies at the "United State Schools for Fine and Applied Art", (Vereinigte Staatsschulen für Freie und Angewandte Kunst) in Charlottenburg with Wilhelm Gerstel (1879–1963), whose master student he became from 1934 to 1938.[4] During this time Cremer shared a studio with Kurt Schumacher and produced his first socially-critical etchings. In 1934 he travelled to Paris. During a trip to London in 1937, Cremer met the writer and playwright Bertolt Brecht, the composer Hans Eisler and the actor Helene Weigel there,[12] who advised him to continue working in Germany. Twice he was a guest of the Villa Massimo in Rome. The first time was in 1937-1938 where he was awarded a fellowship to study for the year, after winning a prize at the『Preußischen Staatspreis für Bildhauerei』(Prussian State Prize for Sculpture).[13] The second time in 1942-43. At the Prussian Academy of Arts, Cremer now ran a master studio himself. He was in close contact with the Red Orchestra resistance group around the sculptor Kurt Schumacher and the writer Walter Küchenmeister. Cremer was linked to a resistance group associated with the actor Wilhelm Schürmann-Horster via Hanna Berger.[14]
His communist past, possibly not particularly spectacular in terms of political action, seems not to have been taken into account by the Nazi regime; but this is by no means a singular case since talents of all kinds were sought after and employed in the culture industries as long as they kept quiet about their former political options.[citation needed]
From 1940 to 1944, he served in the Wehrmacht as an anti-aircraft soldier in Eleusis and on the island of Crete,[15] after which Cremer became a prisoner of war in Yugoslavia. While he was a soldier would spend any extended leave in Rome where the German Academy had been taken over by the German army. In October 1946, vouched for by his party comrades, he was awarded a professorship and the chair of sculpture department of the Academy for Applied Art in Vienna.[16]
During his time in Austria, Cremer designed two memorials for the victims of fascism, a small one for the French prisoners at Mauthausen near Linz in Austria and a very important and controversial one at the Vienna Central Cemetery, the Memorial for the victims of a free Austria 1934–1945. Controversy was sparked off by the memorial's dedication to the victims of Fascism as from 1934, the year that an authoritarian regime accepted by the Catholic Church took power in Austria.[20][21] The memorial represented a naked bronze figure of a resistance fighter, which was considered controversial. Theodor Innitzer, the Archbishop of Vienna wanted a fig leave placed on the sculptor, which Cremer did not accept.[22]
Fritz Cremer with a group of students in his studio, 1955
In 1950, Cremer had moved to the German Democratic Republic and took over the master class at the Academy of the Arts,[23] later serving as vice-president from 1974 to 1983.[4] His most important work by far during his earlier life in the GDR is his 1958 bronze sculpture "Revolt of the Prisoners" (Revolte der Gefangenen); set in front of a bell tower, high up in the hills above Weimar, the grouping of 11 figures, some gesturing triumphantly, forms the focal point of a memorial at the site of the former concentration camp of Buchenwald.[24][25]
A further memorial at Mauthausen was commissioned in 1961 from Cremer by the German Democratic Republic's Association of Victims of Fascism and completed in 1965-1955. This memorial known as "O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter" in bronze dominates a pivotal area of the former concentration camp, the access road to the stone quarries where most of the camp's victims died.[26]
In Fritz Cremer's work, the acts and lovers form the thematic counterpart to the political commissioned works, and also served to calm down and retreat into the private. In them, “her true features and erotic sensuality unite,” “close together, tenderness and fulfilment.”[27]
Stylistically, it cannot be assigned to modernity or to socialist realism. The aim of Cremer's artistic efforts was to make the “mentalic constitution” of the presented.[28] For this reason, Cremer breaks with the idealising representation of the body, while stressing its irregularities.
1949: Memorial stone for the Ebensee concentration camp (Gedenkstein für das KZ Ebensee)
1950–1953: Memorial to the Nazi Victims Knittelfeld (Denkmal für die NS-Opfer Knittelfeld) (Österreich)
1950: 1950: Large Eva nude figure (Aktfigur Große Eva)
1951: Seated Figure Mother Earth for the Mourning Hall of the Baumschulenweg Crematorium (Sitzende Figur Mutter Erde für die Trauerhalle des Krematoriums Baumschulenweg) (Berlin)
1951–1952: Sculptural design for the Marx-Engels Monument (plastischer Entwurf zum Marx-Engels-Denkmal), Berlin (nicht ausgeführt)
1952–1958: Group of figures for the Buchenwald Monument (Figurengruppe für das Buchenwalddenkmal)[24][25]
1958: Aufbauhelferin und Aufbauhelfer in einer Grünanlage östlich vom Roten Rathaus
1960–1967: Memorial to the Mauthausen Concentration Camp "O Germany, Pale Mother (Denkmal für das KZ Mauthausen, "O Deutschland, bleiche Mutter")[30]
1958–1965: Group of figures for the Ravensbrück Concentration Camp Memorial Site (Figurengruppe für die Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Ravensbrück)[4]
1964: Bronze Bust Hans Eisler (Bronzebüste Hans Eisler)[31]
1964–1965: Ascending, park of the UN headquarters, New York (Aufsteigender – den um ihre Freiheit kämpfenden Völkern gewidmet; Park des UNO-Hauptquartiers, New York (weitere Güsse dieser Plastik stehen vor der Kunsthalle Rostock und im Skulpturenpark Magdeburg)[32]
1967–1968: Spanienkämpfer – Denkmal für die deutschen Interbrigadisten in Berlin-Friedrichshain
Freedom Fighters, replica of the sculpture from 1947, which has stood in Bremen near the Ostertorwache since 1984 and is dedicated to Cremer's executed friends from the Berlin Red Orchestra ("Rote Kapelle").
The Buchenwald memorial (1952-1958)
Ascending 1966-1967
First day cover Vienna Memorial, 1975
Mauthausen Memorial and Memorial Site stamp, September 1978
Cremer, Fritz (1959). Buchenwald Studien Buchenwald Studien (1st ed.). Berlin: Verlag der Nation. OCLC1280532770.
Fritz Cremer; Akademie der Künste der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik (1986). Für Mutter Coppi und die Anderen, Alle! : Graphische Folge. Berlin: Akademie dr Künste der DDR. OCLC856800950.
^Fischer-Defow, Christine; Norbert, Bunge (September 1986). Fritz Cremer zum 80 (in German). Berlin: Hans am Lützowplatz. OCLC74798728.
^ abcd"Fritz Cremer 1906 - 1993". Lemo Lebendiges Museum Online (in German). Berlin: Stiftung Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Das Bundesarchiv. Retrieved 15 October 2022.
^Vernon-Warren, Bettina; Warren, Charles (1999). Gertrud Bodenwieser and Vienna's Contribution to Ausdruckstanz. Hove: Psychology Press. p. 150. ISBN978-90-5755-035-5.
^Grzimek, Sabine; Jacobi, Fritz (1992). Sabine Grzimek: Plastik, Zeichnung, Malerei : Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz, 9. Oktober bis 29. November 1992 (in German). Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz. p. 115. ISBN978-3-88609-407-3.
^"Fritz Cremer". Kunst in der DDR (in German). Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung. Retrieved 15 October 2022.
^Cremer, Fritz; Ballarin, W. (1986). Fritz Cremer: Erinnerungen an morgen ; Städt. Kunstsammlungen Karl-Marx-Stadt, 16. Februar - 19. Mai 1986 (in German). Kunstsammlungen Karl-Marx-Stadt. p. 86.
^"Fritz Cremer". Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (in German). Netherlands Institute for Art History. 20 April 2021. Retrieved 15 October 2022.
^"Bild des Monats September 2008". Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora Memorials Foundation (in German). Berlin. Retrieved 15 October 2022.
^Andresen, Geertje (1 November 2005). Oda Schottmüller: Die Tänzerin, Bildhauerin und Nazigegnerin Oda Schottmüller (1905–1943) (in German). Berlin: Lukas Verlag. ISBN978-3-936872-58-3.
^Cremer, Fritz (1980). Fritz Cremer - Plastik und Grafik: Deutsche Demokratische Republik, Wilhelm-Lehmbruck-Museum der Stadt Duisburg, 7.Dezember 1980 bis 25.Januar 1981 (in German). Duisburg: Das Museum. p. 19.
^Stroynowski, Juliusz (1989). Who's who in the Socialist Countries of Europe: A Biographical Encyclopedia of More Than 12,600 Leading Personalities in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia. Munich: K.G. Saur. p. 198. ISBN978-3-598-10636-1.
^Grzimek, Sabine (1982). "Porträt Fritz Cremer". Bildindex der Kunst & Architektur - Startseite Bildindex (in German). Marburg: Philipps-Universität Marburg. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
^Goltzsche, Dieter (1969). "Porträt Fritz Cremer". Bildindex der Kunst & Architektur - Startseite Bildindex (in German). Marburg: Philipps-Universität Marburg. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
^Mucchi, Gabriele (1963). "Porträt Fritz Cremer". Bildindex der Kunst & Architektur - Startseite Bildindex (in German). Marburg: Philipps-Universität Marburg. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
^Borejsza, Jerzy W.; Ziemer, Klaus; Hułas, Magdalena; historyczny (Varsovie), Niemiecki instytut (2006). Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes in Europe: Legacies and Lessons from the Twentieth Century. New York: Berghahn Books. p. 574. ISBN978-1-57181-641-2.
^Berger, Stefan; Eriksonas, Linas; Mycock, Andrew (2008). Narrating the Nation: Representations in History, Media, and the Arts. New York: Berghahn Books. p. 211. ISBN978-1-84545-424-1.
^Amort, Andrea (2010). Hanna Berger: Spuren einer Tänzerin im Widerstand (in German). Vienna: Brandstätter. pp. 142–143. ISBN978-3-85033-188-3.
^ ab"Cremer, Fritz". Bundesstiftung Aufarbeitung (in German). Bundesstiftung zur Aufarbeitung der SED-Diktatur. October 2009. Retrieved 20 October 2022.
^ abKoshar, Rudy (2000). From Monuments to Traces: Artifacts of German Memory, 1870-1990. Berkeley: University of California Press. p. 215. ISBN978-0-520-92252-5.
^Spielmann, Jochen (1988). "Steine des Anstoßes - Denkmale in Erinnerung an den Nationalsozialismus in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland". Kritische berichte - Zeitschrift für Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften (in German). 16 (3). University of Heidelberg: 5–16. doi:10.11588/kb.1988.3.10120. ISSN0340-7403.
^Brüne, Gerd (May 2009). "Fritz Cremer (1906 - 1993) - Plastiken und Zeichnungen". In Cremer, Fritz; Schwind, Karl; Schwind, Galerie (eds.). Fritz Cremer (1906 - 1993) - Plastiken und Zeichnungen, Retrospektive [anlässlich der Ausstellung "Fritz Cremer - Retrospektive" in der Galerie Schwind, Frankfurt am Main vom 8. Mai bis 27. Juni 2009] (in German). Frankfurt, M: Ed. Galerie Schwind. pp. 6–43. ISBN978-3932830617.
^Brüne, Gerd (2005). Front cover image for Pathos und Sozialismus : Studien zum plastischen Werk Fritz Cremers (1906-1993) Pathos und Sozialismus : Studien zum plastischen Werk Fritz Cremers (1906-1993) (in German). Weimar: Verlag und Datenbank für Geisteswissenschaften. p. 20.
^Cremer, Fritz; Hoffmeister, Christine (1976). Fritz Cremer: Projekte, Studien, Resultate (in German). Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / National-Galerie Akademie der Künste der DDR. p. 92.
^"Die Frau auf der Promenade". Märkische Oderzeitung (in German). Märkisches Verlags. 30 June 2008. Archived from [tp://www.moz.de/artikel-ansicht/dg/0/1/19337 the original] on 15 July 2015. Retrieved 19 October 2022.
^Cremer, Fritz; Hoffmeister, Christine (1976). Fritz Cremer: Projekte, Studien, Resultate (in German). Berlin: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin / National-Galerie Akademie der Künste der DDR. p. 37.
^Eisold, Dietmar (2010). Lexikon Künstler in der DDR. Berlin: Verlag Neues Leben.
^"Neue Elite". Spiegel-Verlag. Der Spiegel. 24 December 1972. Retrieved 20 October 2022.
^ abStroynowski, Juliusz (1989). Who's who in the Socialist Countries of Europe: A Biographical Encyclopedia of More Than 12,600 Leading Personalities in Albania, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, German Democratic Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Yugoslavia. Munich: K.G. Saur. p. 198. ISBN978-3-598-10636-1.
