Fritz Cremer

Fritz Cremer was a German sculptor.

Cremer was considered a key figure in the art and cultural politics of East Germany.

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.

Fritz Cremer was the son of the upholsterer and decorator Albert Cremer.

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.

During this time Cremer shared a studio with Kurt Schumacher and produced his first socially-critical etchings.

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.

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.

Cremer trained as a stone sculptor under Christian Meisen in Essen from 1921 to 1925 after finishing grammar school.

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.

After his mother died in 1922, Cremer lived with a miner's family.

In 1929, the Austrian expressive dancer Hanna Berger met Cremer and the two began a romantic relationship.

In 1929, as a committed communist, he decided to join the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

In 1934 he travelled to Paris.

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.

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.

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, 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).

From 1940 to 1944, he served in the Wehrmacht as an anti-aircraft soldier in Eleusis and on the island of Crete, 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 autumn 1942, Berger was arrested by the Gestapo for her work as a campaigner in Kurt Schumacher's resistance group.

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.

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.

In 1944, Berger was able to escape from prison when she was being transferred to Ravensbrück concentration camp during a bombing.

She lived illegally in Styria until the end of the war.

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.

In 1950, Cremer had moved to the German Democratic Republic and took over the master class at the Academy of the Arts, later serving as vice-president from 1974 to 1983.

In 1953, Cremer married Christa von Carnap (1921-2010), a painter and ceramicist who had divorced shortly before.

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.

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.

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.