Fritz Cremer

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. In 1929, the Austrian expressive dancer Hanna Berger met Cremer and the two began a romantic relationship. In autumn 1942, Berger was arrested by the Gestapo 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. She lived illegally in Styria until the end of the war. 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.

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. 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. 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, 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). 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. 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 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. 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. Cremer was respected in the GDR because he sometimes spoke up against the communist regime's stubborn denial of modernism and artistic liberty; he was never censored since no doubt seems ever to have been cast on his political sincerity. Part of his authority, of course, was due to his decision to move to the East and to denounce Western policies during the Cold War. A good example of his intransigency, comparable to that of the right-wing caricaturist Andreas Paul Weber in West Germany, was the widely distributed and quite masterly cycle of lithographs in which he denounced the Hungarian rebellion, shortly after the event. 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. In them, “her true features and erotic sensuality unite,” “close together, tenderness and fulfilment.” 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. For this reason, Cremer breaks with the idealising representation of the body, while stressing its irregularities. Cremer was an excellent draughtsman; his prints and drawings are sometimes far more interesting than his later works of sculpture, from the 1970s onwards.

The following exhibitions were held by Cremer:

Sabine Grzimek: Portrait of Fritz Cremer (Bronze sculptor, 1982). Dieter Goltzsche: Portrait Fritz Cremer (lithograph, 47.7 × 34.5 cm, 1969) Gabriele Mucci: Portrait Fritz Cremer (oil, 100 × 72 cm, 1963)

1956: Never again, (Nie wieder) 1956: Mappe Walpursgisnacht (36 Blätter) 1962: Selbstbildnis 1963: Kreidekreis 1966: Fragen eines lesenden Arbeiters (zu Brechts Gedicht) 1979: "Genug gekreuzigt!" 1986: Mappe Mutter Coppi und die Anderen, Alle! 1988: Fritz Cremer Lithographien 1955–88

Cremer, Fritz (1959). Buchenwald Studien Buchenwald Studien (1st ed.). Berlin: Verlag der Nation. OCLC 1280532770. 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. OCLC 856800950.

1953: National Prize II Class for the bust of the miner and National Prize winner Franz Franik 1958: National Prize I. Class for the Buchenwald Memorial 1961: Art Prize of the FDGB for the portrait bust of Bert Brecht 1965: Fatherland Order of Merit in Gold 1972: Goethe Prize of the City of Berlin 1972: National Prize I. Class for the Complete Works 1974: Order of Karl Marx 1976: Hero of Labour 1978: Order of the Flag of the People's Republic of Hungary 1981: Bremen Sculpture Prize 1981: Honorary Gold Medal of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

In 1967 Cremer became an Honorary Member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR.