Fritz Cremer
Encyclopedia
Fritz Cremer was a German
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 sculptor of catholic extraction who turned to communism
Communism
Communism is a social, political and economic ideology that aims at the establishment of a classless, moneyless, revolutionary and stateless socialist society structured upon common ownership of the means of production...

 in the 1920s. Originally a stone-cutter, he studied at Berlin and got a government grant for the German academy in Rome, Villa Massimo
Villa Massimo
Villa Massimo, short for Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo , is a German art institute in Rome, established in 1910 and located in the Villa Massimo....

, from 1937 to 1938. His communist past, possibly not particularly spectacular in terms of political action, seems not to have been taken into account 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.
Cremer served as a soldier from 1940 to 1944, spending an extended leave in Rome where the German Academy had been taken over by the German army. In 1946, vouched for by his party comrades, he got a professorship and the chair of sculpture department of the Academy for Applied Art in Vienna
University of Applied Arts Vienna
The University of Applied Arts Vienna is an institution of higher education in Vienna, the capital of Austria. It has had university status since 1970.-History:...

.

During his time in Austria, Cremer designed two memorials for the victims of fascism, a small one for the French prisoners at Mauthausen
Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp
Mauthausen Concentration Camp grew to become a large group of Nazi concentration camps that was built around the villages of Mauthausen and Gusen in Upper Austria, roughly east of the city of Linz.Initially a single camp at Mauthausen, it expanded over time and by the summer of 1940, the...

 and a very important and controversial one at the central cemetery of Vienna
Vienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...

. Controversy was sparked off by the memorial's dedication to the victims of Fascism
Fascism
Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek to rejuvenate their nation based on commitment to the national community as an organic entity, in which individuals are bound together in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood...

 as from 1934, the year that an authoritarian regime accepted by the Catholic Church took power in Austria
Austria
Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

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In 1950, Cremer 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 and a major example of XXth-century art in Europe is Cremer's memorial at the former concentration camp of Buchenwald, high up in the hills above Weimar
Weimar
Weimar is a city in Germany famous for its cultural heritage. It is located in the federal state of Thuringia , north of the Thüringer Wald, east of Erfurt, and southwest of Halle and Leipzig. Its current population is approximately 65,000. The oldest record of the city dates from the year 899...

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A further memorial at Mauthausen
Mauthausen
Mauthausen is a small market town in Upper Austria, Austria. It is located at about 20 kilometers east of the city of Linz, and has a population of 4,850 .During World War II, it became the site of the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp complex....

 was commissioned to Cremer by the German Democratic Republic
German Democratic Republic
The German Democratic Republic , informally called East Germany by West Germany and other countries, was a socialist state established in 1949 in the Soviet zone of occupied Germany, including East Berlin of the Allied-occupied capital city...

's Association of Victims of Fascism in the mid-1960s. This memorial dominates a pivotal area of the former concentration camp, the access road to the stone quarries where most of the camp's victims died.

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
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

.
A good example of his intransigency, comparable to that of the right-wing caricaturist A. 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.

Cremer was an excellent draughtsman; his prints and drawings are sometimes far more interesting than his later works of sculpture, from the 1970s onwards.

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