1. Fritz Cremer is most notable for being the creator of the "Revolt of the Prisoners" memorial sculpture at the former concentration camp of Buchenwald.
16 Facts About Fritz Cremer
1. 2.
Fritz Cremer was the son of the upholsterer and decorator Albert Cremer.
3.
Fritz Cremer lived illegally in Styria until the end of the war.
4.
In 1953, Fritz Cremer married Christa von Carnap, a painter and ceramicist who had divorced shortly before.
5.
Fritz Cremer was the daughter of Alfred von Carnap, a merchant from the Wilmersdorf area of Berlin, and his first wife Susanne Schindler.
6.
Fritz Cremer trained as a stone sculptor under Christian Meisen in Essen from 1921 to 1925 after finishing grammar school.
7.
Fritz Cremer took up studies at the "United State Schools for Fine and Applied Art", in Charlottenburg with Wilhelm Gerstel, whose master student he became from 1934 to 1938.
8.
At the Prussian Academy of Arts, Fritz Cremer now ran a master studio himself.
9.
Fritz Cremer was in close contact with the Red Orchestra resistance group around the sculptor Kurt Schumacher and the writer Walter Kuchenmeister.
10.
Fritz Cremer was linked to a resistance group associated with the actor Wilhelm Schurmann-Horster via Hanna Berger.
11.
From 1940 to 1944, he served in the Wehrmacht as an anti-aircraft soldier in Eleusis and on the island of Crete, after which Fritz Cremer became a prisoner of war in Yugoslavia.
12.
Theodor Innitzer, the Archbishop of Vienna wanted a fig leave placed on the sculptor, which Fritz Cremer did not accept.
13.
In 1950, Fritz 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.
14.
Fritz 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.
15.
Fritz Cremer was an excellent draughtsman; his prints and drawings are sometimes far more interesting than his later works of sculpture, from the 1970s onwards.
16.
In 1967 Fritz Cremer became an Honorary Member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR.