Fritz Cremer

1906

Born on October 22 in Arnsberg (Ruhr) as the second child of the upholsterer and decorator Albert Cremer and his wife Christine

1921-25

Apprenticeship with the stone sculptor Christian Meisen in Essen

1930-34

Pupil of Wilhelm Gerstel, member of the Prussian Academy of Arts and deputy director of the United State Schools for Fine and Applied Arts (today: University of the Arts) in Berlin-Charlottenburg

1933

Participation in a collection of signatures by students at the university against the exclusion of Käthe Kollwitz and Heinrich Mann from the Prussian Academy of Arts

1934-38

Master student of Wilhelm Gerstel

1936

Meets Bertolt Brecht in London, who advises him to continue working in Germany

1940

Conscripted into the Wehrmacht; stationed in the Luftwaffe as a private in an anti-aircraft unit on Crete

1944-46

Cremer is taken prisoner of war in Yugoslavia; he participates in the founding of an anti-fascist committee in the Šibenik prison camp

1946

Cremer is appointed professor and head of the sculpture department at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna (until 1950); his first sculptural work after the war is “The Freedom Fighter”

1952

First design for the Buchenwald Memorial; Cremer is commissioned by the jury for the competition for the Buchenwald Memorial (chaired by GDR Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl); Cremer’s first design is initially rejected. Only the third design for the Buchenwald Memorial is accepted in 1954.

1958

Inauguration of the Buchenwald Memorial on the Ettersberg near Weimar; awarded the GDR National Prize, First Class

1967

Honorary member of the Academy of Arts of the USSR, Moscow

1971

Awarded the National Prize of the GDR I. Class

1974

Awarded the Karl Marx Order of the GDR; Vice President of the Academy of Arts of the GDR; Cremer is stripped of his honorary membership of the Academy of Arts of the USSR after he stands up for the artists of the so-called “Bulldozer Exhibition” in Moscow

1977

Participation in the “documenta 6” in Kassel

1989

Start of work on the sculptural group “The Self-Killing Man”

1993

Fritz Cremer dies in Berlin on September 1 at the age of 86