| General info : | | Fritz Alfred Behrendt (born 17 February 1925, Berlin, Germany – died 4 December 2008 in Amsterdam, Netherlands (aged 83) ) was a Dutch cartoonist of German - Jewish descent.
Behrendt grew up in what was then the Weimar Republic, where the Nazis came to power in 1933. For political reasons, his father fled Nazi Germany to the Netherlands in 1936. His family followed him in 1937, settling in Amsterdam. During the war years, he briefly attended the School of Arts and Crafts, now the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. In 1945, he was arrested by the German occupiers for "subversive activities" and imprisoned in the Weteringschans House of Detention.
As a young man, he developed sympathies for communism and in 1947 left for Yugoslavia as commander of an international youth brigade, joining thousands of young people in the construction of a railway line from Šamac to Sarajevo. There, he received an invitation to study etching and lithography at the art academy in Zagreb. In the summer of 1949, he went to the GDR to work as a graphic designer and illustrator for the Free German Youth. There, he designed the first version of the GDR coat of arms. Suspected of "Titoist activities" he was arrested by the Stasi on December 9 of the same year and held in solitary confinement for six months. After his release on June 9, 1950, he returned to the Netherlands.
From then on, he opposed all forms of totalitarian dictatorship with his drawing pen and built an international career as an illustrator and cartoonist. He started as a freelance illustrator for a German anti-fascist magazine and a publication of the Labour Party. He also published in Vrij Nederland. On March 6, 1953, the day after Stalin's death, Het Parool placed a drawing by Fritz Behrendt on the front page.
After several conflicts with the newly appointed editor-in-chief H.J.A. Hofland, he left for Het Parool in March 1968. In 1989, he ended his contract with Het Parool and moved to De Telegraaf.
In addition to his work in the Netherlands, Fritz Behrendt contributed to a large number of foreign newspapers and magazines including The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and TIME Magazine in the United States, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Der Tagesspiegel and Der Spiegel in Germany, the Svenska Dagbladet in Sweden, the Berlingske Tidende in Denmark, the Aftenposten in Norway, De Nieuwe Gazet in Belgium, the Neue Kronen Zeitung in Austria, Die Weltwoche in Switzerland, Punch in the United Kingdom, Kathimerini in Greece and Maariv in Israel.
Fritz Behrendt died in late 2008 at the age of 83. | |
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| Source : | | Wikipedia (nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz_Behrendt) | |
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