Kurt Westergaard

Biography

On 1 January 2010, at about ten in the evening, a man with an axe and a knife smashed the glass of the front door of Kurt Westergaard’s house in Denmark. The householder managed to lock himself in a safe room; his five-year-old granddaughter was with him. The police arrived within a few minutes and wounded the attacker.

Westergaard was born on 13 July 1935 in the village of Døstrup in Jutland, in the Mariagerfjord area. His family belonged to the conservative Christian movement known as the Inner Mission, and as a boy he attended Sunday school. His encounter with cultural radicalism in the last years of school in the 1950s he later called an “epiphany” and a liberation from the religious subjugation of his childhood.

The profession he chose was not an artistic one. In 1958 he graduated from the teacher training college at Ranum, taught German at a boarding school in Grindsted, and then enrolled to study psychology at the University of Copenhagen. In 1968 he was appointed head of a special school on the Djursland peninsula, where children with disabilities were taught. He drew alongside this work, briefly contributed to the newspaper Demokraten, and in 1983 became a cartoonist for the daily Jyllands-Posten. His signature and nickname were “KW”. His surname is spelled in different ways: at birth it was written Vestergaard, later he used the spelling Westergaard, and in Russian texts the form “Vestergaard” appears.

In September 2005 Jyllands-Posten printed a series of drawings on the subject of the Prophet Muhammad. Westergaard’s drawing showed the prophet in a turban shaped like a bomb. In an interview in 2009 he explained that he had wanted to show that terrorists draw spiritual ammunition from certain parts of Islam. The publication provoked protests across the Islamic world, accompanied by riots; the number of dead is given differently, and is hard to verify. Threats followed, and the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) advised him to go into hiding for a time. On 12 February 2008 PET arrested three men suspected of plotting to kill Westergaard: two Tunisians and a Danish citizen of Moroccan birth. After that he was given protection. Steel doors, a safe room, reinforced windows and surveillance cameras were installed in his house, and the police escorted him to and from work. In 2008 the Dutch politician Geert Wilders used his drawing without permission in the film Fitna; in reply Westergaard drew Wilders himself with a bomb and a sign reading “Danger! Freedom of expression”.

The attacker of 2010 was a 28-year-old Somali who had lived in Denmark for a long time. He shouted “Revenge!” and tried to break through the reinforced door with his axe. According to PET, he was linked to the Somali group al-Shabaab. On 22 June 2011 a court found him guilty of attempted murder and attempted terrorism and sentenced him to ten years in prison and permanent deportation from the country. In 2010 Westergaard’s name appeared on an al-Qaeda list published in Inspire magazine, alongside Carsten Juste, Flemming Rose, Salman Rushdie and others. In March 2013 the police detained a bus passenger who had threatened to blow up the bus and Westergaard.

In May 2008 the Danish Free Press Society presented him with its Sappho Award. On 8 September 2010 Angela Merkel handed him the German M100 Media Award for his contribution to freedom of opinion.

At about seventy-five he left the newspaper and turned to independent work. His drawings were sold in 58 countries, and the Draupner gallery in Skanderborg held twenty sold-out exhibitions of them in seven years. His autobiographical book “Manden bag stregen” (“The Man Behind the Line”) appeared with the help of John Lykkegaard in 2010 or 2011; the exact year is not known.

Westergaard died in Copenhagen on 14 July 2021, the day after his 86th birthday.