He was born Kurt Vestergaard on July 13, 1935, in Jutland, Denmark, the peninsula flanked by the North and Baltic Seas. His parents ran a grocery store.
Raised in a conservative Christian family, he experienced what he described as a religious liberation as a high school student. He later enrolled at the University of Copenhagen to study psychology and then taught German and worked in a school for disabled students in Djursland. Fellow journalists said that he had always wanted to be an illustrator. He worked briefly for the newspaper Den Ny Demokrat, then joined Jyllands-Posten in 1983. He retired in 2010, when he was 75.
His survivors include his wife, Gitte; their five children; 10 grandchildren; and one great-grandchild.
In 2008, Mr. Westergaard won the Sappho Award from the Free Press Society of Denmark. In 2010, he received the M100 Media Award from Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany for his contributions to freedom of opinion.
“I want to be remembered as the one who struck a blow for free speech,” he once said. “But there is no doubt that others will instead remember me as a Satan who insulted the religion of a billion people.”
Mr. Westergaard and his wife lived under tight security after the authorities foiled the first assassination attempt against him, although it was difficult to hide a man so often nattily attired in red trousers, a broad-brimmed black hat and giraffe-headed walking stick.
In recent years he chose to live openly in Aarhus, with bodyguards.
“I do not see myself as a particularly brave man,” he told The Guardian in 2010, adding: “But in this situation I got angry. It is not right that you are threatened in your own country just for doing your job. That’s an absurdity that I have actually benefited from, because it grants me a certain defiance and stubbornness. I won’t stand for it. And that really reduces the fear a great deal.”
Jasmina Nielsen contributed reporting.
Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/19/world/europe/kurt-westergaard-dead.html
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