The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right by Paul B. Jaskot (review)

As the title suggests, Paul Jaskot’s study sets out to highlight how post-war German art reflects the ever-changing conception of the Nazi perpetrator, but in fact the book does much more by conceiving “art” very broadly to include architecture, and by offering intricately interwoven overviews of political debates involving not only the right but also the entire political spectrum. In his first chapter, Jaskot reflects on the early years of the Nazi party to identify three distinct phases of its exploitation of culture: strategic (manipulating the ideas of art history early on to promote racism and gain cultural legitimacy), ideological (consolidating power after 1933, purging the art world, and climaxing in the Degenerate Art exhibit), and functional (the architectural projects connected to the Final Solution). Jaskot identifies a fourth phase after the war with the “ambivalent rejection of Nazi perpetrators” as a framework for tracing the evolution of the meaning of “perpetrator” in the post-war years (44).

The next two chapters focus on painting, or more specifically on individual painters, and here Jaskot’s mastery of unlocking the meaning of works against the backdrop of contemporary debates in conceptualizing the perpetrator comes to full fruition. His chapter on Gerhard Richter shows that, contrary to the common notion that silence about the Nazi past prevailed, the Eichmann trial and the “Auschwitz trials” opened up the possibilities of seeing ordinary citizens as potential perpetrators. Richter reacts powerfully by locating them within the family, and Jaskot carefully analyzes Richter’s technique of subtle distortions of family photos to highlight the dilemmas of identifying perpetrators among one’s relatives. In the following chapter, Jaskot revisits the generational conflicts of the 1970s and the ascendance of Helmut Kohl as the next backdrop against which to view artists’ critical engagement with the perpetrator, this time in the work of Anselm Kiefer. Kiefer, like Richter, engages in the generational conflict on a highly personal level, using his work to react to statements in the autobiography of his father—an art historian who served in the Wehrmacht—and to give vent to the complicated father-son struggles typical of his generation. In the 1980s, however, Kiefer moves on with works that ambivalently reference Speer’s vast neoclassical structures, while the understanding of “perpetrator” evolves from the area of student activism through the controversial fetishization of Nazi kitsch to the heated debates generated by Helmut Kohl’s statements on guilt and official visit to the Bitburg military cemetery.

The last two chapters and brief conclusion focus far less on artists’ individual contributions and instead on controversial architectural projects: the construction of the Jewish Museum in Berlin and the postwar uses of the Nuremberg Party Rally Grounds and (in the conclusion) the Air Force Ministry built for Hermann Göring in Berlin. Jaskot offers a painstakingly detailed analysis of the complex political negotiations that directly impacted the planning and execution of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum. Conceived as an addition to the existing Berlin Museum but also as a Cold War counterpart to East German projects commemorating the Jewish presence in Berlin’s history (the Ephraim Palais and the Oranienburgerstrasse synagogue), the project became the center of entirely new controversies with the unexpected fall of Communism and reunification. Funded with increasingly scarce public monies, the museum’s purpose was redefined as an ethnic commemoration. This shift transpired in the context of neo-Nazi and right-wing resurgence, hopes for “normalization” of Germany’s status as an international player, and difficult questions of German citizenship with regard to former East Germans as well as generations of foreign workers. Beyond the epicenter of Berlin, however, Jaskot argues that the perpetrator focus of architectural projects became blurry, and he examines the development as well as neglect of the Nuremberg grounds as an example of provincial amnesia. Basically turning a blind eye...