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  • The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right by Paul B. Jaskot
  • Kathryn M. Floyd
The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right. By Paul B. Jaskot. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013. Pp. 288. Paper $30.00. ISBN 978-0816678259.

With recent revelations about Nazi-appointed art historian Hildebrand Gurlitt’s ill-gotten collection of “degenerate” art, and the February 2014 release of The Monuments Men, a film based loosely on the Allied platoons of art historians who saved Europe’s treasures from Hitler, the enduring presence of the Nazi criminal and the changing status of the art historian (whose use-value President Obama seemed to question in a January quip) have momentarily collided. Paul B. Jaskot’s study The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and the Politics of the Right likewise draws together National Socialism’s continuing reverberations with a demonstration of the powerful potential of art’s histories. His book focuses on a series of four deeply investigated situations from the 1950s to the present in which complex political debates and evolving notions of the Nazi perpetrator, the embodiment of guilt and responsibility, become tethered to cases of German art and architecture. Together, [End Page 698] Jaskot’s detailed, materialist histories around the early work of Gerhard Richter and Anselm Kiefer, Berlin’s Jewish Museum, and the Nuremburg Party Rally Grounds form a sustained corrective to art historical simplifications and omissions regarding German art’s engagement with the fascist past, including overlooked conservative debates. His painstaking research intertwines a range of political perspectives with the objects, individuals, and institutions of postwar culture. Jaskot’s book deserves to be counted among the richest recent scholarship on German art, but should also be considered a model for the valuable analysis the most precise histories of art can offer.

Historians in other disciplines may recognize the inclusive evidence Jaskot employs. But studies of postwar German art tend, with notable exceptions, to focus on themes of memorialization, experimental artists like Joseph Beuys, or complex artworks explored through disciplinary narratives and philosophical abstractions rather than sources like German newspapers or city council proceedings. These subjects, Jaskot notes, while important, are really part of a broader web that must be untangled from art history’s habit of generalizing about German politics or ignoring what seems to have no “value.” Investigations of right-wing politics and culture are limited to studies of the Nazi era. Jaskot’s work rights these imbalances by looking at the responses of cultural practitioners to evolving discussions about historical guilt, especially complicated West German conservative debates (as distinct from continuing fascist ideologies) about the Nazi perpetrator. Thus Adenauer and the CDU’s indictment, not of individuals, but of secularism and materialism as they carefully negotiated any positions they shared with the former state, sets the stage for understanding Richter, just as Kohl’s agendas in the 1980s resonate with Kiefer’s work. Jaskot demonstrates that by engaging postwar art through nuanced political and social histories, we can form accurate considerations of overlooked and ubiquitous subjects.

Some of these oversights trace their origins to the immediate postwar period and considerations of historical perpetration in the cultural realm. After outlining the NSDAP’s instrumentalization of art, architecture, and their histories, Jaskot shows that although the Party carefully and broadly employed aesthetics for deadly ends, in the subsequent rebuilding period Nazi criminality was delinked from the world of Kultur both by Germans and their occupiers; art and fascism became oppositional categories. As Jaskot notes, in the cultural sphere people “acted as though the NSDAP had had no impact on their world whatsoever” (40). Not until the early 70s did German art historians, for example, begin to consider the blind spots of the discipline.

Against assumptions of complete postwar silence in the art world, however, Jaskot demonstrates that German artists, unlike art historians, engaged debates about the character of the Nazi perpetrator before 1968. Works like Richter’s Christa und Wolfi (1964), for example, embody more than problems of aesthetics. Some of Richter’s photo-based paintings from the mid-1960s explore the very nature of the perpetrator, not the easy-to-spot...

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