The Nazi Perpetrator, By Paul Jaskot

Paul Jaskot in The Nazi Perpetrator: Postwar German Art and Politics of the Right (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), argues that the shifting definition of who and what constitutes as a Nazi perpetrator during post war West Germany did not have a constant interpretation; this is portrayed in art and architecture throughout the 1950s and well into the 1990s. Jaskot relies on a series of paintings and pictures from the United States Holocaust Museum. In order to follow the evolution of a Nazi perpetrator in postwar West Germany, it was necessary that Jaskot go back to the era of National Socialism to take the beginning concepts of what a Nazi perpetrator is, in order to obtain a better understanding of the shifting definitions
Jaskot gives an analysis of individuals works such as Gerhard Richter to show that there was a concept of an “everyday Nazi”, those who had lived among the general population; “… the presence of former Nazi party members and supporters in families, institutions, and government offices” (Chapter 2, The Reappearance of the Nazi Past in Artistic Debates in Postwar West Germany), had forced many to question the aftermath of National Socialism and if West Germany had truly surpassed its criminal past. In an attempt to cope with the concern that the Nazi perpetrators were potentially blood relatives, Richter’s art contains distortions in order to identify the perpetrators within the picture. Richter uses the art piece titled “Uncle Rudi”, which is an image of his Uncle standing in a Nazi uniform and the entire oil painting is distorted to easily identify the
The older generation of parents who had lived through the fascist era had their children turn against them and the ideological reasoning of the Nazi regime. This alteration in thought had evolved the idea of a Nazi perpetrator, leading to the sons and daughters creating a collective interpretation of their elders, instead of looking at the individuals. “A mainstay of the students’ political program became the rubric of antifascist critiques of their parents’ mainstream institutions that had allowed the extreme right once again to gain strength” (Chapter 3, From Fathers to Sons). Chancellor Kohl had made this point apparent in a speech stating that many of those alive were after the fascist era and had a different interpretation of the