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Since the inception of the klezmer revival, the genre has been present in public rituals of memory both in Germany and in Poland. This chapter addresses the politicization of klezmer music and the use of the genre in Holocaust commemoration events. Presenting the contexts in which klezmer music is publically performed as the musical representation of Jewishness, it discusses not only the instrumentalization of klezmer for different political agendas, but also the opposition that klezmer music triggers in right-wing circles. Finally, demonstrating the role the klezmer revival plays in Polish and German public discourse, the chapter also shows how the genre has been used by the media and authorities as a proof of successful multicultural policies and interethnic dialogue.

This chapter focuses on three works to illustrate mediations of the Holocaust in contemporary compositions: Georg Katzer’s Aide-mémoir (1982), a tape music piece featuring a quasi-testimonial approach; Aribert Reimann’s Kumi Ori (1999), settings of poems by Paul Celan and Psalm texts for baritone and orchestra; and Peter Ruzicka’s Rercherche (ins Innere) (1999), a minimally text-based work for chorus and orchestra pointing to oblique types of Holocaust commemoration. These works, all by composers who do not identify themselves as Jewish, provide insight into different facets of Holocaust memorialisation. There are a variety of motivations, compositional practices, and representations of Jewishness and the Holocaust in such memorial efforts.

This chapter examines German efforts in the late 1980s and early 1990s to commemorate the Jüdischer Kulturbund (Jewish Culture League), an organization by and for Jews intended to facilitate Jewish cultural activities, with Nazi approval, from 1933 until 1941. These commemorations transformed perceptions of the league, compounding existing debate about the organization in the postwar era. But, as the chapter argues, they also reflect more recent responses to Jewish culture, both in a still divided and just reunified Germany. Indeed, based on analysis of West Germany’s “Gedenkzeichen für das Theater des Jüdischen Kulturbundes in der Kommandantenstraβe 57” and the Akademie der Künste’s 1992 exhibition “Geschlossene Vorstellung, commemorations of the Kulturbund in Germany offer insight into post-Holocaust agendas surrounding the Jew and Jewish culture in Germany: changing post—World War II ideas of Jewish resistance and the Jew as “victim.”

This chapter focuses on three extraliterary facets of Primo Levi: his public associations with Auschwitz and Holocaust commemoration, his leadership role in the Jewish community of Turin, and his contribution to the intellectual debates over the Arab-Israeli conflict. Many of Levi's nonliterary pronouncements appeared in low-circulation publications, on Italian radio and television, in unexpected venues or about subjects—like the crisis in the Middle East—with which Levi is not usually associated. This chapter recalls a facet of Levi that is little known abroad, namely his ties to organized religion in Turin, and one that was well known in Italy but perhaps obfuscated by the passage of time: his long and public involvement, as a progressive thinker, an intellectual, and a Jew, with the political direction and future of the State of Israel and, by extension with Jewry in Israel and beyond.

This chapter focuses on Robert Harris’s alternative history thriller Fatherland and Ian McEwan’s novel Black Dogs. It discusses the novels’ paranoia about contintental evil in the context of Holocaust commemoration and axieties about contemporary European integration. While both novels claim to be horrified by European history they also manage to be fascinated by fascist aesthetics (such as the SS uniform) and by the the Holocaust as an industrialised extermination project with concomitant bureaucracy. Both novels feature visions of concentration camps - in the form of bureaucratic paper trails, ruins or visitable memorial sites or in the form of fantasies of absolute dominance. The chapter analyses the grammar of these fantasies as symptoms of a cultural ambivalence towards fascism that manifests itself as literary and commemorative dark tourism.

This chapter outlines the history of ‘fascinating Fascism’ in film and popular culture from the 1960s to the present day. It contextualises this phenomenon within the critical debate over fascist iconography and its legacy, referring to the arguments of Susan Sontag, Klaus Theweleit and Alvin Rosenfeld. It suggests that the Anglo-Saxon interest in Nazism is less motivated by historical inquiry but fuelled by a desire to inhabit a fascist universe in a safe fashion: the audience engages in a form of fascist flânerie. This strategy allows for the projection, and simultaneous disavowal, of fascist longings. Such dark tourism uncomfortably alongside recent attempts to re-instate affect in the engagement with traumatic history, notably in Saul Friedländer’s notion of disbelief in Holocaust historiography and Alison Landsberg’s emphasis on empathy. The re-emergence of fascinating fascism suggests that in a consumer culture in which violence is reduced to aesthetics and entertainment, neither Holocaust piety nor the mandatory mobilisation of affect towards the victims of fascism through commemoration have succeeded in shifting interest from the perpetrator to the victim. On the contrary, the taboo of representing the perpetrator perspective has enabled the fascination with fascism to flourish into historical voyeurism and cultural pornography.