Dante and the Shoah

Abstract The appropriation of Dante by the Fascist regime in support of the racial laws (1938) did not diminish his popularity after WWII, when Dante’s Inferno became a template for describing the experience of the death camps. In Primo Levi’s If This Is a Man, Dante restores, though fleetingly, the belief in, and practice of, humanity that the Nazis are intent on crushing: far from being a medieval ancestor of the camp, the poem works as an antidote to it. The notion that Dante and humanistic culture may have been complicit, albeit unwittingly, in the Nazi genocidal scheme ignores the poet’s warnings on the misuse of intelligence. For Dante actually anticipates Horkheimer and Adorno’s discourse on the advances of thought and technology, and his story of Ulysses’ death could serve as an opening for Dialectic of Enlightenment. The chapter considers also Dante’s presence in Peter Weiss’s theatre and Giorgio Pressburger’s novels.