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1. Introduction
Cultural tourism represents an important proportion (40 per cent) of overall tourism in Europe (European Commission, 2015; McKercher and Cros, 2002). A growing subset of cultural tourism has been termed "dark tourism" (Joly, 2010) and defined by the Institute for Dark Tourism Research (2015) as "the act of travel to sites, attractions and exhibitions of death, disaster or the seemingly macabre". Examples of dark tourism destinations include battlefields, prisons, sites associated with the holocaust and other locations where tragedies have occurred. One of the characteristics of dark tourism destinations is that they allow visitors to gain a closer experience of historical events and often initiate a process of - at times existential - self-reflection (Stone and Sharpley, 2008).
Second World War concentration camps are a specific and important element of European dark tourism studies today, even if detailed research in this area is relatively new. In spite of an initial debate in Europe with regards to the necessity for curating and conserving Second World War concentration camps, the European Union introduced legislation in 1993 to fund the preservation of Nazi concentration camps (EUR-Lex, 2004) with the intention of creating memorial sites, primarily. Some such camp memorial sites protected in Europe under this legislation and open to visitors and include Auschwitz-Birkenau, Gross-Rosen, Majdanek and Stutthof in Poland; and Buchenwald, Dachau and Sachsenhausen in Germany. Of these, Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest and most researched (Thurnell-Read, 2009; Knudsen, 2011; Minic, 2012; Kidron, 2011), with over 1.43 million visitors in 2012 (Panstwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau, 2015). This study focuses instead on Dachau - Germany's first Nazi concentration camp, built in 1933 and visited by 800,000 tourists annually currently. The research carried out for this study has gone beyond visitor motivations and on-site experiences, and the findings suggest there are gaps in the understanding of the feelings that can linger in individuals (often for a period of several years) after their initial visit to a concentration camp memorial site. What happens once the tour is over? What type of feelings do these tours leave visitors with? These are some of the issues that this micro-ethnography research study offers a tentative glimpse into.
There is also the consideration that what is considered dark tourism is actually part of wider urban...