ESSEN, Germany — Of Europe’s summertime arts festivals, the Ruhrtriennale is the most political.

The five-week event, which lights up disused industrial spaces in the Ruhr Valley, Germany’s former rust belt, has an interdisciplinary program as unique as its setting. After last year’s festival, which focused on “the Global South,” this summer’s program deals with Europe’s loss of status and influence on the world stage.

“European democracy is, and always has been, a racist construct based on power and privilege,” the event’s program book tells us. With an agenda that takes aim at much of Western culture, the current edition could well be titled “Fear and Loathing in Europe.”

Fear of the other and fear for the fate of a multicultural Europe are central to “After Recent Days. A Late Night,” a collage of text and music that the director Christopher Marthaler has fashioned into an urgent appeal.

Staged in the Auditorium Maximum, the circular main lecture hall of the Ruhr University, in the city of Bochum, the production fuses incendiary political speeches with the works of Jewish composers who were banned, exiled and murdered by the Nazis. Eleven actors and six musicians perform from one half of the vast auditorium, with its tiered seating, while the audience watches from across the hall.