‘Like Sheep to the Slaughter’: Animal Agency and Echoes of the Holocaust in Wolfdietrich Schnurre's Writing

ABSTRACT This article examines the writings of Wolfdietrich Schnurre (1920–89) through a combined lens of zoocriticism and Holocaust studies. Drawing on Anna Barcz's concept of ‘vulnerable realism’, it posits an analogy between Jews targeted by the Nazis’ exterminatory programme, who struggled to articulate their suffering in the language of empirical historiography, and animals who, excluded from the human system of moral rights and laws, have no means of voicing the oppression they endure. The article argues, however, that, rather than portraying animals as mute and helpless victims, Schnurre's short stories – ‘Die Tat’, ‘Der Verrat’ and ‘Das Manöver’ (1958) – endow their nonhuman protagonists with moral agency and with an ensuing capacity to resist their tormentors. Read in dialogue with Schnurre's Holocaust novel, Ein Unglücksfall (1981), and in the light of the human–animal entanglement advocated by his writings, these stories can be interpreted as a subtle contestation of the idea of Jewish passivity during the Nazi era.