Pets and cinematic animal witnessing in The Zone of Interest

Since its release in 2023, The Zone of Interest has generated wide-reaching critical discussion concerning the visual politics of Holocaust cinema, much of it crystalizing around director Jonathan Glazer's decision to represent atrocities taking place at Auschwitz aurally rather than visually. Little attention, however, has been paid to the visual as well as sonic presence of animals in the film, who at times act as surrogates for unseen Jewish victims and at others bear witness to human violence tuned out by perpetrators and accomplices. This includes Dilla, a black Weimaraner and the family pet of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss and his wife Hedwig. In this article, Baker asks how Dilla's non-human registering of Holocaust violence, activated by the moving image, complicates anthropocentric conceptions of witnessing and testimony. Drawing on David L. Clark's reflections on animal witnessing in documentary Holocaust footage, she argues that Dilla reconfigures witnessing as an embodied practice of listening as well as looking, exposing both the limits of human-centred paradigms of representation and the ambivalent place occupied by pets and other animal lives within Nazi life and ideology.