Helena Duffy
Helena Duffy
Title: The Animals Counterattack: Anti-militarism and Animal Agency in Wolfdietrich Schnurre’s Kurzgeschichte: The Deed (1950/1958) and The Manoeuvres (1952)
Abstract: The proposed paper discusses the intersectionality of human and animal violence in two untranslated short stories by Wolfdietrich Schnurre (1920–1989), an important literary figure in post-war Germany. Written in the context of the controversial Wiederbewaffnung (Germany’s rearmament after World War II) by an author who had experienced the horrors of the Eastern Front first hand, the two narratives stage acts of animal cruelty as a way of condemning interhuman brutality. In ‘The Deed’ (‘Die Tat’), two young boys torture a pregnant cat to death and, later, during World War II, German soldiers hurl empty food tins at a cat stranded on an ice floe. In ‘The Manoeuvres’, which is set after the war, soldiers disturb the peace of the animal world with their tanks and canons, before a narcissistic general attempts to assert his authority by firing at a flock of terrified sheep. In this paper, I will discuss and praise Schnurre’s attentiveness to animal welfare and his linked decision to grant them subjectivity and agency. While the cat featured in ‘The Deed’ haunts both its tormentor until he repents his senseless killing of a cat by saving a drowning cat and the military judge who sentenced the man to death for rescuing the distressed animal, in ‘The Manoeuvres’ the sheep kill the pompous general and, consequently, thwart the preparations for another war. At the same time, I argue, however, that the two short stories instrumentalise their non-human characters for rhetorical purposes and in order to achieve narrowly anthropocentric ideological ends. Firstly, for Schnurre, animal cruelty is symptomatic of the intrinsically violent human nature and, given its perennial character, serves him to condemn the resurgence of militarism in post-war Germany. Secondly, animal cruelty metaphorises the war perpetrated by the Nazis towards other humans, and especially the Jews who were systematically animalised by the German propaganda through comparisons with vermin. Thirdly, in Schnurre’s writing animals either symbolise guilt without redemption (‘The Deed’) or act as a means of ridiculing human carnophalogocentrism, defined by Jacques Derrida as the intersecting patriarchal dominations of women and animals that produce the sovereign Western subject (‘The Manoeuvres’).
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