From Documentary Narrative to Literary Anthropology: Human–Animal Relations in Judith Schalansky’s An Inventory of Losses

This study examines how German author Judith Schalansky reconfigures human–animal relations in An Inventory of Losses (2018) through documentary narrative. It focuses on three narratives included in the volume—“Caspian Tiger,” “Guericke’s Unicorn,” and “Encyclopaedia in the Wood”—and considers how practices of naming, classification, exhibition, archiving, and control shape the cultural hierarchies associated with the boundary between human and nonhuman life. Drawing on literary anthropology and cultural animal studies, the analysis attends to narrative perspective, corporeal imagery, taxonomic language, and the tension between documentary evidence and imaginative reconstruction. Its conceptual framework brings together Hartmut Böhme’s account of domination and archaic permeability, Thomas Macho’s reflections on knowledge and classification, and Gertrud Koch’s concepts of somatic empathy, somatic affect, and non-linguistic knowledge. In these narratives, animals are not reduced to passive symbols; their bodies, representations, and classificatory histories reveal the cultural mechanisms through which knowledge and power are organised. “Caspian Tiger” relates extinction to spectacle, musealisation, and imperial domination. “Guericke’s Unicorn” shows how scientific practices can turn a creature without a biological counterpart into an object of knowledge, whereas “Encyclopaedia in the Wood” exposes the limits of arranging living beings and environments within conceptual schemes. Taken together, these narratives show that Schalansky does not eliminate biological distinctions among species but interrogates the historically contingent meanings and hierarchies imposed upon them. Accordingly, the study evaluates Schalansky’s documentary poetics from the perspective of literary anthropology and develops an interpretation situated at the intersection of German literary studies and cultural animal studies.