Sheep

Sheep occupy two sharply different registers in the novel: they arrive as part of a routine, quantified livestock trade, then reappear in a pub story about a vast flock supposedly lost in Australia. In the first, their movement is organized by rail, pens, and market accounting; in the second, the explanation for their disappearance becomes a contest between competing human accounts. Franz Biberkopf’s insistence that animals are sensitive gives that talk a point of ethical recognition, even as the animals themselves remain largely mediated by trade and hearsay.

Livestock in transit and at market

Sheep are among the animals arriving by rail from East Prussia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, and West Prussia. They come with pigs and cattle from the provinces, carried along the railway tracks that run for fifteen kilometres beside the livestock market. The narration places their arrival within an organized stream of transport: animals are unloaded from wagons, driven by herders, and put into pens. It gives sheep a place in the same commercial system as the other livestock, while distinguishing them by their presence in the roll call of species being brought into the city.

The market report later counts 4,654 sheep. Its compressed language assigns them a condition in trade rather than describing individual animals: sheep are reported as quiet, while the same bulletin describes cattle as flat and pigs as stable at opening but weak at closing. This shift from living arrivals to a numerical market entry makes the sheep legible as stock and price conditions. Their number is precise, but the report offers no account of any one animal’s journey or fate.

A flock imagined in Australia

In a pub conversation, a young man from Hoppegarten describes Australia as having once held millions of yellow sheep, living wild and supplying animals that the English used and exported. He then presents their absence as a puzzle: according to his account, a traveller could now look across the country without seeing a sheep. The story is not introduced as an established history. It emerges in informal conversation, where speakers question and revise one another’s explanations.

Gottlieb Meck first dismisses the suggestion that wild animals caused the loss and proposes disease instead: where large numbers of animals live together, sickness may follow deaths and decay. The young man accepts that disease might have affected some sheep but rejects it as the decisive cause. He argues that capture and herding frightened the flock into a mass flight toward the sea. The account grows concrete through its imagined sequence: animals driven into carts, a delayed response by the English, then sheep reaching the coast and swallowing salt water when thirsty and without food. The speaker says they drowned and lay rotting in great numbers. These details belong to the debaters’ explanation, not to an independently verified report; the scene preserves the uncertainty and disagreement within the story.

Animals seen through human speech

The Australia story makes the sheep more than an abstract export. In the young man’s telling, their flight is a response to repeated capture and forced movement; their fate follows from thirst, hunger, and salt water. Yet this account is still delivered by people around a pub table, and the speakers turn the animals’ loss into an argument about cause, organization, and wasted effort. The narrative lets the sheep’s vulnerability enter the discussion without giving them a speaking voice of their own.

Franz Biberkopf endorses the claim that animals are sensitive and difficult to handle, adding that people who do not know what they are doing should leave them alone. His intervention does not resolve whether disease or panic caused the supposed catastrophe. It changes the emphasis: the conversation’s competing theories are also a reminder that animals can suffer under human handling, and that ignorance has consequences. Set beside the market’s count of 4,654 sheep, this exchange exposes a tension between treating animals as units of trade and acknowledging them as responsive living creatures.

Narrative significance

The sheep’s two appearances connect the material systems that move livestock with a story of animals escaping human control. At the Berlin market, rail transport, pens, herders, and statistical reporting place them within a practical commercial routine. In the Australian anecdote, the same scale that made the flock useful—millions of animals—becomes the scale of its imagined panic and destruction. The difference in narrative form matters: the market bulletin records quantities and conditions tersely, while the pub debate offers rival causal explanations and a moral response from Franz Biberkopf.

The novel does not settle the pub story into a definitive account of Australia’s sheep or identify the young speaker’s version as fact. Instead, the sheep’s disappearance remains a tale told amid ordinary conversation, surrounded by disagreement. Their narrative significance lies in that double status: counted in the city’s economy, yet also invoked as animals whose fear and bodily needs resist being reduced entirely to market figures.