Political Animals: Serengeti Shall Not Die and the Cultural Heritage of Mankind

Bernhard Grzimek’s 1959 nature documentary, Serengeti darf nicht sterben (Serengeti Shall Not Die), has recently been the subject of intense scrutiny by environmental historians and film scholars, who have unmasked it as a projection of colonialist fantasies. Building on their work, this article draws attention to Grzimek’s description of the East African steppes as a “cultural heritage of all mankind” and examines the visual tropes deployed to support this claim. In this way, the film emerges as an early illustration of a new form of planetary consciousness that would find other examples in orbital photography and in the language of international treaties.