Clumsy and carefree in appearance, with a temperament somewhere between that of a friendly pachyderm and an angry, lumbering beast: rhinos often have a hard time in human descriptions. Nevertheless – or perhaps precisely because of this – they have held a colossal fascination for us for thousands of years. In his natural and cultural history of these largest land mammals after elephants, Lothar Frenz casts a tender gaze upon the rhinoceros and traces its grand appearances from the cave paintings at Chauvet through Dürer’s famous woodcut – the product of a media revolution – to the horned “Jungfer Clara,” the star rhinoceros of the 18th century and protagonist of the first Europe-wide advertising campaign. However, he also shows how this fascination escalated into something deadly: the excesses of poaching and the greed for the legendary horn bear catastrophic witness to our qualities as fellow inhabitants of this planet, for it may well be that we are the last to experience this legendary animal, reminiscent of primeval times.
Non-fiction
Lothar Frenz, born in 1964, is a biologist and journalist. Since the 1990s, biodiversity and its conservation have been the focus of his work – whether in nature documentaries for ZDF, ARTE and NDR, in GEO or in books.
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