Felix Salten

Felix Salten: The Author Disney Erased

In 1933 he sold the film rights to his novel about a roe deer for a thousand dollars. Nine years later Walt Disney's version — Thumper, Flower, the naturalism sanded smooth — became one of the most beloved animated films ever made, and the book that produced it slid into obscurity. By then Nazi Germany had banned the original as a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe and burned it, and its author, born Siegmund Salzmann in Pest, was a refugee in Zürich.

Siegmund Salzmann of Pest

He was born on 6 September 1869 in Pest, Hungary, into a Jewish family: his father Fülöp Salzmann was a telegraph clerk, his mother was Maria Singer. When he was four weeks old the family moved to Vienna — one of thousands who did so after Austria granted Jews full citizenship rights in 1867, and one of the great migrations that made fin-de-siècle Vienna what it was.

It was not a welcome. Salten faced sustained antisemitism from schoolmates and neighbours, and as a teenager changed his surname to something that sounded less Jewish. Then his father's business collapsed. At sixteen he left school and went to work for an insurance agency. Everything he later knew about literature he taught himself.

An Insurance Clerk in Young Vienna

The remarkable fact of Salten's twenties is that a self-educated clerk talked his way into the most brilliant literary circle in Europe. He joined Jung-Wien — Young Vienna — and became a theatre and art critic writing for very nearly every significant Viennese publication. In 1900 he published his first collection of short stories; in 1901 he founded the city's first literary cabaret.

What followed was industrial. Salten averaged roughly a book a year across novels, plays, essays, travel writing and screenplays, while sustaining a full journalistic career. In 1906 he spent a brief spell in Berlin as editor-in-chief of *B.Z. am Mittag* and the *Berliner Morgenpost* before returning to Vienna. He married the actress Ottilie Metzl in 1902; they had two children, Paul and Anna Katharina. From 1927 he served as president of the Austrian PEN club.

Herzl's Follower

Salten was also an outspoken Zionist, drawn to the movement by Theodor Herzl. He contributed anonymously to Herzl's newspaper *Die Welt*, wrote a biographical portrait of him after his death in 1904, and appeared at Bar Kochba Society events on platforms shared with Martin Buber. This matters for reading his fiction. The man who wrote the world's most famous story about a hunted animal spent his adult life thinking publicly about what it meant to be a Jew in Central Europe.

The Anonymous Book

In 1906 an erotic novel called *Josephine Mutzenbacher* appeared in Vienna without an author's name. Salten is now considered its probable author. It has never been proved, and he never claimed it — but the attribution has attached itself permanently to a writer whose public reputation was built on children's classics, which is its own small irony.

Bambi

*Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde* was serialised in the *Neue Freie Presse* between August and October 1922 and published in Berlin by Ullstein Verlag in 1923. It follows a roe deer from birth to maturity: his mother teaches him the forest, hunters terrify it, his mother is shot, he competes for mates, wins his cousin Faline, and learns from the Old Prince that humans are not omnipotent. It ends with a grown Bambi scolding fawns, the cycle complete.

It is not a children's book in any comfortable sense. Critics have read it as one of the earliest environmental novels, and scholars have read it as a parable of the dangers facing Jews in Europe.

Chambers, Galsworthy and America

The English *Bambi* arrived in 1928 in a translation by Whittaker Chambers — later famous for entirely different reasons — commissioned by Max Schuster of Simon & Schuster, with a foreword by John Galsworthy, who called it a "little masterpiece" and described reading it aloud while crossing the English Channel. *The New York Times* judged it "admirably translated." It became a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and had sold more than 650,000 copies by 1942; over 200 editions have since appeared in more than thirty languages.

Translation is never neutral. An Austrian scholar argued in 2015 that Chambers had tilted the book away from human persecution and towards animal conservation. When Jack Zipes produced a new version for Princeton University Press in 2022, he set out to restore Salten's anthropomorphism and the specific texture of the animals' speech — "reminiscent of Austrian German you'd hear in cafes around Vienna" — and to foreground the allegory of European antisemitism. Reviewers noted that Zipes sometimes pushed the anthropomorphism further than Salten had and omitted passages of his own.

The Ban, the Exile, and Disney

Nazi Germany banned *Bambi* in 1936 as a political allegory on the treatment of Jews in Europe. Copies were burned; first editions are consequently rare. After the Anschluss of 1938 Salten fled with his wife to Zürich.

Meanwhile his best-known work was being remade beyond recognition. Sidney Franklin bought the film rights in 1933 for a thousand dollars, intending a live-action picture; Disney acquired them in 1937 and began serious production in 1939, judging the novel too grim and sombre for young audiences. The 1942 film introduced Thumper and Flower, lightened the naturalism, and became a permanent fixture of childhood — and, as critics have observed, made the original novel more obscure than it had been. Salten wrote *Perri* (1938), which Disney also filmed in 1957, and *Bambi's Children* (1939). His 1923 novel *The Hound of Florence* fed Disney's *The Shaggy Dog* in 1959. He died in Zürich on 8 October 1945, aged seventy-six.

Why Felix Is Called a Genius

The case rests on a single book, and it is a strong one. *Bambi* solves two problems at once that most writers cannot solve separately. It sustains a non-human point of view without whimsy — natural history written as psychological realism, a deer's world rendered from inside it — and functions simultaneously as a political parable about the hunted. The proof of the second is unusual: the Nazi state read the allegory, understood it, banned the book and burned it in 1936. Few novels have been paid that compliment.

There is also the improbability of the man: a sixteen-year-old insurance clerk with no further schooling who wrote his way into Jung-Wien, produced a book a year for decades, and made a story that has appeared in over thirty languages.

The counter-case is substantial. Nearly all that output is forgotten; Salten is a one-book author, and barely remembered even for that, since the world knows *Bambi* through a film that removed his politics and his name from public view. He sold those rights for a thousand dollars, which nobody would call shrewd. Within Young Vienna he was never a first-rank literary figure, and no major critic advances him as one. And the allegorical reading, powerful as it is, was partly supplied by later readers: Zipes's translation, which foregrounds it, has itself been faulted for going beyond the text. Salten's genius was real and narrow: one perfectly aimed book, whose meaning his enemies confirmed.

Legacy

Salten wrote the most famous animal novel of the twentieth century and then watched it be taken from him: sold cheap, softened, and absorbed into a corporate childhood that has nothing to say about hunted minorities in Europe. The 2022 retranslation is part of a slow correction. The book he actually wrote is darker, stranger and more political than the fawn on the merchandise — and, eighty years after his death in exile, more relevant.

Achievements

• Notable work: The Hound of Florence
• Worked as screenwriter, writer and journalist