With his huge eyes and coltish limbs, Bambi the orphaned deer has enchanted children ever since Disney took the 1923 novel by Austrian-Jewish author Felix Salten and popped the little charmer onto the big screen. Both my daughters, like most of the nation’s children, sobbed their hearts out when the deer’s mother is shot dead by a hunter.
In the world of Disney Bambi is finally rescued by his father, a majestic full-grown stag. But a new translation of Salten’s original novel, to be published on January 18, 2022, reveals a much darker tale with anything but a happy ending. According to the translator Professor Jack Zipes, Salten’s book Bambi,A Life in the Woods is actually a foretelling of the Holocaust.
You could read many things into Bambi’s story: abandoned children, human danger to wildlife, to conservation and the planet. But the Holocaust?
In Salten’s anthropomorphic story, written 20 years before George Orwell’s Animal Farm, Bambi is threatened by hunters from the moment of his birth and is betrayed by other animals. He ends up alone, terrified and anticipating a grim fate. The English version, published in 1928, on which Disney based his own forest fantasy was modified into a story about conservation.
Whether or not Salten intended his novel to prophesy the decimation of European Jewry, the Nazis certainly thought so. In 1935 they banned the book because they perceived it to be a Jewish allegory of encroaching fascism.
Salten, himself an avid hunter, had experienced antisemitism in his own country and changed his name from Siegmund Saltzmann when still a teenager. His own fate was to die alone in Zurich in 1945, stripped of his Austrian citizenship. But was his novel really a prediction of coming Nazi power, or of the danger he, himself, as a hunter, represented to the natural world?
Zipes, professor emeritus of German and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota, condemns many Disney animated films which he feels “disgraced the work of popular folklorists”. He believes they “defeat the original purpose of the fairy tales and give the writers little to no acknowledgement.”
In an online article, Breaking the Disney Spell, he explains that fairy tales were used to relieve social conflict by describing past experiences to their audience. “
As for Bambi, he told The Observer: “The darker side of Bambi has always been there” – concealed to a certain extent by the Disney Corporation and made into a “pathetic, almost stupid film”.
Pathetic, stupid or not, Bambi’s plight as an orphan was very real to my children when young. But had I known the likely provenance of his story and its attempt to alert the world to the threat to European Jewry, I don’t know what I could have said to console them.
