The Original Bambi By Felix Salten & Translated By Jack Zipes — Review

The 1942 animated film “Bambi” is a childrens’ cinematic classic, but the original novel upon which the film was based, now retranslated and republished, tells a bleak and compelling adult story that can be interpreted in many ways

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“I noted with horror the striking similarities between what the Nazis did to my family and my people, and what we do to animals we raise for food: the branding or tattooing of serial numbers to identify victims, the use of cattle cars to transport victims to their death, the crowded housing of victims in wood crates, the arbitrary designation of who lives and who dies — the Christian lives, the Jew dies; the dog lives, the pig dies.”

— Alex Hershaft, Holocaust survivor and vegan animal rights activist

Like most American children, I watched Walt Disney’s version of Bambi in one of the film’s frequent cinematic rereleases in the many decades after it originally premiered in 1942. This film was an animated adaptation by Walt Disney based on the novel, Bambi: A Life in the Woods, written and published in German by Austrian journalist Felix Salten in 1922. This coming-of-age story about a wild deer realistically depicts the primitive beauty of nature and the astounding cruelty of man.

In this novel, Mr Salten tells a powerful adult story that made me wonder what his bleak novel really meant (he never offered an explanation). Most people think it was a sociopolitical allegory that presents the author’s experiences with a childhood filled with anti-semitism, his premonition of the coming Nazi persecution of European Jews and the impending Holocaust. Considering this backdrop, it seems unlikely that this novel would be transformed into a poignant animated film for children by Walt Disney.

Although poignant, Disney’s adaptation was also terrifying. The most pivotal event in Disney’s film was the traumatic shooting death of young Bambi’s mother by a hunter. This ignited a firestorm of public controversy in the United States at the time because it was the first time most American children were confronted by death, and this terrified them. Even Disney’s daughter, Diane, was horrified, and told her father that it was “unnecessary”. Indeed, one could argue that young Diane had a point since the trajectory of the story itself would not have changed much (or at all) if Bambi’s mother had lived because Bambi’s character was unaffected by her death.

But many literary critics maintain that in the original novel, the death of Bambi’s mother is an essential part of the history of European Jews: it symbolized the heartrending separation of Jewish children from their parents as well as the destruction and loss of their comfortable pre-Holocaust lives as they fled Nazi persecution.

Leaving the sociopolitical interpretations aside, Mr Salten said he wrote Bambi to as a plea for greater understanding of, and greater care for, the natural world, and as a realistic story about nature, where starvation, competition, and predation are normal. That is the message I got from my viewing of the film, and in fact, the murder of Bambi’s mother outraged hunters across America and helped strengthen the Animal Rights movement.

Despite the controversies that this somber novel inspired, it became popular in Germany, then in Austria, as soon as it was published, as well as in the United States a few years later (1928). But the Nazis, who decided that this novel was a compelling allegory for how Jews were treated in Europe under their rule, officially banned the book in 1935 and publicly burned it after Hitler himself deemed it to be “the work of an undesirable”.

According to the new translation by Jack Zipes, a professor emeritus of German at University of Minnesota and a leading authority on fairy tales and folk literature, Bambi is a story of brutality, loss and, ultimately, loneliness. This is plausible: According to my reading of the new translation, I can tell you that the word “alone” appears increasingly often as Bambi grows older. Although I didn’t count the precise number of times that the word “alone” appears in each chapter (yeah, I know: I should’ve — I could make a graph!), avid readers and book club members can now count for themselves the number of times this word appears in a newly published translation of this classic, The Original Bambi: The Story of a Life in the Forest (Princeton University Press, 2022: Amazon US / Amazon UK). This new translation comes with an informative and lengthy introduction by translator, Professor Zipes, where he writes that, in Bambi, Mr Salten created “a brilliant and profound story of how minority groups throughout the world have been brutally treated, even when they try to live peacefully in their own environment”.

“Read in the original language and in its sociohistorical context, ‘Bambi’ is, if anything, dystopic and sobering”, Professor Zipes continues, “for it reveals the cutthroat manner in which powerless people are hunted and persecuted for sport.”

I’m neither a literary critic nor a historian, but the book, in my opinion, is a powerful tale of the destructive side of human nature and our despotic relationship to the environment. This broken relationship is now painfully obvious in the accelerating climate crisis, which looms ever more ominously every day. Because we insist on continuing our reckless pursuit of profit at all costs, it will only be a few short years before finally we destroy ourselves and the rest of the planet too.

As true for the planet itself, the greatest danger to Bambi is posed by He, Man, an armed murderer who kills animals seemingly arbitrarily and usually from a distance, and his dogs, who have betrayed their fellow animals by enthusiastically helping Man hunt. In a forest filled with peril, nowhere does comic relief pop up in the form of Thumper the rabbit or Flower the skunk, as they did in the “Disneyfied” film. In the original novel, not only does Bambi lose his mother, but almost every creature around him suffers a brutal, often bloody, and premature end. There is no happy ending here. There only is danger, death, loss, and loneliness — and a stoic acceptance of these fates.

As a baby, Bambi learns valuable lessons from his mother, but the old prince, the oldest surviving stag in the forest (who treats him as his son and who may be his father), fills in after his mother’s death to teach adult Bambi many more important survival skills — and first and foremost amongst these is that he must learn to live alone:

“When Bambi had been younger, the old prince taught him that he must learn to live alone. Then and afterward, the old prince revealed many of his insights and secrets to him. But of all his teachings, the most important one was you must learn to live alone, if you want to protect yourself, if you want to grasp the meaning of existence, if you want to attain wisdom. You had to learn to live alone!” (The Original Bambi by Felix Salten, pp. 144-145).

This philosophy sounds so incredibly American. It also sounds autobiographical. There were many inconsistencies in Mr Salten’s life. For example, he was a hunter who loved animals and strongly believed they had similar rights to humans. He was a persecuted Austrian Jew who wanted to be accepted by proper Viennese society. He fled to Switzerland to escape the Nazis who then stripped his citizenship and left him to die alone, unknown, and despairing.

And so, this tension between aloneness and companionship is, in my perception, another major theme in the novel, a theme that grows in prominence as Bambi grows into adulthood. It is wonderfully captured by the short but quietly moving existential conversation between two leaves in autumn, as they discuss what happens after they fall from their tree (Chapter 8). Near the end of this interlude, one leaf appears to reaffirm the value of companionship when it says to the other: “You’ve always been so kind to me. I’m just beginning to understand how kind you are.”

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