Before Bambi was the star of an animated Disney movie, he was a character in a German novel. “Bambi, a Life in the Woods” was written in 1923 by an Austrian, Felix Salten.
Unlike the Disney treatment it received in 1942, the novel was not a children’s story. Yes, the animals talked to each other; and yes, a deer named Bambi was born, grew up, fell in love, and faced many challenges; but no, it was not a sweet, pleasant book. Think of it as a coming-of-age story, more suitable for teens and adults. Or even a suspense novel in which the inhabitants of an area are in constant danger of violent death. They live their lives in fear of predators who kill indiscriminately and without mercy.
There is a scene, for example, when shots are fired and all the animals, large and small, are in a panic. Pheasants are being hunted. If they stay on the ground, they will be safe, but many take to the sky anyway. Bambi watches as a pheasant, which had been warning others to stay on the ground, is unable to resist the urge to fly. It gives a whistle-like sob, flaps its wings, and soars up through the trees, only to be shot like the others.
And there is the sad story of Bambi’s cousin, Gobo. Small and weak, he gets stuck in the snow and is unable to escape some approaching hunters. It turns out that rather than being killed by the hunters, Gobo is rescued, nursed back to health, and becomes a pet. When later on he is released back into the woods, he proclaims that the hunters are good and would never shoot him. You don’t need to read the book to know how that turns out.
Salten was not the only writer—nor the first— to use animals as human substitutes to comment on our frailties and tendencies.
In ancient Greece, Aesop told fables that featured talking animals who demonstrated people-like weaknesses and ill judgment.
And in 1945, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm, which he, himself, said portrayed events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era.
Salten, an avid hunter and experienced woodsman, was aware of the dangers that creatures in the woods dealt with. He was also a Jew living in Austria in the 1920s and was aware of the dangers that his people dealt with. It is believed that in writing about one, he was also writing about the other. When the Nazis came to power in the 1930s, they banned the book and burned every copy of it they could get their hands on.
You can read or listen to an English translation of Salten’s novel for free. Project Gutenberg, an online library of free ebooks, has a copy at gutenberg.org/ebooks/63849. Also, the Caribou Public Library has a chapter-by-chapter reading of it online. Search YouTube and you should be able to find it.
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