One of the deer uses the loaded verb verfolgen to ask whether humans and deer might get along: “Will they ever stop persecuting us?” When another deer answers that “reconciliation” with humans will eventually come about, Old Nettla, a third deer with vastly more experience of the world, will have none of it. Likening Bambi to Kafka’s talking-ape story “A Report to an Academy,” Bruce claims that Salten’s work, too, is a critique of assimilation. Salten’s suggestive phrase for butterflies is “wandering flowers,” and Bambi describes them elsewhere as “beautiful losers” who have to keep moving, “because the best spots have already been taken.” Bruce stresses, as well, that the culture of the deer develops around the fact of their victimization: They tell their children tales that “are always full of horror and misery.” In an essay published in 2003, Iris Bruce argues broadly that the novel evokes the “experience of exclusion and discrimination.” But she also pays close attention to its language. It was not until a decade ago, however, that an actual reading of the “Zionist overtones” in Bambi was proposed. It was published in English before it appeared in Salten’s native language: it was published in the United States in 1939 but the German-language version only appeared in 1940.Was Bambi Jewish? It sounds like the setup to an unfunny Family Guy joke, but it’s actually the fascinating argument put forth by Paul Reitter, an author and professor at Ohio State, in a newly published Jewish Review of Books piece entitled “Bambi’s Jewish Roots.” The piece explores the background of Bambi’s author Felix Salten and convincingly argues that Salten’s original Bambi novel was an allegory for anti-Semitism: Salten wrote the sequel while living in exile in Switzerland, having been driven out of Austria by the Nazis. Bambi’s Children focuses on the adventures of Bambi’s twin children, Geno and Gurri. Salten wrote a sequel to his book. It’s a little-known fact that Salten followed his first Bambi book with a sequel, though the sequel was never adapted for the big screen. (Like father, like son: Bambi’s father had walked out on the family when Bambi was young.)ĥ.

At the end of the Disney film, Bambi and Faline, the love of his life, start a family together, but in Salten’s book Bambi leaves his lover and their little fawns.

This is obviously removed from the Disney film, and instead Bambi’s sidekick, the rabbit Thumper, is brought in.

At one point in Bambi: A Life in the Woods, Bambi sees a dead human body and realises that the men who are hunting him and his family are also out to destroy each other. Salten’s novel is altogether darker than the Disney film version of his book. In the original novel, Bambi walks out on his family at the end of the book.

Bambi author felix