How the Nazis burned the book behind Bambi: Classic was banished because its Jewish author used it to predict the Holocaust… with cruel brownshirts as the hunters

• Translation of 1923 novel by Felix Salten reveals story was never meant for kids  
• Bambi: A Life In The Woods written as allegory about anti-Semitism in Germany 
• Originals of the first edition are incredibly scarce because so many were burned 

When Walt Disney was a budding artist aged seven growing up on the family farm in rural Missouri, his older brother Roy shot a rabbit.

Young Walt was appalled. That week he had learnt to draw the farm’s wild rabbits in his first cartoon doodles, sketching their floppy ears and wide eyes peeping at him through the grass. In protest, he refused to eat the rabbit stew.

Three decades later, he created one of his best-loved animated characters — Thumper the fun-loving rabbit, who helps his pal Bambi to dodge the human hunters with their guns.

How much more horrified Walt would have been if he’d known the grim truth about Bambi. A new translation of the original 1923 novel by Felix Salten reveals the story was never meant for children.

Walt Disney created one of his best-loved animated characters — Thumper the fun-loving rabbit, who helps his pal Bambi to dodge the human hunters with their guns 

Brutal, bleak and filled with cruelty, Bambi: A Life In The Woods was written as an allegory about the rise of anti-Semitism in Germany. The hunters were thugs and brownshirts, who invaded the forest home of peaceful animals and killed in a frenzy of bloodlust.

Bambi’s best friend is his cousin, Gobo, who is shot and wounded near the beginning of the story. A man finds him and nurses him back to health, before setting him free with a collar round his neck.

Gobo believes humans are the animals’ friends, and trusts his collar to protect him from harm. Instead, it makes him an easily-spotted target for the next hunter, and he’s dead within a week.

The novel was banned on Hitler’s orders in 1936, not long after the Nazis came to power. Though it was once a bestseller, originals of the first edition are scarce because so many were burned. 

Walt Disney did not read that version. The first English translation in 1928, on which the film is based, is much gentler. The politics are downplayed, and all the emphasis is on conservation — much more likely to appeal to a family audience.

The 70-minute animated film, released in 1942 and nominated for three Oscars, was so powerful that some critics suggest it proved the trigger for the anti-hunting movement.

A new translation of the original 1923 novel by Felix Salten (pictured) reveals the story was never meant for children

No one who wept for Bambi’s mother will ever forget her death scene. Caught in the open as she grazes with her little fawn, she urges Bambi to run for the shelter of the thickets.

As two shots ring out, he makes it to safety. His forlorn cry, when she does not join him, is heart-breaking: ‘Mother? Mother!’ Encyclopedia Britannica calls it ‘an unusually tragic moment for a children’s film’ and ‘emotionally devastating for many viewers’. 

But to Professor Jack Zipes, the translator of the new edition of the book, released next month, and the world’s leading authority on literary fairytales, this hardly begins to capture the pessimism of Salten’s original.

‘The darker side of Bambi has always been there,’ Zipes says. ‘It is a book about survival in your own home. All the animals have been persecuted. And I think what shakes the reader is there are also some animals who are traitors, who help the hunters kill.’

That reflected Salten’s experience of anti-Semitism. Working in Vienna as a journalist after World War I, he changed his name from Siegmund Salzmann to make himself less conspicuously Jewish. In both Austria and Germany, Jews were being blamed for the post-war economic disaster.

In his story, even the trees are depressed. Two leaves on a branch in autumn have a doleful discussion about their fate and what will happen to them when they fall.

‘These leaves talk very seriously,’ Zipes says, ‘about really dark questions humans have. We don’t know what is going to happen to us when we die, we don’t know why we must die.’

All the characters speak with an ornate elegance, like intellectuals conversing in a Viennese cafe — the natural habitat of scientists and writers such as Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig.

This was not the side of Bambi that appealed to Disney. He purchased the story in 1937 from Sidney Franklin, head of production at MGM, who had tried and failed to shoot it as a live-action story with real animals. 

Franklin had paid just $1,000 ($20,000 today) for the film rights. The penniless Salten was living in Vienna, in fear of the looming Nazi invasion of Austria. Disney, whose studios were enjoying a huge hit with their first full-length feature, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs, wanted the animation to be as lifelike as possible.

‘To retain the charm of these creatures,’ he told his artists, ‘our animated drawings must fully capture the natural movements and attitudes of living animals.’ He believed it would give the story ‘a tremendous amount of appeal’.

At first, he sent the animators to Los Angeles Zoo, to study how deer moved. Then he had a private zoo built on the studio grounds, with two fawns named Bambi and Faline, and various other woodland creatures.

Wildlife artists were hired to give advice to the cartoonists, who also watched countless hours of live footage. Bambi himself, a European roe deer in the book, became an American white-tailed deer.

But Bambi became a classic, one of Disney’s biggest earners ever. Audiences loved it on re-release in 1947. By 2005, when the 60th anniversary ‘platinum edition’ DVD was released, the film had grossed $102 million in its lifetime. Pictured: Walt Disney 

The results thrilled Disney. When he saw an early sequence, drawn-in outlines without colouring, of Bambi meeting a butterfly, he exclaimed: ‘This is pure gold.’ The scene survived into the finished picture, as the little deer goes cross-eyed, looking at the insect that has landed on his nose.

Critics were less impressed. It took three years to finish, even with 12 minutes cut from the final script, and the budget tripled to $1.7 million ($29m today). It grossed slightly less than that at the box office, and The New York Times sniped: ‘In search for perfection, Mr Disney has come perilously close to tossing away his whole world of cartoon fantasy.’

It was denounced, too, by the hunting lobby. Outdoor Life magazine called Bambi, ‘the worst insult ever offered in any form to American sportsmen and conservationists’.

Disney was despondent. ‘When we released that picture there was a war on,’ he grumbled, ‘nobody cared about the love life of a deer.’ Coming after Fantasia and Pinocchio, which were also flops at first, it left the studio $4.3 million ($73m today) in debt.

But Bambi became a classic, one of Disney’s biggest earners ever. Audiences loved it on re-release in 1947. By 2005, when the 60th anniversary ‘platinum edition’ DVD was released, the film had grossed $102 million in its lifetime.

Felix Salten never saw a penny of that. He had sold the rights for $1,000 to the man from MGM, and that was all he ever received.

A belated court case in the 1990s over the book’s disputed copyright ended in the Disney studio’s favour. Salten did receive a bonus in 1938, though, when Disney bought another of his stories, Perri, about a squirrel. The tale became a short feature that is now quite forgotten.

Salten fled Vienna when the Germans annexed Austria that same year. He died in exile in Zurich, in 1945.

But his influence on generations of children lives on, and not only as the legacy of his bitter, morbid novel about a hunted deer.

In the 1950s, Disney bought another of his quirky animal stories, The Hound Of Florence, and based The Shaggy Dog — a live-action comedy — on it.

The real surprise of the saga, though, is what became of Bambi’s friend, Gobo — the trusting deer who thought his leather collar would protect him.

Gobo was reimagined by Disney as Bobo, a rabbit like those he’d sketched as a child on the farm. Then Bobo was renamed Thumper, the little furball who takes Bambi skating on a frozen pond and teaches us: ‘If ya can’t say something nice, don’t say nuthin’ at all.’

That’s a far cry from existential despair in the face of Nazism.

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