At around the age of 20, he began a career as a journalist, which remained his staple source of income for around 50 years, according to Marcel Atze, head of the manuscripts department at Vienna City Library.

But as the exhibition makes clear, there is much more to the work of Salten than “Bambi.”īorn in 1869 in Budapest, he and his family moved to the imperial capital the following year. Given “the impression of fear, the way the animals must constantly escape,” Rovere says it is “impossible not to make the link with (Salten’s) personal experience,” living as he did through an era of rising antisemitism. “It’s a book which is deeply anchored in its time and is much more than a simple children’s story about the loss of one’s mother,” said philosopher Maxime Rovere, author of the preface to a new French edition. Storch says that while Salten himself never offered a commentary on the meaning of the book, it is a powerful evocation of the dark side of human nature and the relationship between humans and the environment. But by then, “Bambi,” along with the rest of Salten’s work, had been banned because he was Jewish, first in Germany and then in Austria after Hitler’s annexation of the country in 1938. “Of course it was made even more famous by the film adaptation in 1942,” Storch told AFP. However, in the 1930s, Salten - himself a hunter - sold the film rights for the text for $1,000 to an American producer, who in turn sold them to Disney.Īs for the book itself, “Felix Salten changed publishers and from then on it became much more successful,” said Ursula Storch, curator of the exhibition at the Wien Museum dedicated to the city’s history. Salten wrote the iconic and poignant tale of the fawn bereaved of his mother by hunters in 1922 under the title “Bambi: A Life In The Woods.” On its publication the following year, it did not enjoy immediate success among the reading public.

As a Vienna exhibition which shines a spotlight on the neglected creator shows, he was a prolific writer who moved in the same circles as the likes of Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Felix Salten was a product of the cultural blossoming in the capital of the then Austro-Hungarian empire around the turn of the 20th Century. While the 1942 Disney film “Bambi” is world famous as a classic of animated cinema, the man behind the story - an eminent writer in pre-war Vienna who had to flee the Nazis - is little known. (The Times Of Israel) Besides writing Bambi - the obscure novel upon which the Disney animated movie is based - the Jewish author Felix Salten also wrote a notorious pornographic novel about a child prostitute which was so obscene that it became illegal to even own a copy of it:

Bambi author felix