Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde
or, Disney does a morality play.
Ya’ll remember Bambi, right? That sweet Disney movie that traumatized me as a five year old. Darling Bambi, running ahead of his mother, trying to escape Man, the Hunter. He made it home free, and then turned to look for his mother. She was gone. Oh. My. God. I had to be carried from the theater, wailing.
Coming onto Christmas every year, I think about Bambi. Maybe it’s because I remember Bambi’s first winter and his wonder and utter delight at the sight of snow.
You know, some historians have speculated that the author, Felix Salten, an Austrian Jew, wrote Bambi as a secret political treatise criticizing the political oppression of his day. I disagree. Bambi was first published in 1923, a full ten years before Hitler came to power, during a time when the Jews of Austria had full citizenship.
Other historians have called the book the first environmental novel. Again, I disagree. There’s no science in the book. The story is told from the point of view of the forest’s inhabitants like a fable, like an Aesop’s Fable. It’s pretty dark, even darker than the movie which I think is damn dark, especially for a kid’s movie.
No, I suspect Salten wrote the book because he loved animals and nature, and frankly, the man probably opposed hunting. The book made quite a stir when it was released, becoming immensely popular all over Europe and the United States…until 1936 when the Nazis banned it because Hitler believed the first reason to be true - that Salten had written Bambi as a political allegory about the Nazi treatment of Jews. They burned all the copies they could find. Damn those Nazis!
Anywho, Salten managed to escape to Switzerland, where he stayed out of Nazi hands and wrote a sequel to Bambi. He died April 8, 1945.
Aren’t you glad you tuned in for this uplifting post? Well, I think about a lot of random stuff at Christmas time, being Jewish and all - with a Christmas tree sitting in my living room - now that’s an interesting German tradition related to the old Norse gods, but I’ll save it for another post!
