Deer Diary. Bambi and Josephine Mutzenbacher.

When I came home from the conference in Lüneburg, which ended with a lecture by a philosopher and behavioural scientist, who actually sang half of his lecture, spontaneously bursting into song, serenading tropical birds and their ritualistic synchronicities, I found a package containing a volume of Felix Salten’s 1923 novel Bambi, a Life in the Woods in the mail. The story behind this is that two weeks ago, I was having dinner with my best friend Patrick and my father, who was visiting Berlin. Patrick, who is an anesthesiologist by day, moonlights as a “homme de lettres”, sea captain, and most recently, as a hunter. We were discussing what we would cook for my father’s birthday dinner the next day and Patrick generously offered us a haunch of a fallow deer he had recently hunted. More precisely, a mother deer and its son. My father (who later mailed me the book) and he then went on to discuss – much to my surprise – the novel Bambi, which was later adapted, as we all know, but I didn’t, by Walt Disney in 1942.

Salten was born Siegmund Salzmann in Budapest in 1869, and his family relocated to Vienna when he was four weeks old. Still at a relatively young age, he became an integral part of Vienna’s public intellectual circles and was a prolific writer and editor, among other’s for B.Z. am Mittag, Berliner Morgenpost, Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, and filled Arthur Schnitzler’s post as the president of the Austrian P.E.N. Club. He published one book a year, on average, besides his journalistic work. Bambi was an instant hit and translated into English in 1928. As the climate for Jews got more and more perilous in the 1930s, Bambi  was banned in 1936 as a “political allegory of the treatment of the Jews in Europe” and many copies of it burned. A reviewer in the Wall Street Journal considered it an “anti-fascist allegory” and sarcastically noted that “you’ll find it in the children’s section at the library, a perfect place for this 293-page volume, packed as it is with blood-and-guts action, sexual conquest and betrayal” and “a forest full of cutthroats and miscreants. I count at least six murderers (including three child-killers) among Bambi’s associates.”

Salten himself fled to Switzerland, where he lived until his death in 1945. There is some dispute to it, but he is also generally regarded as the author of the erotic novel Josephine Mutzenbacher of 1906. 

The goulash, by the way, was delicious. Ask me for the recipe. We’re having a different part, this time of Bambi’s mother, tonight at Patrick’s place.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTZPMJj-X9M