Columns One hundred years ago, a Jew wrote a book in anticipation of the Holocaust, scholars now say: This is why Bambi is never just Bambi

Peurat happy to eat the green grass glistening under the snow when a mother deer is startled: there is someone on the other side of the meadow! Follow the running, throwing around the forest. The little deer enters the home nest only to notice that the mother is far away, and when she turns back, finds her dead, in a blood-stained stubble.

For eighty years, children have been shocked by the death of Disney’s Bambi’s mother. Most of all, however, I remember the horror I experienced when I was reading a novel based on an animated film as a child.

In the novel, hunters are present everywhere, shooting at any time. Even more horrific is the death of Bamb’s Gobo cousin in the hands of hunters. People have taken a young deer (the wild deer in Salten’s book changed to a North American mule deer at Disney) as their pet, tied a red ribbon around their neck, and made it clear that this is safe. The young Capricorn is confident, not careful, and will be shot by a human.

Austrian Felix Salten Bambi: Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde appeared in the Neue Freie Presse as a follow-up report in 1922, between the world wars. Now, a hundred years later, the work has once again received new attention, inspired by a new English translation to be published in January.

Bambin a recent translator, Professor Emeritus of the University of Minnesota Jack Zipesin according to the novel, there is an allegory of atrocities against Jews that even foreshadows the Holocaust. The persecution of Jews and other minorities did not begin at all Adolf Hitler rise to power, Zipes recalls In an interview with The Guardian.

Bambi is the story of the loss of a parent and the growth story of a young deer.

Moreover, it is a story of a constant climate of fear, where not even your own home is a place of refuge and not all your neighbors are trustworthy. In the book, the chicks, the children, are taught to be afraid right from birth, not to move during the day, and constantly ready to flee.

Felix Salten was the grandson of a Jewish rabbi who had to flee his homeland after Nazi Germany conquered Austria in 1938. The Nazis forbade Bambin Accompanied by works by Salten and other Jewish writers in 1936.

We don’t know if Felix Salten wrote Bambiits book is deliberately a warning against the devastation of anti-Semitism, but it is timeless: even today it provides an effective picture of the dark sides of human activity and how it feels as the far right continues to rise again around the world.

Mixed book that the film is also timeless in terms of conservation and environmental awareness. For example, scientists Wesley V. Jamison and Robert M. Muth stated in 2000 In the Wildlife Society Bulletin Bambin be “possibly the most effective anti-hunting propaganda ever produced”.

We humans always tell two stories through animal stories, ours and theirs. Through animals, human experiences become more universal and take on shades that seem relevant in their allegory, George Orwellin On the animal revolution Charlotte McConaghyn To the last migratory bird.

The second question is whether Bambi and his cute animal friends benefit from acting as a human mirror.