Felix Salten

Origins and early life

Felix Salten was born Siegmund Salzmann in Pest on 6 September 1869, the grandson of an Orthodox rabbi, into a Jewish family that moved to Vienna a month after his birth and lost its money there; he left school at sixteen to work in an insurance office and never abandoned the Judaism he was born into, speaking from Zionist platforms beside Martin Buber from 1909 and travelling to Palestine in 1924, a journey he described in New People on Old Soil.

Work and career

He made himself a writer in the cafés of Vienna, one of the Young Vienna circle with Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal, a prolific journalist, critic and novelist, president of the Austrian PEN Club from 1927 to 1933. In 1923 he published Bambi, a Life in the Woods, the story of a roe deer's growing up in a forest where man is death, which Walt Disney made into the film of 1942 that fixed the fawn in the world's memory — and whose rights Salten had sold for a thousand dollars; the book, read in America as a children's classic, has been read in Vienna as a parable of the hunted Jew, and the Nazis banned it in 1936.

This fiche also records the attribution to him, widely accepted but never proved, of the anonymous erotic novel Josefine Mutzenbacher of 1906. Expelled from Germany's literary market after 1933 and from Austria after the Anschluss, he was allowed to emigrate to Zurich in 1939, and died there on 8 October 1945.