Felix Salten

Felix Salten (1869–1945) was a Viennese journalist and the author of Bambi, the story of a roe deer’s life in a European forest. He was born Siegmund Salzmann on September 6, 1869, in Pest, then part of Austria-Hungary, and died in Zürich on October 8, 1945.

The son of a Hungarian-Jewish engineer, he came to Vienna as a baby of four weeks. Money was short: at sixteen he left school without a diploma and went to work in an insurance office. He used the name Felix Salten from his first published poem in 1889; in 1911 it became his legal name. From 1890 he belonged to the Young Vienna circle at Café Griensteidl, with Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von Hofmannsthal. He was a journalist all his working life, a theater critic from 1894 and, from 1913, a writer for the Neue Freie Presse, whose Sunday feuilleton he ran from 1919.

Bambi. Eine Lebensgeschichte aus dem Walde ran in that paper in 1922 and came out as a book from Ullstein in Berlin, dated 1923. Its hero is a roe deer, and the animals call man only “He.” Salten was a hunter himself, with a hunting ground outside Vienna, and the idea came to him there. Whittaker Chambers translated the book into English in 1928. Salten sold the film rights for 1,000 dollars, and the Disney film of 1942 made the name known around the world.

He married the actress Ottilie Metzl in 1902. His books were banned in Nazi Germany in 1935. After the annexation of Austria he left in 1939 for Switzerland, where his daughter lived, on condition that he publish no journalism there.