The concentration of literary firepower in fin de siècle Vienna has few counterparts in human history: This transitional movement headlined by Arthur Schnitzler, Karl Kraus and the Young Vienna group that gathered at the Café Griensteidl eventually birthed modernist (and difficult) classics such as Robert Musil’s “The Man Without Qualities.” It’s wonderfully ironic that the cultural production of this milieu that eventually reached the widest audience is a talking-animal story.
Felix Salten was born Siegmund Salzmann in Hungary, but his family soon moved to Vienna, where he changed his name (according to his very able translator Jack Zipes) in order to “unmark” himself as a Jew. He grew up on the edge of poverty, from which he made his escape by pursuing high art in its many forms: “He went to the theater, attended exhibits at museums and sought out places where he might meet people of culture and wealth. Young Salten became an ambitious and shrewd social climber. His greatest desire was to be recognized as a dignified Austrian, a man of culture.” In this he succeeded, becoming one of the city’s most important journalists, and also something of a hack (his other famous novel, “Josephine Mutzenbacher,” was a pornographic saga written anonymously to make money).
