Altneuland

This chapter examines Theodor Herzl’s idealistic representation of Palestine as a national home for the Jewish people in his novel Altneuland [Old New Land] (1902) through the eyes of Franz Kafka and Felix Salten. While all three writers dialogue with past, present, and future history, only Kafka’s “Jackals and Arabs” (1917) is a devastating satire of European imperialism in Palestine. Unlike Kafka, Salten knew Herzl and idolized him as a charismatic Zionist leader. Twenty years after Herzl’s death, Salten’s Bambi (1922/23) allegorically resurrects and idealizes Herzl’s leadership by fusing the legendary Herzl myth with the old (deer) King’s teachings. Bambi becomes the King’s “chosen” deer and symbolically carries on the legacy after the idolized leader dies. Salten’s hero worship in Bambi was satirized in Kafka’s “Investigations of a Dog” (1922). However, Salten never questioned his own imperialist, humanist convictions. Two years after writing Bambi, Salten visited Palestine and experienced firsthand the failed Arab-Jewish dialogue or co-existence. He did not see mild, humanist Jewish deer in Palestine, and there was no harmonious existence between Jews and Arabs. In contrast to Kafka, Salten clung to Herzl’s romantic, transnationalist, colonial myths, unwilling to critically examine the legacy of the European Enlightenment.