Renni the Rescuer
Cover of the 1941 Swiss edition.
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| Author | Felix Salten |
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| Original title | Renni der Retter: Das Leben eines Kriegshundes |
| Translator | Kenneth C. Kaufman |
| Illustrator | Philipp Arlen (Swiss ed.) Diana Thorne (U.S. ed.) |
| Country | Switzerland |
| Language | German |
| Genre | novel |
| Published | 1941 |
| Publisher | The Bobbs-Merril Company |
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Published in English
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1940 |
| Pages | 326 |
| LC Class | PZ3.S1733 |
Renni the Rescuer: A Dog of the Battlefield (German original: Renni der Retter: Das Leben eines Kriegshundes) is a 1940 war novel by Felix Salten, describing the career of a military working dog called Renni, a German Shepherd dog, and his master, Georg.
Although the book is a work of fiction, Salten did some research for it: he was allowed to follow the dog training of the Swiss army. The story is set to an unspecific German-language country, and the German-language edition opens with a note:
“The occurrences depicted in this book take place in an imaginary country. Therefore also the war events are merely imaginary shadows of a tragic reality.”
This note is missing from the English-language edition; on the other hand, the English edition has additional references to Europe, missing from the German version.
Renni the Rescuer was published in English translation in 1940 in the United States, and the original German-language edition was published in Switzerland only in 1941. The English translation is longer than the published German-language edition because Salten’s Swiss publisher removed some sequences that were considered weak. The most remarkable omissions are the following:
On the other hand, the death scene of a war horse, which takes a page in the German-language edition, has been reduced into nine lines in the English translation. Also some references to alcoholic beverages have been removed from the English translation.
The U.S. edition was illustrated by Diana Thorne and the Swiss edition by Philipp Arlen.
The novel is divided in three parts. The first part tells about Renni’s childhood and youth. The second part describes the education of Renni as a combat search and rescue dog and his first triumph at a war manoeuvre. The final part takes the main characters to a full-scale war where they become a seamless unit. At the end, both are wounded so that they have to be released from duty. So, although the book is labeled as a biography (Das Leben), it does not end with the death of the protagonist — it merely recounts the whole story of Renni’s career as a military working dog. The English-language edition adds chapter division to the book, totalling 30 chapters.
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