Michael Ende is a mythopoetic author whose works and created worlds transcend the boundaries of children’s literature. The legacy he left behind is still waiting to be fully discovered. His deep connection to German Romanticism on one hand, and his critique of the modern world and technology on the other, grant him a unique position in the literary world. We spoke with Birgit Dankert, a cultural expert who has written a comprehensive biography of Michael Ende and is well-known for her works and contributions to the German library system.
Could you tell us something about the life of Michael Ende? How did the fact that his father was a surrealist painter, his childhood spent in the shadow of the Nazi era, and his later work as a theater critic shape his intellectual world and literary orientation? What intellectual and personal processes were behind Ende’s turn toward children’s and youth literature?
The German contemporary history during Michael Ende’s lifetime (1929–1995) was equally defining for both his biography and his professional path as a writer. Born in 1929 in Garmisch (a well-known spa town in Bavaria/Southern Germany), he spent carefree, sheltered, and formative childhood years there and later in a suburb of the state capital, Munich. From 1935, he lived with his parents in a studio apartment in the Munich artists’ district of Schwabing. His father was the surrealist painter Edgar Ende (1901–1965), who originally came from Hamburg-Altona.
A problematic student from the start, Michael Ende attended the nearby elementary school starting in 1936. His entry into the traditional Maximilian Gymnasium in 1940 coincided with the beginning of the war, a perceptible National Socialist influence, and a growing alienation from rigorous schooling. Shaped by his parents’ political distance from the system and his father’s art theories, the early adolescent found his lived experience in the walk to school, friendships, and sexual encounters—elements recognizable in many of his prose pieces for children and adults.
His father was drafted into military service in 1941. In 1943, while staying with relatives, Michael Ende experienced the great bombing raid on Hamburg (“Operation Gomorrah”) and was later moved to Garmisch-Partenkirchen near Munich as part of the Kinderlandverschickung (evacuation of children). It was there that his writing career began, initially oriented toward school readings. After the war ended in 1945, a colleague of his father provided the reunited family with a studio apartment in Munich’s Leopoldstrasse, where Michael Ende lived until 1962.
As a young man, he was shaped by his parents’ religious and philosophical orientation within the circles of Anthroposophy and Waldorf education. He spent his final two school years (1947/1948) at the Waldorf School in Stuttgart. The cultural “re-education” facilities of the US occupation and the Stuttgart art scene pointed him toward new paths. His first poem was published in 1947 in the Eßlinger Zeitung.
Without the school-leaving certificate required for university studies, Michael Ende returned to Munich. From 1949 to 1951, he completed acting training at the renowned Otto Falckenberg School of Performing Arts in Munich. During the 1951/52 theater season, he tried his hand at a provincial theater in Northern Germany before returning to Munich, where he met his future first wife, the actress Ingeborg Hoffmann. Many of his projects were created in cooperation with her.
In the following period, Michael Ende wrote film reviews and designed and realized texts for cabaret and small stages. In 1956, he began working on the children’s book Jim Button, without intending to define himself or appear as a children’s book author. Due to the resounding success of the book (which was also adapted for other media), texts for children and young people took up an increasingly large share of his literary output. His texts for adults and discussions on literary theory accompanied these successes, though they did not represent a cohesive, interrelated unit.
The royalties from Jim Button, as well as the inheritance from his father who died in 1965, enabled him to purchase a historical building, the Altes Schloss Valley. He sold it in 1970 and acquired a house in Genzano near Rome, which became his center of life and retreat until the death of Ingeborg Hoffmann in 1985. After his father’s death, he dealt with the surrealist motifs in his father’s paintings through his writing. In rapid succession, alongside anthology contributions and picture books, he published the equally successful and partially multimedia-adapted children’s and youth texts: Das Schnurpsenbuch (1969), Momo (1973, first filmed in 1986), and finally The Neverending Story (1979, first filmed in 1984). While predominantly judged by German literary critics as non-artistic escapism, the book became a staggering success, receiving positive international acclaim. His play Die Spielverderber (The Spoil-sports) achieved at best a “respectable success” at its premiere in Heidelberg in 1967. Through Mariko Sato, he gained contact with the Japanese publishing scene and traveled to Japan for the first time in 1977. Mariko Sato became his second wife in 1989.
In 1978, in Rome, Ende made the acquaintance of the composer Wilfried Hiller, who to this day has set several of Ende’s texts as operas. Thus, in 1983, the opera Der Goggolori was premiered in Munich with a libretto by Michael Ende. In 1992, Hiller’s musical setting of the picture book The Dream-Eater (1978) was brought to the stage.
Michael Ende survived a financial crisis caused by the fraudulent activities of his asset manager in 1988/1989 with the help of Thienemann Verlag, which now holds most of the copyrights to his works. In 1994, Michael Ende was diagnosed with stomach cancer. After several unsuccessful attempts at healing, he retired to the anthroposophically managed Filderklinik near Stuttgart. He died there on August 28, 1995.
Although decades have passed since the publication of Ende’s books, they still find new readers and maintain their relevance. In your opinion, what are the essential characteristics that make his works so timeless? What are the elements that make Ende truly unique within contemporary fantasy literature?
From a young age, Michael Ende was a “man of the theater.” Whether in school plays within Waldorf education, in post-war cabaret, in processing the theater theories of the “Victorious Powers” (France and the USA), in the dramaturgy of Bertolt Brecht, or in the improvisational street theater of Palermo—he absorbed these impressions and experiences intensely as a dramaturgical school and life rhythm. Even his three great children’s and youth novels—Jim Button, Momo, and The Neverending Story—are, upon closer inspection, sequences of scenes, dramaturgically thought through down to the smallest detail. This principle is obviously timeless and can be effortlessly integrated into different eras with various time-dependent conditions and experiences.
A second factor in his obvious timelessness is the design of characters and plot, which always ensures a well-considered mix of contemporary references and characterological, often traditional literary prototypes. With this constellation, these figures “have enough to do” and are never allowed to have too much psychological depth. That depth is brought in by the reader who feels addressed. What kind of thoughtful boy is Jim Button actually? By what individual quality (beyond costume and listening) do we recognize Momo? And what about the awakening of conscience in the adolescent Bastian? The intentional, chosen “blurriness” in favor of supra-temporal validity allows everyone to interpret it for themselves. Additionally, it permits the translation of characters and plot constellations from poetry and prose into dramaturgical forms of representation. Unfortunately, one can also see this in the fact that even the most trivial forms of representation use Michael Ende’s narrative tactics and are successful—meaning they still profit from his unmatched substance.
Michael Ende’s fantasy lives from tradition, but not flatly through Romanticism or Gothic dramas. These are building blocks; they act as amplifiers for his intended narrative, which always follows its own law. For me personally, the uniqueness of his fantasy stories lies in the stupendous logical consistency of events—within a fantastic world that “actually” is not characterized by stringency. Furthermore, Ende demonstrably endeavored to avoid overt eroticism of any kind in these stories. Of course, he was well aware that precisely through this “renunciation,” such themes would repeatedly be associated by the reader—including children.
What is Michael Ende’s relationship to the heritage of German Romanticism, and how does he represent this tradition in his works?
First, it should be mentioned that Michael Ende was a connoisseur (and reader) of Romantic literature and aesthetics. Since this knowledge initially stemmed from his school education and family upbringing, it was present and available to him as an attitude, but also as a reservoir of prose. He admired the epoch and the viewpoint of Romanticism as a world model whose ideals he absorbed as one compass among others. At the same time—as with many other phenomena—he possessed an ambivalent relationship toward the Romantic era and the “romantic” feeling of life. He was aware of the “stage-set” nature of Romantic storytelling. Romantic narrative was at his disposal. He used it when it served his narrative intentions. For many years, he led a life that could and should be characterized in many respects as “romantic” (artist existence; longing for Italy). In truth, however, the Romantic model of life did not withstand his life experiences from childhood onward. It remained an ideal from which he knowingly withdrew more and more. Between Anthroposophical determination and the minimalism of Zen Buddhism—the lack of neediness he had learned from his second wife’s philosophy of life—Romanticism revealed itself as nothing more than a German model to which he nevertheless owed a great deal.
Specialist literature and journalistic studies on Michael Ende have repeatedly cited his proximity to German Romanticism, especially to Novalis. Novalis’s mirror-symmetrical image of expectation and fulfillment, and the multifaceted relationship between dream and reality, are often used to interpret The Neverending Story. Hans Heinrich Ewers cites Ende’s literary program of the “re-mythicization of society” as a reason for this proximity. Markus May also notes a closeness to Novalis, suggesting that Ende took up and updated Novalis’s “poetization” of a rational modernity.
Are Ende’s stories an escape from reality, or are they intended to offer the reader a deeper symbolic engagement?
There are few questions in post-war German literature, particularly in children’s and youth literature, that have generated such a furor—ranging from personal insults to unresolvable enmities and long-lasting injuries—as the question of the value of Michael Ende’s non-realistic prose. Therefore: I also initially considered Ende’s books to be apolitical escapism. I knew Michael Ende personally, and as a convinced “young leftist” at the time, he seemed to me a bit apolitically dreamy. In my perception, a more relaxed relationship toward this question has developed over the years among both friends and foes, from generation to generation. The author, once scolded as apolitical, very soon published and lived serious political statements, had high-ranking interlocutors, and showed meticulous knowledge of political positions in science and cultural journalism. In Japan, the home of his second wife, the reception of Michael Ende also includes respect for his philosophical stance. One does not have to use his political confessions as expert knowledge or follow them, but as the opinion of a fantasy author, they do achieve an impact. In Michael Ende’s case, there was a classic paradox to be experienced: the accusation of an author’s supposedly apolitical behavior led to the realization that it was precisely this accusation that helped him into a political role that was anything but otherworldly.