Ende wrote one of the defining portal fantasies of the late 20th century, a book about the power and danger of imagination itself, and its film, TV and game adaptations made Fantastica part of 1980s pop culture.
Life
Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende was born on November 12, 1929, in Garmisch, Bavaria, the only child of the surrealist painter Edgar Ende and the physiotherapist Luise Bartholomä Ende. The family moved to Munich's artists' quarter of Schwabing when he was six. In 1936 the Nazi regime declared his father's work "degenerate art," and Edgar Ende painted in secret thereafter; bombing in 1944 destroyed more than two hundred and fifty of his paintings and sketches. Michael witnessed the air raids on Munich and Hamburg, and in 1945, when three of his classmates were killed on their first day in the Volkssturm, he tore up his own call-up papers and ran messages for a resistance group trying to stop the SS from defending Munich to the last.
After the war Ende finished school at a Waldorf school in Stuttgart, trained at the Otto Falckenberg drama school in Munich, and toured the provinces as an actor. He wrote sketches and songs for Munich cabarets and worked as a film critic. In 1964 he married the actress Ingeborg Hoffmann, his closest reader and collaborator; for fourteen years the couple lived near Rome, in Genzano, where he wrote most of Momo. After her sudden death in 1985 he returned to Munich, and in 1989 he married his Japanese translator Mariko Sato. Ende was deeply admired in Japan, where by 1993 more than two million copies of Momo and The Neverending Story had been sold. He died of stomach cancer in Filderstadt on August 28, 1995.
Work
Ende's first novel, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver (1960), was rejected by about ten publishers as too long for children before the small Stuttgart house Thienemann accepted it, on condition that it be split in two. It won the German Children's Literature Prize, rescued him from debt, and was adapted by the Augsburger Puppenkiste marionette theater. Momo (1973), about a girl who reclaims humanity's time from the gray "time thieves," won the same prize and remains a German classic.
The Neverending Story (Die unendliche Geschichte, 1979) is his masterpiece. A lonely, grieving boy, Bastian Balthasar Bux, steals a book from a Munich bookshop and hides in a school attic to read it. The book tells of Fantastica, a land being devoured by the Nothing, and of the boy warrior Atreyu's quest to heal the Childlike Empress; gradually Bastian realizes that the story knows he is reading it. The physical book was part of the fiction: the first edition was printed in red ink for the human world and green for Fantastica, and its twenty-six chapters begin with successive letters of the alphabet. After Bastian crosses into Fantastica, the second half turns darker, as each wish he makes costs him a memory, and a hero who could remake a world must learn how to leave it. Ende, who had been shaped by Novalis and Rudolf Steiner, meant it as a book about the necessity of imagination and its capacity for self-deception, for "any child between 80 and 8."
Legacy
The novel has been translated into dozens of languages; by 2010 it had sold more than eight million copies worldwide. Wolfgang Petersen's 1984 film, shot largely at Bavaria Studios in Munich on a budget of DM 60 million, reputedly the most expensive European production to that date, turned Falkor the luckdragon into an icon of 1980s Fantasy Film alongside Labyrinth and Willow. Ende hated it. The film adapted only the first half of the book and invented a new ending; when the producers refused to halt production or change the title, he sued and lost, and dismissed it as a "gigantic melodrama" of "kitsch, commerce, plush and plastic." Two sequels, a 1995 Nelvana animated series and the 2002 series Tales from the Neverending Story followed. In 2024 Michael Ende Productions and See-Saw Films announced a new series of films.
Games came quickly. Ocean Software's 1985 text adventure brought Fantastica to the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers, and a game based on the second film followed in 1990. The novel was even reviewed in White Dwarf, the British gaming magazine. More lastingly, Ende's central idea, a reader drawn bodily into a story that responds to him, is an ancestor of the Portal Fantasy and Children's & YA Fantasy that followed and a natural fit for a generation learning, around the gaming table and the home computer, what it meant to shape a story from inside it.
Marginalia
- His father, the surrealist painter Edgar Ende, had his work declared "degenerate art" by the Nazis in 1936.
- In 1945 Ende tore up his Volkssturm call-up papers and served as a courier for a resistance group in Munich.
- Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver was rejected by about ten publishers before Thienemann took it; it won the German Children's Literature Prize in 1961.
- The first edition of The Neverending Story (1979) was printed in red ink for the human world and green ink for Fantastica.
- Ende sued the makers of the 1984 film to stop production or change its title; he lost and called it a "gigantic melodrama" of kitsch and commerce.
- Ocean Software released a Neverending Story text adventure in 1985 for the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, Commodore 64 and Atari 8-bit computers.
Quick answers
- Who was Michael Ende?
- German author of The Neverending Story, a novel about a boy who reads himself into the dying land of Fantastica, and of Momo; he famously disowned the 1984 film that made his story a global childhood memory.
- When was Michael Ende born?
- Michael Ende was born in 1929 in Garmisch, Bavaria, Germany and died in 1995.
- What is Michael Ende known for?
- Michael Ende is best known for The Neverending Story.
- Why does Michael Ende matter to fantasy and games?
- Ende wrote one of the defining portal fantasies of the late 20th century, a book about the power and danger of imagination itself, and its film, TV and game adaptations made Fantastica part of 1980s pop culture.
