Michael Ende

Early life

Ende was born November 12, 1929 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen (Bavaria, Germany), the only child of the surrealist painter Edgar Ende and Luise Bartholoma Ende, a physiotherapist (Coby). In 1935, when Michael was six, the Ende family moved to the "artists' quarter of Schwabing" in Munich (Haase). Growing up in this rich artistic and literary environment influenced Ende’s later writing.

In 1936 his father's work was declared "degenerate" and banned by the Nazi party, so Edgar Ende was forced to work in secret. The horrors of the second world war heavily influenced Michael Ende’s childhood. He was twelve years old when the first air raid took place above Munich.

‘Our street was consumed by flames. The fire didn’t crackle; it roared. The flames were roaring. I remember singing and careering through the blaze like a drunkard. I was in the grip of a kind of euphoria. I still don’t truly understand it, but I was almost tempted to cast myself into the fire like a moth into the light.’

He was horrified by the 1943 Hamburg Bombing (Bombing of Hamburg in World War II), which he experienced while visiting his uncle. At the first available opportunity his uncle (Edgar Ende’s brother) put him on a train back to Munich. There, Ende attended the Maximillians Gymnasium in Munich until schools were closed as the air raids intensified and pupils were evacuated. Ende returned to his birthplace of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where he was billeted in a boarding-house, ‘Haus Kramerhof’ and later in ‘Haus Roseneck’. It was there that his interest in poetry was awakened. As well as writing his own poetry, he began to study poetical movements and styles. A good deal of modern poetry was banned at the time, so he studied the Romantic poet Novalis, whose ‘Hymns to the Night’ left a great impression on him.

In 1944 Edgar Ende’s studio at no. 90 Kaulbachstrase, Munich went up in flames. Over two hundred and fifty paintings and sketches were destroyed, as well as all his prints and etchings. Ernst Buchner, Director of Public Art for Bavaria, was still in possession of a number of Ende’s paintings, and they survived the raids. After the bombing, Luise Ende was relocated to the Munich district of Solln. In 1945 Edgar Ende was taken prisoner by the Americans and released soon after the war.

In 1945, German youths as young as fourteen were drafted into the German army and sent to war against the advancing Allied armies. Three of Michael Ende’s classmates were killed on their first day of action. Ende was also drafted, but he tore up his call-up papers and joined a Bavarian resistance movement founded to sabotage the SS’s declared intention to defend Munich until the ‘bitter end’. He served as a courier for the group for the remainder of the war.

In 1946 Michael Ende’s grammar school re-opened, and he attended classes for a year, following which the financial support of family friends allowed him to complete his high-school education at a Waldorf School in Stuttgart. This seemingly charitable gesture was motivated by more self-interest: Ende had fallen in love with a girl three years his senior, and her parents funded his two-year stay in Stuttgart to keep the pair apart. It was at this time that he first began to write stories ("Michael," par. 3). He aspired to be a "dramatist," but wrote mostly short stories and poems (Haase).

During his time in Stuttgart, Ende first encountered Expressionist and Dadaist writing and began schooling himself in literature. He studied Theodor Daubler, Yvan Goll, Else Lasker-Schuler and Alfred Mombert, but his real love was the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George and Georg Trakl. He also made his first attempts at acting, performing with friends in Stuttgart’s America House. He was involved in productions of Chekhov’s one-act comedy "The Bear", in which he played the principal role, and in the German premiere of Jean Cocteau’s "Orpheus". Ende’s first play "Denn die Stunde drangt (As Time is Running Out)" dates to this period. It was dedicated to Hiroshima, and was never performed. Ende decided that he wanted to be a playwright, but financial considerations ruled out a university degree, so in 1948 he auditioned for the Otto Falckenberg School of the Performing Arts in Munich and was granted a two-year scholarship (Haase). On leaving drama school, his first job as an actor took him to a provincial theatre company in Schleswig-Holstein. The troupe travelled from town to town by bus, usually performing on makeshift stages, surrounded by beer, smoke and the clatter of skittles from nearby bowling alleys. Even the acting was a disappointment, for despite his dark curls, Michael Ende was never assigned the part of ‘heroic lover’ that he had trained for. Instead he was made to play old men and malicious schemers, and had barely enough time to memorize his lines. Despite the frustrations and disappointments of his early acting career, Ende came to value his time in the provinces as a valuable learning experience that endowed him with a practical, down-to-earth approach to his work: ‘It was a good experience, a healthy experience. Anyone interested in writing should be made to do that sort of thing. It doesn’t have to be restricted to acting. It could be any kind of practical activity like cabinet making - learning how to construct a cabinet in which the doors fit properly.’ In Ende’s view, practical training had the potential to be more useful than a literary degree.

Commercial success: writing Jim Knopf

Michael Ende often spoke of how his first novelJim Button—came into being. ‘I sat down at my desk and wrote: “The country in which the engine-driver, Luke, lived was called Morrowland. It was a rather small country.” Once I’d written the two lines, I hadn’t a clue how the third line might go. I didn’t start out with a concept or a plan - I just left myself drift from one sentence and one thought to the next. That’s how I discovered that writing could be an adventure. The story carried on growing, new characters started appearing, and to my astonishment different plotlines began to weave together. The manuscript was getting longer all the time and was already much more than a picture book. I finally wrote the last sentence ten months later, and a great stack of paper had accumulated on the desk.’ Michael Ende always said that ideas only came to him when the logic of the story required them. On some occasions he waited a long time for inspiration to arrive. At one point during the writing of Jim Button the plot reached a dead end. Jim and Luke were stuck among black rocks and their tank engine couldn’t go any further. Ende was at a loss to think of a way out of the adventure, but cutting the episode struck him as disingenuous. Three weeks later he was about to shelve the novel when suddenly he had an idea - the steam from the tank engine could freeze and cover the rocks in snow, thus saving his characters from their scrape. ‘In my case, writing is primarily a question of patience,’ he once commented. After nearly a year the five hundred pages of manuscript were complete. Over the next one-and-a-half years he sent the manuscript to ten different publishers. Each responded with a rejection slip: ‘Unsuitable for our list’ or ‘Too long for children’. In the end he began to lose hope and toyed with the idea of throwing away the script. At the time he and his future wife Ingeborg Hoffmann were in the middle of a three-month separation period designed to test the strength of their relationship. When she heard of his problems, she put an end to the separation and tried one of her contacts, Sammy Drechsel, head of cabaret group Die Namenlosen (‘The Nameless Ones’) to find a way to assist Michael to get his manuscript published. Drechsel advised her to try a small family publishing-house, K. Thienemann Verlag in Stuttgart. Michael Ende’s manuscript landed on the desk of company director Lotte Weitbrecht, who liked the story and decided to accept it. Her only stipulation was that the manuscript had to be published as two separate books.

The first of the ‘Jim Button’ novels was published in 1960. About a year later, on the morning of the announcement that his novel, Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, had won the German Prize for Children’s Fiction, Ende was being sued by his landlady for seven months' rent backpayment. With the prize money of five thousand marks, Michael Ende’s financial situation improved substantially and his writing career began in earnest. After the awards ceremony, he embarked on his first reading tour, and within a year, the first "Jim Knopf" book was also nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and received the Berlin Literary Prize for Youth Fiction. The second "Jim Knopf" novel, Jim Button and the Wild Thirteen, was published in 1962. Both books were serialized on radio and TV, and the Augsburger Puppenkiste famously adapted the novels in a version filmed by Hesse’s broadcasting corporation. The print-runs sold out so rapidly that K. Thienemanns could barely keep up. Translations into numerous foreign languages soon followed.

Relationship with Ingeborg Hoffmann

On New Year’s Eve 1952, Michael Ende met the actress Ingeborg Hoffmann during a party with friends. According to Ende, he was standing at an ivy-covered counter serving as barman, when Hoffmann strode towards him, looking ‘flame-haired, fiery and chic’. ‘Leaning up against the ivy-covered wall / Of this old terrace,’ she declaimed. ‘Morike,’ Ende said instantly, recognizing the quote. Hoffmann, eight years his senior (b. 1 July 1921) made a big impression on Ende. She in turn was intrigued by his literary cultivation and artistic inclinations. They began a relationship that led to their marriage in 1964 in Rome, Italy, and ended with Ingeborg Hoffmann’s sudden and unexpected death in 1985. Hoffmann influenced Ende profoundly. In addition to assisting with getting his first major manuscript published, she worked with him on his others, reading them and discussing them with him. Hoffman also influenced Ende's life in other ways. She encouraged Ende to join the Humanistic Union, an organization committed to furthering humanist values. Together they campaigned for human rights, protested against rearmament, and worked towards peace. Thanks to Ingeborg Hoffmann’s numerous contacts, Michael Ende was introduced to a variety of cabaret groups. In 1955, Therese Angeloff, head of Die kleinen Fische (the ‘Little Fish’ cabaret), commissioned Ende to write a piece in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Friedrich Schiller’s death. Ende produced a sketch in which a statue of Schiller was interviewed about newsworthy issues, and replied with quotes from Schiller’s work. ‘There was rapturous applause, and commissions arrived from other cabarets too.’ Michael Ende began to compose sketches, chansons and monologues.

For fourteen years, Ende and Hoffmann, who greatly admired Italian culture, lived just outside Rome in Genzano, Italy, in a house they called Casa Liocorno ("The Unicorn"). It was there that Ende wrote most of the novel Momo.

On March 27, 1985, Hoffman died unexpectedly from a pulmonary embolism; she was 63 years old. Following the death of his wife, Ende sold the home in Genzano and returned to Munich.

Mariko Sato and Japan

Even as a child Michael Ende had been fascinated by Japan. He loved Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese legends and ghost stories, and in 1959 he wrote a play inspired by Hearn’s material. Die Paonienlaterne (‘The Peony Lantern’) was written for radio, but never broadcast. Ende was primarily interested in Japan because of its radical otherness. The Japanese language and script were so different from Ende’s native German that it seemed they were grounded in a different kind of consciousness – an alternative way of seeing the world. He was particularly intrigued by the way in which everyday circumstances were shaped into intricate rituals, such as the tea ceremony. There was, he realized, a sharp contrast between the traditions of ancient Japan and its industry-oriented modern-day society.

Ende won a devoted following in Japan, and by 1993 over two million copies of Momo and The Neverending Story had been sold in Japan. Perhaps Ende’s critical treatment of modern industrial society found particular resonance in Japan. Michael Ende first met Mariko Sato in 1976. Sato had moved from Japan to Germany in 1974 and was working for the International Youth Library in Munich. After their meeting at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Sato translated some of Ende’s books into Japanese and helped answer some of his questions about Japanese culture. From 1977 to 1980 Michael Ende and Mariko Sato worked together to produce a German translation of ten fairy tales by Japanese writer Kenji Miyazawa. The German text was never published, but the working partnership turned into a friendship. Mariko Sato accompanied Michael Ende on a number of trips to Japan. The first trip took place in 1977 and included visits to Tokyo and Kyoto. For the first time Michael Ende was able to experience Kabuki and Noh theatre, and was greatly impressed by traditional Japanese drama. In 1986 Michael Ende was invited to attend the annual congress of the JBBY (Japanese Committee for International Children’s Literature) in Tokyo. He gave a lecture on ‘Eternal Child-likeness’ – the first detailed explanation of his artistic vision. 1989 marked the opening of the exhibition ‘Michael and Edgar Ende’ in Tokyo. The exhibition was subsequently shown in Otsu, Miyazaki, Nagasaki, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuyama. At the invitation of Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, Michael Ende attended the opening and spent two months touring Japan. It was his third trip accompanied by Mariko Sato, whom he married in September 1989. The following year an archive devoted to Michael Ende was established at Kurohime Dowakan, a museum in the Japanese city of Shinano-machi. Ende donated letters and other personal items to the collection. On 23 October 1992 Michael Ende made his final trip to Japan. In the course of their three-week visit Michael Ende and Mariko Sato-Ende visited the Dowakan museum, joined Ende’s Japanese publishers, Iwanami, in celebrating the millionth sale of Momo, and travelled to Kanazawa and Hamamatsu and a number of other cities that were new to Ende.

Death

In 1992, Ende was diagnosed with stomach cancer. Over the next two years he underwent various treatments, but the disease progressed. He ultimately succumbed to the disease in Filderstadt, Germany on 28 August 1995.

Selected works

Michael Ende's works include: (Note – original titles are listed in German, followed by the English translation of the title in captions. Any translations of an entire work into English are listed.)

Most of the above information was retrieved from the following sources: