Ende, Michael (1929–95), internationally known German author of fantasy literature and children's books. Ende was the son of the surrealist painter Edgar Ende and spent the years 1931–43 as a child in Munich's artist district, where he came under the influence of artists and writers associated with his father. Later, through the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, he became acquainted with the anthroposophic writings of Rudolf Steiner, who had developed esoteric interpretations of German fairy tales. He also studied acting in Munich, and his interest in theatre led him to the theoretical works of Bertolt Brecht. However, he ultimately abandoned Brecht's ideas because they advocated the destruction of illusion. Instead, Ende embraced fantasy as the creative force that would drive his work.

Although Ende published in a wide range of genres—including poetry, drama, short fiction, and picture books—he is best known for his fantasy novels, which incorporate fairy‐tale structures and motifs. His first novel was published in two parts as Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer (Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver, 1960) and Jim Knopf und die Wilde 13 (Jim Button and the Wild 13, 1962). The two books chart the fairy‐tale ascent of the black foundling Jim Knopf, whose fabulous journey leads him to discover his royal identity. In the fairy‐tale novel Momo (translated into English as both Momo and The Grey Gentlemen, 1973), Ende describes a modern civilization that has been dehumanized by ‘grey gentlemen’ who have robbed people of their time. The novel's main character is a little girl named Momo, another orphan, who overturns the oppressive order of reason and technology, and restores imagination and human freedom to their rightful places.

In Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story, 1979), Ende draws on the complex, self‐reflexive fiction of the German romantics to create a book about the redemptive power of imagination and the act of reading itself. Using a frame story, Ende establishes two separate realities: the everyday world of his withdrawn juvenile hero, Bastian Balthasar Bux, and the fantasy world of the book Bastian is reading, The Neverending Story. The two worlds intersect when Bastian enters into the reality of the fantasy realm to prevent it from being lost in a void of nothingness, just as the actual reader gives life to Ende's book through an act of the imagination.

Following a German tradition that uses fairy tales to explore both social and aesthetic questions, Ende's fairy‐tale works emphasize overall the importance of play and imagination in a society otherwise governed by rationality and utilitarian forces. However, despite his belief in the redemptive power of the imagination for the individual, Ende made clear in his play Das Gauklermärchen (The Circus Clowns' Fairy Tale, 1982), that he did not envision fantasy as an effective tool for pragmatic social change.

Bibliography

• Haase, Donald, “‘Michael Ende’”, in Wolfgang D. Elfe and James Hardin (eds.), Contemporary German Fiction Writers, 2nd ser. (1988).

— Donald Haase

The Oxford Companion to Fairy Tales. Copyright © 2000, 2002, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.