1st Segment Bastian Balthasar Bux Bastian is a young boy around the age of ten or eleven years. He is a shy and wimpy bookworm, who gets harassed by his classmates a lot. His father barely talks to him since he has trouble getting over the death of Bastian’s mother. In the Endless Story though, he is great, strong and powerful and forgets about his former self, which gets him into huge trouble.

The Infantine Empress, the embodiment of fantasy, is the ruler of Fantastica, but she is not what you would expect from somebody with such a title. Despite being called “The Golden-eyed Arbiter of wishes”, she doesn’t rule and never makes use of her power. She never judges. Every creature is treated equally by her, no matter what their looks or characters are like. She may look like a ten years old girl, but her hair is white and she does not age. She is not a creature of Fantastica, but nothing within Fantastica could exist without her. Her vitality thrives on names. If her name is forgotten, she must urge for a new one. Otherwise she will die – and the whole of Fantastica as well.

Artréju Artréju is a member of the “Greenskins”, who live in an area known as “The Gramineous Sea”.

2nd Segment Atréju The Greenskins are a proud people of hunters and even their youngest learn to ride without a saddle. Their skin is olive-green and their hair is black as ebony. Everything they need they make from gras or the skins of the purple buffalos which travel the land of the Greenskins in big herds. Despite being only ten years old, Atréjui is named as her substitute by the Childlike Empress and also sent on “The Great Search”. Further, Atréju is Bastian’s friend and often helps him escape seeminly hopeless situations.

Falkor [COMMENT: name adopted from the existing Wikipedia entrance] Falkor is a Luckdragon, one of the rarest creatures in all of Fantastica. His pearly scales are shining rose-pink or glitter in purest white. Additionally, he has a large mane as well as fringes on his tail and other limbs. This sets him apart from “common” dragons appearing in fantasy literature, as he shares no similarities in appearance with them whatsoever. Luckdragons also do not live in dark caves, they do not hoard treasure and they do not breathe fire. They do not enjoy spreading distruction either. Instead of wings they have a very long and elegant body that is able to float through the air, rather orientated on the appearance of dragons in chinese mythology. This is also reflected in their nature; Luckdragons are creatures of untamable joy and warmth. Their natural element is air.

3rd Segment Fuchur (cont.) Despite their body size they are as light as a feather and therefore do not need wings to fly - they virtually swim through the air, like fish in the water (? not sure about the the). Another peculiarity is Fuchur's singing, which is described as "the roaring of a huge bronze bell". Whoever has heard this song will never forget it for the rest of his life. Dragons of happiness never seem to lose hope and joy; they trust in their happiness and understand all languages of joy.

History of origin and publication: In 1977, his publisher Hansjörg Weitbrecht advised Michael Ende to write a new book. Ende promised to have it finished by Christmas, but doubted to reach a page number beyond 100. Ende's leitmotif: "When reading a story, a boy literally gets into the story and finds it hard to find out again"". Thienemann-Verlag approved this concept in advance. However, it soon turned out that the material was more extensive than Ende had believed /planned?. because of this? The publication had to be postponed further and further. Ende promised that the book could be published in autumn 1979. A year before the specified /set date, he called his publisher and told him that Bastian, the main character, was determinedly refusing to leave Phantásia. (and that he ... had no choice ...) He (Michael Ende) has no choice but to accompany him on his long journey.

4th Segment Creation and publication history (cont.) Also, it wouldn’t be about an ordinary book anymore. It should be designed much more as a proper grimoire: a leather cover with nacre and brass buttons. Eventually, it was agreed upon a silk cover, the familiar bicolored print and the twenty-six vignettes for the individual chapters, which were to be designed by Roswitha Quadflieg. Thus, the costs of the book increased severely. Still, Ende was not able to move forward with his story, since at first he was missing ideas on how to get Bastian back to reality from Phantásia. In this artistic crisis one of the coldest winters Ende had ever experienced broke in. The water pipes froze, one pipe burst, the house was under water, the walls started to mold. In this difficult period the author came up with the perfect solution. AURYN, the amulet of the childish empress, itself should function as the exit out of Phantásia. That way, Ende could finally finish his book in 1979 after three years of work. The novel was released for the first time in September 1979 by publisher Thienemann. The narrative brought the author international fame. He received in succession the Buxtehuder Bull, the price of the bookworms of the ZDF, the Wilhelm-Hauff-Price for the aid of literature for children and young people, the European price for books for young people, the silver stylus of Rotterdam as well as the Grand Prix of the German Academy for literature for children and young people.

5th Segment Creation and publication history (cont.) Creation and publication history (cont.) A year after the book’s publication, the producer Bernd Eichinger attempted to acquire the rights to adapt The Neverending Story into a movie. Despite numerous letters by readers, Michael Ende eventually allowed ((said)) adaption to be made. However, during the development of a screenplay by director Wolfgang Petersen, Ende distanced himself from the movie, saying that Peterson’s screenplay had strayed too far from the source material. Ende even tried to rescind his original signing over of the movie rights, but Eichinger’s production company, Constantin Film, threatened to sue (him?) for damages. Ende’s own attempt to sue Constantin Film was denied. In the end, he had to allow the adaption to continue. He did however reserve the right to remove his name from the adaption. The movie, having cost 60 Million Dollars (dollar) to make, was finished in 1984. Ende was deeply upset by the gaudy, commercialized end product. He felt wounded in his identity as an author, artist and member of the cultural scene. Today, Michael Ende’s estate can be found in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach. The original manuscript of The Neverending Story can be viewed in the Literaturmuseum der Moderne in Marbach, as part of its permanent collection.

Editions In September 1979, Thienemann Verlag published the book, with a small initial print run of only 20.000 copies. Having garnered favorable critical reception from the start, the novel hit No. 5 on the Spiegel Bestseller List in July 1980 and stayed on the list for sixty weeks. In the following three years, there were 15 reprints of the novel, with nearly a million copies in circulation.

6th Segment Editions Until Michael Ende's death in 1995, the circulation figures had risen to 5.6 million. Thirty years after its publication, "The Neverending Story" has been translated into over 40 languages. Worldwide, its total circulation constitutes 10 million copies (40 million copies?). Usually, the book is not printed in black, but in two different colors. The red writing symbolizes story lines which take place in the human world, while the blue-green writing symbolizes the events taking place in Fantastica, the Realm of Fantasy. This kind of variation facilitates the reader's understanding of the plot, since the ten-year-old protagonist Bastian Balthasar Bux shifts in between the two worlds. "The Neverending Story" consists of 26 chapters, each one beginning with a richly adorned initial from "A" to "Z" in alphabetical order. The book's design was developed in cooperation with the illustrator Roswitha Quadflieg. The book's 2004 reprint is missing these initials as well as the green writing. Ralph Manheim's English translation of the book has a different cover design, but it does include the two-color writing as well as the alphabetically arranged initials - the translations of the first words in each chapter were therefore adapted accordingly. In 1987, the first paperback version of the book was published by dtv-Verlag, followed by "Der Niemandsgarten" in 1998 as part of the "Edition Weitbrecht" with writings from Michael Ende's unpublished works.

7th Segment Translation Auflagen (cont.) In this, you can find a novel fragment of the same name, which can be understood as a predecessor of “The Neverending Story”. As of 2004, a new edition with illustrations by Claudia Seeger has become available at Thienemann-Verlag. In addition to that, Piper-Verlag published “Aber das ist eine andere Geschichte – Das große Michael Ende Lesebuch” (eng. „But that is a different story – The big Michael Ende Reading Book”), containing the previously unpublished chapter “Bastian erlernt die Zauberkunst” (eng. “Bastian learns how to do magic”). In 2009, Piper-Verlag made „The Neverending Story” available as a paperback. Later on, Thienemann-Verlag added “The Fantastica-Lexicon” to their line of books surrounding “The Neverending Story”.

Interpretation Regarding the interpretation of „The Neverending Story”, Michael Ende didn’t want to set any limits. According to him any interpretation could be right if it is well done. However, he does have one thing to say about the story: “This is a story of a boy who loses his whole interior world, which basically is his mythical world, during the night of a crisis – a life crisis. It just disappears into nowhere and he has to face this nothing, this nowhere and that is what we as Europeans have to do. We have gotten rid of all the values we once had and now we have to face that, we have to bravely jump in in order to be able to create something again, to create a new “Fantastica” and thereby a new set of values.”

8th Segment Michael Ende has often been asked what the message of his novel is. Usually he would answer this question like he would have answered to a letter of a reader: ‘’Art and Poetry don’t explain the world, they depict it. They do not need anything that exceeds them. They themselves are goals. A good poem does not exist to improve the world – it in itself is a piece of an improved world, that is why it does not need a message. This endless searching for a message (moral, religious, practical, social, etc.) is a deplorable invention of literary professors and essayists, who otherwise would not know what to write and babble about. The works of Shakespeare, the Odyssey, One Thousand and One Nights, Don Quixote – the biggest works of literature don’t have a message. They don’t prove or disprove anything. They are something like a mountain, a lake, a deadly desert or an apple tree. People write because they think of a topic, not because one has the intention or the urge to inform the reader about some important worldview. But that, of course, depends on how the theme one comes up with interacts with the world one has created. Well, I’ve never succeeded in bringing everything that is happening in my head into one collective structure.‘’

9th Segment I neither make use of any philosophical system to answer every single of my questions, nor do I have an ideology which is fully developed – I am always on the go. There are some absolute terms which are central to me, however things are very flexible and vague towards the border of these terms. My attempt has actually never really been to address any kind of audience, instead my lines are a conversation with god in which I don’t ask him for anything (as I assume that he knows anyway what we need and if we won’t get it then there must be a good reason for it) but rather I tell him how it is to be an incapable human being among incapable human beings. I suppose that god might be interested in that since this is an experience he has never been able to make .

“The Neverending Story” is usually considered a literary fairy tale. However, it only contains few characteristics of the fairy tale-genre. Elements of the fairy tale are usually only imitated without containing a stable basis. By this means Ende replaces the secret of the world which once has been part of the myth and which also had an esthetical expression in fairy tales through the mystery of the self. While keeping the framework of a fairy tale Ende changed the content of it.

Similar twists has also been made use of in Science Fiction literature and can be seen in context of a postsmodern identity crisis.

10th Segment Natural sciences have made the world more explainable and controllable, but they don’t help in making more sense of the world. The resulting quest for meaning led to an exploration of the notion of “Inner Space” within Science Fiction. In Ende’s novel, this quest leads to a mythologisation of the “Self”. In view of this, the story’s fairy tale elements only serve the plot, while stylistically, they’re subordinate to other devices which are atypical for fairy tales. However, for the story’s plot and its purpose, the fairy tale elements are crucial and notably responsible for the novel’s massive success. “The Neverending Story” refrains from being analytical or educational, but nevertheless conveys a clear message. The novel opposes materialism and the devaluation of imagination. Michael Ende himself said: “I have searched my whole life for clues and ideas that could show us an alternative world view, in which not everything has to be proven to exist.” („Ich habe Zeit meines Lebens nach Hinweisen und Gedanken gesucht, die uns herausführen könnten aus dem Weltbild des Nur-Beweisbaren.“)

Ende promotes the scientific world to be in equilibrium with the imaginative world. The goal is to rediscover the fascination of existence, existence itself, and since all human beings once have been children themselves to give adults the chance to fall under imagination’s spell again in an intellectually impoverished world that is controlled by technology, much like it is the case within indigenous cultures.

11th Segment Ende talks about the healing of humanity, about an ideal world which he creates in the context of the classic division of good and evil. A place in which no child has to fear uncertainties of any kind. If one believes postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard, people nowadays live in a hermetical and nearly indestructible simulation of the world, in which neither up and down nor good and bad exist anymore. Instead, the world is riddled with exploitation, oppression and control of the individual. Although the situation seems hopeless, we need to do our best to improve it. What’s important is to never be on the losing side. This idea can be particular burdensome for children. Children, much like indigenous peoples, require a certain kind of enchantment that grants them hope outside of the calculated confines of logic. Ende further elaborates on this idea during a conversation with Erhard Eppler and Hanne Tächl about the socio-cultural state of the world: On the outside, we have everything, but on the inside we are no more than poor wretches. We can’t see the future or find a utopia. The modern-day human lacks a positive image of the world they’re living in: A utopia that can push back against the bleakness created by modern-day conceptions of the world. All this leads to a desperate desire for beauty and marvel shared by adults and children alike.

12th Segment Interpretations continued: The years after the war had been full of anxiousness, everything was seen in a socio-critical, political, (…) rationalistic way and these postwar years pulled people further into a spiral of negativity, rage, bitterness and moroseness. Ende defends himself against this exclusivity applied in literature and art. For him it was time to give the world its sacred secret and the people their dignity back: “The artists, poets and writers will play an important role when it comes to returning to life its magic and mystery.” The writer’s responsibilities consisted of renewing ancient values or creating new ones. Michael Ende was following this principle as well and was searching for an Utopia for society to renew its values. Like Thomas Morus’ Utopia, Ende also imagined a country that is not real: here, humanity will find its lost myths again. In doing so, he moves in a poetic landscape constructed based on the principles of the four cardinal directions: beauty, wonder, mystery and humor. Nevertheless, the mysteries of the world are revealed only to those who are willing to let themselves be transformed by them. To dive into this utopian world, Ende and his readers have to be open to free and aimless imagination.

13th Segment Interpretations continued: In his lecture in Japan, Ende illustrated how the free creative play of writing, due to its unplanned approach, becomes an adventure in itself. About the development of „The Neverending Story“, he says that he literally fought for his life with this story. If a human had not become a real adult - an unenchanted, mundane, sophisticated, crippled being, living in an unenchanted, mundane and sophisticated world of so-called facts - then the child proceeds to live within him and represents future until the last day. Ende dedicates his works to the “eternally-childlike“(?) in everyone, which is why his writings aren’t ought to be classified as children’s literature. He chose a fairy-tale novel because of artistic and poetic reasons. He says if one wanted to tell specific wonderful occurrences, they had to depict the world in such a way that such occurrences were possible and probable in it. In a television interview with Heide Adams, he claimed that if he had become a painter, he would have drawn like Marc Chagall. In Chagall‘s art, he rediscovered his way of looking at things. In their view of the world, they both hit the “sound of the eternal-childlike,“ which lets us know that everything exists. Further, that this ‘everything‘ is even more real than all the things in the secularistic reality(?).

14th Segment Interpretation (cont.) Based on this insight, Michael Ende modifies the sentence of Friedrich Nietzsche (In every man there is a hidden child, that wants to play) to his thesis: In every human being there is a hidden child, that wants to play. Ende considers art as the highest form of such play. For Michael Ende, poetry as well as the visual arts, primarily fulfill a therapeutic task because being born of the wholeness of the artist; both could return this wholeness to man. In a sick society, the poet takes on the task of a doctor who tries to cure, save and console people. But if he is a good doctor, Ende says, he will not try to teach or improve his patients. Ende has kept true to this principle. But his new myth is above all a renewal of the old. To establish that, Ende uses a variety of literary references. He uses well-known motifs and avails himself of numerous mythologies: the Greek‘s, the Roman’s and the Christian ones. The book is predominately read by adults, who may, after reading it, resolve to give greater consideration to their creative, associative and emotional side of the brain.

15th Segment The novel mainly stresses the importance of dreaming. It’s main point is to approach imagination with an open mind, as it supposedly shapes the perception of reality and thereby helps to bring something phantastical into everyday life. The ideas conveyed by The Neverending Story are the following:

1. Learning how to perceive the mundane as something magical which will eventually shape the worldview. 2. Learning how to love every human being as love is the most basic human desire.

These conclusions might be trivial, but they are reoccurring motifs and serve an important purpose in the novel. Ende believes that imaginativeness and fictional thinking are neither a good nor a bad thing but that any kind of action will be judged based on a social perception of morality. Eventually, the outcome has a positive or negative effect. Ende adduces lying as an instance. According to him, a lie equals a perverted kind of fantasy which is used to manipulate and control others. Ende adds that repetitive lying ultimately undermines any authentic type of imagination though.

16th Segment

17th Segment

The journey of the protagonist Bastian into the world of fantasy, into his own inner world, is therefore to be seen as an immersion into a forgotten reality, a “lost world of values”, as Michael Ende says himself, which needs to be rediscovered and renamed in order to become aware of it again. “Only the true name will give all creatures and things their reality”; says the childlike empress, looking for an eponym herself. Lastly, this is to be understood as an ode to love (‘’water of life’’), that, in order to grow, needs to be discovered over and over again. The human being goes on a journey of self-discovery to find his true self by letting his imagination run free; the protagonist is assigned to find and act upon his true will. The journey to Phantásien ultimately becomes a search for identity, which requires Bastian to face problems he successfully repressed for so long. In the end, Bastian succeeds in learning how to love by drinking from the waters of life; and by bringing those waters to his father, he releases him: Tears free him from the ice sheet, which held his inner life captive.

18th Segment

Full Text

Characters

Bastian Balthasar Bux

Bastian is a young boy around the age of ten or eleven years. He is a shy and wimpy bookworm, who gets harassed by his classmates a lot. His father barely talks to him since he has trouble getting over the death of Bastian’s mother. In The Neverending Story though, he is great, strong and powerful and forgets about his insecurities, which will get him into huge trouble.

The Childlike Empress

She is the embodiment of fantasy. She is the ruler of Fantastica, but she is not what you would expect from someone with such a title. Despite being called “The Golden-eyed Arbiter of wishes”, she doesn’t rule and never makes use of her power. She does not judge. She treats every creature equally, no matter what their looks or characters are like. She may look like a ten year old girl, but her hair is white and she does not age. She is not a creature of Fantastica, but nothing within Fantastica could exist without her. Her vitality thrives on names. If her name is forgotten, she must urge for a new one. Otherwise she will die – and the whole of Fantastica as well.

Artréju

Artréju is a member of the “Greenskins”, who live in an area known as “The Gramineous Sea”. The Greenskins are a group of proud hunters and even their youngest learn to ride without a saddle. Their skin is olive-green and their hair is black as ebony. They make everything they need from grass or the skins of purple buffalos which travel the land of the Greenskins in big herds. The Childlike Empress named Atréjui as her substitute, despite the fact that he is only ten years old and is, therefore, also sent on “The Great Search”. Atréju is a friend of Bastian's and often helps him escape seemingly hopeless situations.

Falkor

Falkor is a Luckdragon, one of the rarest creatures in all of Fantastica. His pearly scales are shining rose-pink or glitter in purest white. Additionally, he has a large mane as well as fringes on his tail and other limbs. This sets him apart from “common” dragons appearing in fantasy literature, as he shares no similarities in appearance with them whatsoever. Luckdragons also do not live in dark caves, they do not hoard treasure and they do not breathe fire. They do not enjoy spreading destruction either. Instead of wings they have a very long and elegant body that is able to float through the air, rather orientated on the appearance of dragons in Chinese mythology. This is also reflected in their nature; Luckdragons are creatures of untamable joy and warmth. Their natural element is air. Despite their body size they are as light as a feather and therefore do not need wings to fly - they virtually swim through the air, like fish in the water. Another peculiarity is Falkor's singing, which is described as "the roaring of a huge bronze bell". Whoever hears this song will never forget it for the rest of his life. Luckdragons never seem to lose hope and joy; they trust in their happiness and understand all languages of joy.

History of Origin and Publication:

In 1977, his publisher Hansjörg Weitbrecht advised Michael Ende to write a new book. Ende promised to have it finished by Christmas, but doubted to reach a page number beyond 100. Ende's leitmotif: "When reading a story, a boy literally gets into the story and finds it hard to find out again". Thienemann-Verlag approved this concept in advance. However, it soon turned out that the material was more extensive than Ende had planned. Because of this, the publication had to be postponed further and further. Ende promised that the book could be published in autumn 1979. A year before the set date, he called his publisher and told him that Bastian, the main character, was determinedly refusing to leave Fantastica and that he (Michael Ende) had no choice but to accompany him on his long journey. He also said it would not be an ordinary book anymore. It should be designed much more as a proper grimoire: a leather cover with nacre and brass buttons. Eventually, it was agreed upon a silk cover, the familiar bicolored print and the twenty-six vignettes for the individual chapters, which were to be designed by Roswitha Quadflieg. Thus, the costs of the book increased severely.

Still, Ende was not able to move forward with his story, since at first he was missing ideas on how to get Bastian back to reality from Fantastica. In this artistic crisis one of the coldest winters Ende had ever experienced broke in. The water pipes froze, one pipe burst, the house was under water, the walls started to mold. In this difficult period the author came up with the perfect solution. AURYN, the amulet of the Childlike Empress, itself should function as the exit out of Fantastica. That way, Ende could finally finish his book in 1979 after three years of work.

The novel was released for the first time in September 1979 by publisher Thienemann. The narrative brought the author international fame. He received the Buxtehuder Bull, the price of the bookworms of the ZDF, the Wilhelm-Hauff-Price for the aid of literature for children and young people, the European price for books for young people, the silver stylus of Rotterdam as well as the Grand Prix of the German Academy for literature for children and young people.

A year after the book’s publication, the producer Bernd Eichinger attempted to acquire the rights to adapt The Neverending Story into a movie. Despite numerous letters by readers, Michael Ende eventually allowed said adaption to be made. However, during the development of a screenplay by director Wolfgang Petersen, Ende distanced himself from the movie, saying that Peterson’s screenplay had strayed too far from the source material. Ende even tried to rescind his original signing over of the movie rights, but Eichinger’s production company, Constantin Film, threatened to sue him for damages. Ende’s own attempt to sue Constantin Film was denied. In the end, he had to allow the adaption to continue. He did however reserve the right to remove his name from the adaption.

The movie, having cost 60 Million dollars to make, was finished in 1984. Ende was deeply upset by the gaudy, commercialized end product. He felt wounded in his identity as an author, artist and member of the cultural scene.

Today, Michael Ende’s estate can be found in the Deutsche Literaturarchiv Marbach. The original manuscript of The Neverending Story can be viewed in the Literaturmuseum der Moderne in Marbach, as part of its permanent collection. Editions

In September 1979, Thienemann Verlag published the book, with a small initial print run of only 20.000 copies. Having garnered favorable critical reception from the start, the novel hit no. 5 on the Spiegel Bestseller List in July 1980 and stayed on the list for sixty weeks. In the following three years, there were 15 reprints of the novel, with nearly a million copies in circulation. Until Michael Ende's death in 1995, the circulation figures had risen to 5.6 million. Thirty years after its publication, The Neverending Story has been translated into over 40 languages. Worldwide, its total circulation constitutes 10 million copies (alternative source: 40 million copies).

Usually, the book is not printed in black, but in two different colors. The red writing symbolizes story lines which take place in the human world, while the blue-green writing symbolizes the events taking place in Fantastica, the Realm of Fantasy. This kind of variation facilitates the reader's understanding of the plot, since the ten-year-old protagonist Bastian Balthasar Bux shifts in between the two worlds.

The Neverending Story consists of 26 chapters, each one beginning with a richly adorned initial from "A" to "Z" in alphabetical order. The book's design was developed in cooperation with the illustrator Roswitha Quadflieg. The book's 2004 reprint is missing these initials as well as the green writing.

Ralph Manheim's English translation of the book has a different cover design, but it does include the two-color writing as well as the alphabetically arranged initials - the translations of the first words in each chapter were therefore adapted accordingly.

In 1987, the first paperback version of the book was published by dtv-Verlag, followed by "Der Niemandsgarten" in 1998 as part of the "Edition Weitbrecht" with writings from Michael Ende's unpublished works. In this, you can find a novel fragment of the same name, which can be understood as a predecessor of The Neverending Story. As of 2004, a new edition with illustrations by Claudia Seeger has become available at Thienemann-Verlag. In addition to that, Piper-Verlag published “Aber das ist eine andere Geschichte – Das große Michael Ende Lesebuch” (Eng. „But that is a different story – The big Michael Ende Reading Book”), containing the previously unpublished chapter “Bastian erlernt die Zauberkunst” (Eng. “Bastian learns how to do magic”). In 2009, Piper-Verlag made The Neverending Story available as a paperback. Later on, Thienemann-Verlag added The Fantastica-Lexicon to their line of books surrounding The Neverending Story.

Interpretation

Regarding the interpretation of The Neverending Story, Michael Ende didn’t want to set any limits. According to him, any interpretation could be right if it is well done. However, he does have one thing to say about the story: “This is a story of a boy who loses his whole interior world, which basically is his mythical world, during the night of a crisis – a life crisis. It just disappears into nowhere and he has to face this nothing, this nowhere and that is what we as Europeans have to do. We have gotten rid of all the values we once had and now we have to face that, we have to bravely jump in in order to be able to create something again, to create a new “Fantastica” and thereby a new set of values.”

Michael Ende has often been asked what the message of his novel is. Usually he would answer this question like he would have answered to a letter of a reader: ‘’Art and Poetry don’t explain the world, they depict it. They do not need anything that exceeds them. They themselves are goals. A good poem does not exist to improve the world – it in itself is a piece of an improved world, which is why it does not need a message. This endless searching for a message (moral, religious, practical, social, etc.) is a deplorable invention of literary professors and essayists, who otherwise would not know what to write and babble about. The works of Shakespeare, the Odyssey, One Thousand and One Nights, and Don Quixote – the biggest works of literature don’t have a message. They don’t prove or disprove anything. They are something like a mountain, a lake, a deadly desert or an apple tree.

People write because they think of a topic, not because one has the intention or the urge to inform the reader about some important worldview. But that, of course, depends on how the theme one comes up with interacts with the world one has created. Well, I’ve never succeeded in bringing everything that is happening in my head into one collective structure. I neither make use of any philosophical system to answer every single of my questions, nor do I have an ideology which is fully developed – I am always on the go. There are some absolute terms which are central to me, however things are very flexible and vague towards the border of these terms. My attempt has actually never really been to address any kind of audience, instead my lines are a conversation with god in which I don’t ask him for anything (as I assume that he knows anyway what we need and if we won’t get it then there must be a good reason for it) but rather I tell him how it is to be an incapable human being among incapable human beings. I suppose that god might be interested in that since this is an experience he has never been able to make.”

“The Neverending Story” is usually considered a literary fairy tale. However, it only contains few characteristics of the fairy tale-genre. Elements of the fairy tale are usually only imitated without containing a stable basis. By these means, Ende replaces the secret of the world which once has been part of the myth and which also had an aesthetical expression in fairy tales through the mystery of the self. While keeping the framework of a fairy tale Ende changed the content of it. Similar twists has also been made use of in Science Fiction literature and can be seen in context of a postmodern identity crisis. Natural sciences have made the world more explainable and controllable, but they don’t help in making more sense of the world. The resulting quest for meaning led to an exploration of the notion of “Inner Space” within Science Fiction. In Ende’s novel, this quest leads to a mythologisation of the “Self”.

In view of this, the story’s fairy tale elements only serve the plot, while stylistically, they’re subordinate to other devices which are atypical for fairy tales. However, for the story’s plot and its purpose, the fairy tale elements are crucial and notably responsible for the novel’s massive success.

The Neverending Story refrains from being analytical or educational, but nevertheless conveys a clear message. The novel opposes materialism and the devaluation of imagination. Michael Ende himself said: “I have searched my whole life for clues and ideas that could show us an alternative world view, in which not everything has to be proven to exist.” („Ich habe Zeit meines Lebens nach Hinweisen und Gedanken gesucht, die uns herausführen könnten aus dem Weltbild des Nur-Beweisbaren.“) Ende promotes the scientific world to be in equilibrium with the imaginative world. The goal is to rediscover the fascination of existence, existence itself, and since all human beings once have been children themselves to give adults the chance to fall under imagination’s spell again in an intellectually impoverished world that is controlled by technology, much like it is the case within indigenous cultures. Ende talks about the healing of humanity, about an ideal world which he creates in the context of the classic division of good and evil. A place in which no child has to fear uncertainties of any kind. If one believes postmodern sociologist Jean Baudrillard, people nowadays live in a hermetical and nearly indestructible simulation of the world, in which neither up and down nor good and bad exist anymore. Instead, the world is riddled with exploitation, oppression and control of the individual. Although the situation seems hopeless, we need to do our best to improve it. What’s important is to never be on the losing side. This idea can be particular burdensome for children. Children, much like indigenous peoples, require a certain kind of enchantment that grants them hope outside of the calculated confines of logic.

Ende further elaborates on this idea during a conversation with Erhard Eppler and Hanne Tächl about the socio-cultural state of the world: On the outside, we have everything, but on the inside we are no more than poor wretches. We can’t see the future or find a utopia.

The modern-day human lacks a positive image of the world they’re living in: A utopia that can push back against the bleakness created by modern-day conceptions of the world. All this leads to a desperate desire for beauty and marvel shared by adults and children alike. The years after the war had been full of anxiousness, everything was seen in a socio-critical, political, (…) rationalistic way and these postwar years pulled people further into a spiral of negativity, rage, bitterness and moroseness. Ende defends himself against this exclusivity applied in literature and art. For him it was time to give the world its sacred secret and the people their dignity back: “The artists, poets and writers will play an important role when it comes to returning to life its magic and mystery.”

The writer’s responsibilities consisted of renewing ancient values or creating new ones. Michael Ende was following this principle as well and was searching for an Utopia for society to renew its values. Like Thomas Morus’ Utopia, Ende also imagined a country that is not real: here, humanity will find its lost myths again. In doing so, he moves in a poetic landscape constructed based on the principles of the four cardinal directions: beauty, wonder, mystery and humor. Nevertheless, the mysteries of the world are revealed only to those who are willing to let themselves be transformed by them. To dive into this utopian world, Ende and his readers have to be open to free and aimless imagination.In his lecture in Japan, Ende illustrated how the free creative play of writing, due to its unplanned approach, becomes an adventure in itself. About the development of The Neverending Story, he says that he literally fought for his life with this story.

If a human had not become a real adult - an unenchanted, mundane, sophisticated, crippled being, living in an unenchanted, mundane and sophisticated world of so-called facts - then the child proceeds to live within him and represents future until the last day. Ende dedicates his works to the “eternally-childlike” in everyone, which is why his writings oughtn’t to be classified as children’s literature. He chose a fairy-tale novel because of artistic and poetic reasons. He says if one wanted to tell specific wonderful occurrences, they had to depict the world in such a way that such occurrences were possible and probable in it.

In a television interview with Heide Adams, he claimed that if he had become a painter, he would have drawn like Marc Chagall. In Chagall‘s art, he rediscovered his way of looking at things. In their view of the world, they both hit the “sound of the eternal-childlike” which lets us know that everything exists. Further, that this ‘everything’ is even more real than all the things in the secularist reality. Based on this insight, Michael Ende modifies the sentence of Friedrich Nietzsche (In every man there is a hidden child that wants to play) to his thesis: In every human being there is a hidden child that wants to play.

Ende considers art as the highest form of such play. For Michael Ende, poetry as well as the visual arts, primarily fulfill a therapeutic task because being born of the wholeness of the artist; both could return this wholeness to man. In a sick society, the poet takes on the task of a doctor who tries to cure, save and console people. But if he is a good doctor, Ende says, he will not try to teach or improve his patients. Ende has kept true to this principle. But his new myth is above all a renewal of the old. To establish that, Ende uses a variety of literary references. He uses well-known motifs and avails himself of numerous mythologies: the Greek‘s, the Roman’s and the Christian ones.

The book is predominately read by adults, who may, after reading it, resolve to give greater consideration to their creative, associative and emotional side of the brain. The novel mainly stresses the importance of dreaming. Its main point is to approach imagination with an open mind, as it supposedly shapes the perception of reality and thereby helps to bring something fantastic into everyday life. The ideas conveyed by The Neverending Story are the following: 1. Learning how to perceive the mundane as something magical which will eventually shape the worldview. 2. Learning how to love every human being as love is the most basic human desire. These conclusions might be trivial, but they are reoccurring motifs and serve an important purpose in the novel. Ende believes that imaginativeness and fictional thinking are neither a good nor a bad thing but that any kind of action will be judged based on a social perception of morality. Eventually, the outcome has a positive or negative effect. Ende adduces lying as an instance. According to him, a lie equals a perverted kind of fantasy which is used to manipulate and control others. Ende adds that repetitive lying ultimately undermines any authentic type of imagination though.

In his writings Ende puts a lot of emphasis on other issues such as the relationship between humanity and its maker: escape from reality, exercise of power, responsibility (especially responsible handling of the consequences of ones actions), selfconfidence and interpersonal relations. The silver lining of his works manifests itself in the idea that a journey into the world of phantasy can only ever lead to a positive end if it is also applied to ameliorate the real world. To this end he selected the protagonist Bastian Balthasar Bux's character traits with great care. In a letter to his publisher 1973, Ende complains about the craze for functionality in literature. In his opinion the portrayal of an entirely rational world aims to prohibit readers from exploring their own imagination. This is reflected in Bastian Balthasar Bux's incapability to cope with life: Most people's conception of the world as a purely rational and functional place does not make any sense to him. Ever since the death of his mother – an incident that neither him nor his father ever managed to process – they have been drifting apart. Because of that, Bastian finds refuge in books filled with phantasy, which create a world that appears more meaningful to him than his own

The journey of the protagonist Bastian into the world of fantasy, into his own inner world, is therefore to be seen as an immersion into a forgotten reality, a “lost world of values”, as Michael Ende says himself, which needs to be rediscovered and renamed in order to become aware of it again. “Only the true name will give all creatures and things their reality”; says the Childlike Empress, looking for an eponym herself. Lastly, this is to be understood as an ode to love (‘’water of life’’), that, in order to grow, needs to be discovered over and over again. The human being goes on a journey of self-discovery to find his true self by letting his imagination run free; the protagonist is assigned to find and act upon his true will. The journey to Fantastica repressed for so long. In the end, Bastian succeeds in learning how to love by drinking from the waters of life; and by bringing those waters to his father, he releases him: Tears free him from the ice sheet, which held his inner life captive.

The novel is an ode to the inspiring and constructive power of the imagination and its beneficial impact on reality. At the same time it discusses the dangers that come with escaping into one’s own imagination

Comments:

-Question for 2nd paragraph: [...she is not what you would expect from somebody with such a title.] doesn't it have to be someone because we refer to a specific person? -3rd paragraph: [The Greenskins are a proud people of hunters and even their youngest learn to ride without a saddle.] I would reformulate the first half of the sentence to "The Greenskins are proud hunters" or "The Greenskins are a group of proud hunters" [Everything they need they make from grass or the skins of the purple buffalos ] Weird syntax, "They make everything they need from grass or the skins of purple buffalos" [Atréjui is named as her substitute by the Childlike Empress] Maybe "The Childlike Empress named Atréjui as her substitute"? -4th paragraph: [they do not hoard treasure] to hoard sth implies that one has gathered multiple things-> paradoxical word choice, has to be "they do not hoard treasures" with the plural 's

I very much agree with the Greenskins/Atreju substitute - part. The syntax seems a bit weird... I like the suggestions above. I also agree that “treasure” probably needs the plural “s“.

Part 1: In the Endless Story though, he is great, strong and powerful and forgets about his former self, which gets him into huge trouble. - Maybe something like his “insecurities” or “shortcomings" instead of "former self"? Also: “which eventually gets him into trouble“ ? To me it sounds like there is something missing concerning temporalisation

Every creature is treated equally by her - “She treats every creature the same“ or something like that? subject/ object need to be switched