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Creator / Michael Ende

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Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende (12 November 1929 – 28 August 1995) was a German fantasy writer, best known in the English-speaking world for The Neverending Story.

His other novels include Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver and its sequel, Jim Button and the Wild 13, Momo, which offers a whimsical answer to the question "Why is it, when I have all these time-saving devices, I still never have any free time?", and The Night of Wishes, a wordplayful comic novel.

He Also Did some other stuff, like translating Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark in German.

When he was alive, many left-leaning critics criticized him for writing escapist and unpolitical novels, which was completely missing the point and utterly inaccurate. Jim Button, for example, contains many, many hidden metaphors for fascism in general and the Third Reich in particular. note  This also had a curious effect in that the other side of the spectrum would accuse him of being too political!


Works by Michael Ende with their own trope pages include:

Works by Michael Ende provide examples of:

  • Disowned Adaptation: He was not fond one bit of the 1984 film adaptation of The Neverending Story to the point of (unsuccessfully) suing the production to have his name removed from it. It's probably better not to ask what he thought of the other two films, given that the first one was ironically far more faithful to the book in comparison.
  • Full-Circle Revolution: Mirror in the Mirror contains a short storynote  from the point of view of a tyrant who used to be a revolutionary, while being chased through his crumbling palace by the men seeking to overthrow him.
  • Meaningful Name: Quite a few across his works.

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