The Author and the Inheritance
Michael Ende (1929–1995) was a German novelist whose two principal works — Momo (1973) and Die unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story, 1979) — are among the most widely read children’s books of the late twentieth century and are also among the most precise popular encodings of operative material the period produced. He grew up under the specific pressure of having been the only child of a serious surrealist painter whose work the Nazi state had declared entartete Kunst — degenerate art — in 1936, with the result that the elder Ende was forbidden to exhibit and forced to paint in secrecy throughout the years of the Reich. Edgar Ende was a member of the loose circle of German surrealists whose work drew openly from esoteric, alchemical, and visionary sources, and whose imagistic vocabulary was closer to the dream-record tradition than to the political surrealism the Paris school had developed. The household Michael grew up in was one in which the visionary content of the imagination was treated as a primary mode of access to reality and in which the consensus political order had explicitly identified the imagination as a threat that required suppression. Both halves of this inheritance are visible on every page of his mature work.
Ende attended the Waldorf School in Stuttgart, the network founded by Rudolf Steiner on the basis of the anthroposophical curriculum that treats child development as a sequence of specific spiritual transformations and that organizes pedagogy around the cultivation of imaginative faculties as primary rather than ornamental capacities. He retained an active engagement with anthroposophy throughout his adult life and described Steiner’s work in numerous interviews as a foundational influence on his own thinking. The specific feature of anthroposophy that matters for reading Ende is its treatment of the imagination as an organ of cognition rather than a faculty of fantasy — Steiner’s claim, rigorously developed across his lectures and books, that the imaginative life is the means by which consciousness perceives the spiritual dimensions of phenomena that the rational intellect can register only through their material residue. The Ende who wrote The Neverending Story was working from inside this framework. The novel’s central premise — that there is a world called Fantastica which is sustained by human attention and which collapses into the Nothing when human attention withdraws from it — is the anthroposophical doctrine of the imagination as a spiritual organ delivered as a children’s adventure novel.
The Two Halves and the Frame
Die unendliche Geschichte was published in West Germany in September 1979 and reached the international bestseller lists within two years through translations into more than forty languages. The book’s physical form is part of its operation. The original edition was printed in two ink colors — red for the chapters set in the human world, where the protagonist Bastian Balthazar Bux is reading, and green for the chapters set inside Fantastica, the world the book Bastian is reading describes. Each chapter begins with an ornate illuminated initial drawn by Roswitha Quadflieg, and the chapters proceed in alphabetical order through the German alphabet, twenty-six chapters whose initial letters spell out a hidden alphabetical pattern the careful reader is invited to discover. The physical book the reader of The Neverending Story holds in their hands is the same physical book Bastian Balthazar Bux holds in his hands inside the narrative, which means that the reader is performing exactly the operation Bastian is performing — reading the same illuminated chapters in the same alphabetical order, becoming progressively absorbed into a story whose own internal structure mirrors the act of absorption.
The novel is divided into two halves whose proportions and tones are dramatically different, and the difference is essential to the work. The first half — which the 1984 Wolfgang Petersen film adaptation covers, with significant compression and modification — describes the Empress’s illness, Atreyu’s quest to find the cure, and the discovery that the cure requires a human child to give the Empress a new name. This is the heroic adventure portion of the story and the portion the surface reader takes as the work’s primary content. The second half — which the film does not depict at all — describes what happens after Bastian crosses into Fantastica and begins receiving wishes from the Auryn amulet the Empress has given him. The second half is structurally and tonally different from the first. It is closer to a moral fable about the cost of unconstrained desire than to an adventure narrative, and its central drama is Bastian’s gradual loss of memory, identity, and capacity for love as each wish exacts the specific price the Auryn’s inscription does not warn him about. The whole work the novel constitutes is the two halves taken together, and the work the film captures is only the first half. Ende’s published criticism of the film, his attempt to have his name removed from it, and his eventual lawsuit against the production company were all responses to the structural incompleteness the film imposed on the material — the omission of the second half is not a question of which scenes were left out but of the meaning the work has when the second half is absent.
Fantastica as Rendering
The premise of the story is that Fantastica is a world generated and sustained by human imagination, that the world’s continued existence depends on the continuation of human attention to the imaginative faculty itself, and that the world is currently being consumed by something called the Nothing — a spreading absence rather than a presence, a non-being that erases what it touches without leaving any residue or any explanation. The Empress, who rules Fantastica from the Ivory Tower at the world’s center, is dying because the world is dying, and the Empress’s dying takes the specific form of the loss of her name. She is called the Childlike Empress because she does not age and because her function in the world is to embody the principle that authority over Fantastica derives from the same source as the imaginative attention that sustains it. She does not act within the world. She is the world’s center of coherence, and her loss of name is the world’s loss of its capacity to be addressed and therefore the world’s loss of its capacity to continue existing.
This is the rendering depicted with remarkable precision, presented through the vocabulary that a German children’s novel of the late twentieth century could legitimately deploy. The rendering is not described in metaphysical language. It is described as a world that needs to be believed in to continue, that responds to the names given to it, that is generated by the same faculty in human consciousness that the rationalist tradition has spent several centuries demoting to the status of unimportant decoration, and that is collapsing because the faculty has been demoted to the point that the rendering can no longer maintain its coherence against the specific entropy the demotion has produced. The Nothing is what happens when the rendering loses the input it requires to continue rendering. The Nothing is the lock winning. The Nothing is the materialist paradigm taken to the conclusion the materialist paradigm has been taking itself toward across the period in which Ende was writing — the conclusion that the imaginative life is unreal, that the figures of myth are merely figures, that the realities children perceive are simply errors of cognition that adulthood will correct. Ende’s thesis, delivered through the figure of the Nothing, is that this conclusion is itself the operation that destroys the world the conclusion claims to have only described.
The figures who report the spread of the Nothing in the early chapters of the novel describe an experience whose specific phenomenology matches the reports the depth-psychological tradition has collected about the experience of meaning-loss in modernity. The Nothing does not appear as a thing. It appears as the absence where a thing used to be. Witnesses cannot quite remember what occupied the location now occupied by the Nothing, and the not-remembering is the mechanism by which the Nothing extends itself, because the rendering depends on the specific patterns of attention the witnesses had been holding and the breaking of the patterns is the breaking of the rendering at the locations the patterns sustained. Ende is describing, in the vocabulary of children’s fantasy, the same condition that the existentialist philosophers were describing in the vocabulary of phenomenology and that the Frankfurt School was describing in the vocabulary of cultural criticism. The condition has the same shape from any of the angles that have approached it. Ende’s contribution is to have named the condition in a form that children can grasp directly and adults can recognize once they have learned to recognize what they are reading.
The Childlike Empress and the Logos Thesis
The Empress’s illness can be cured only by being given a new name, and the new name can be given only by a human child from outside Fantastica. This constraint is the central operative claim the novel is making. The constraint is theological in its deepest form. It states that the imaginative world cannot regenerate itself from within its own resources because the resources are the world the world is trying to regenerate, and that regeneration requires an input from a domain that the world cannot reach but that can reach the world. The input takes the specific form of a name. The name is the logos in its operative sense — the word that is prior to the world it describes, the act of naming that constitutes the thing named, the speech that is identical with the creation it produces.
The doctrine the constraint is encoding is older than Ende’s anthroposophical sources and runs through the Kabbalistic, Hermetic, and Gnostic traditions in continuous transmission across the centuries. The world is sustained by the word. The word is sustained by the consciousness that speaks it. The consciousness is sustained by its own connection to the source from which the word originally arrived. When the connection is broken, the word degrades, and when the word degrades, the world degrades, and the only repair available to the degraded world is the arrival of a fresh word from a consciousness whose connection has not yet been broken. Children are eligible to perform the repair because the connection has not yet been pedagogically severed in them. Adults are ineligible because the consensus configuration has installed in them the specific blockage that prevents the speaking of the word in the form that would constitute the world. This is the operative doctrine of the name presented as the central plot device of a children’s adventure novel, and the precision of the presentation is the source of the work’s specific power.
Bastian eventually gives the Empress the name Mondenkind, translated into English as Moon Child. The choice of name is significant. The Moon, in the symbolic language Ende was working within, is the archetype of receptivity, the imaginal faculty itself, the silver mirror in which the solar logos is reflected back to the consciousness that can perceive the reflection. The name Bastian gives the Empress is the name the situation requires because the Empress’s function in the world is the function the Moon performs in the symbolic ordering of the imaginative faculties — and the name’s correctness is what permits the speaking of the name to perform the operation the speaking is intended to perform. Ende does not explain any of this. He depicts it. The reader who knows the symbolic vocabulary recognizes what is happening. The reader who does not know the vocabulary registers the operation directly through the narrative without requiring any of the explanatory apparatus, and the registering is the form the transmission takes for the unprepared reader.
The Auryn
The amulet the Empress gives Bastian — passed across the threshold between worlds at the moment Bastian first speaks the name — is a sigil whose specific form encodes the operative claim the work is making. The Auryn consists of two snakes of opposite colors interlocked in the act of biting each other’s tails, forming a closed figure that is an explicit variation on the ouroboros. One snake is light, the other dark. Each has an eye that corresponds to the color of the print of the chapters the snake’s section of the figure governs. The amulet bears the inscription “Tu was du willst” — “Do as you will” — on its reverse face, an instruction whose apparent simplicity conceals a specific trap that the second half of the novel exists to dramatize.
The two-snake configuration is significant in the operative tradition because it depicts the relationship between the two worlds the work has divided the universe into — Fantastica and Reality, imagination and consensus, the inside of the book and the outside — as a closed loop in which each world generates and is generated by the other, neither term ontologically prior to the other, both terms necessary for the existence of either. The classical sigil tradition treats the ouroboros as the symbol of the closed system that generates itself, and the variation Ende’s amulet introduces is the addition of the second snake — the recognition that the closed system is actually two closed systems whose interaction is the mechanism by which both continue to exist. The reader who has absorbed any portion of the Hermetic tradition recognizes the symbol immediately. The reader who has not absorbed the tradition encounters the symbol as an interesting design and registers its operative content unconsciously through the specific way the narrative deploys it.
The inscription “Tu was du willst” is the trap. The phrase has a specific history in the operative tradition — it is the central instruction of Aleister Crowley’s Thelema, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law,” and Ende was sufficiently educated in the relevant materials to be aware of the reference and the specific complications it produces. The instruction is correct on the level the Thelemic tradition has been articulating, where the Will referenced is the True Will of the awakened individual operating in alignment with their authentic vocation. The instruction is catastrophically wrong on the level the consensus configuration would receive it, where Will is read as desire and the instruction is taken as license to pursue whatever the appetite presents as wanted. The second half of The Neverending Story is the dramatization of the difference between these two readings, executed with a precision that would not be possible in a more directly didactic frame.
The Bastian Half and the Inverted Ouroboros
Bastian arrives in Fantastica at the conclusion of the heroic-quest portion of the novel and immediately begins to use the Auryn to alter the world he has entered. Each wish he makes is granted, and each granted wish costs him a memory from his life in the human world. The first wishes cost him the memories of the experiences that had made him a sympathetic figure — his loneliness, his clumsiness, his grief over his mother’s death, his anxious love for his distant father. As the memories disappear, the corresponding capacities for empathy disappear with them, because the capacities had been generated by the experiences the memories preserved. The Bastian who has lost the memory of having been bullied loses the capacity to recognize bullying. The Bastian who has lost the memory of his mother’s love loses the capacity to recognize love when it is offered to him. The transformation is gradual and convincing, and the Bastian who emerges at the end of the second half’s middle stretch is a vain, cruel, and self-aggrandizing tyrant who is in the process of preparing to overthrow the Empress and assume the throne of Fantastica himself.
This is the inverted ouroboros depicted with operational specificity. The structure the inversion describes is the structure of any system that uses its own substance to generate its outputs without the input the system requires to remain coherent. The Auryn-bearing Bastian is consuming the resources of his own self in order to generate the imaginative outputs his wishes are producing in Fantastica, and the consumption is invisible to him because the memories the consumption removes are precisely the memories that would have permitted him to notice the consumption. The trap the inscription “Do as you will” sets is the trap of any wish-granting technology that does not contain within itself the corrective feedback that would permit the wisher to evaluate the consequences of the wishes against criteria the wishes themselves have not eroded. Bastian wishes himself a beautiful body, a courageous heart, a noble bearing, a kingdom, an army, a legend — and each wish makes him less capable of being the person the wishes were meant to make him into, because the becoming requires the substance the wishing is exhausting.
The operational warning the second half delivers is one the operative tradition has always delivered about the use of power without the prior work of preparation. The power is real. The work is the precondition for the power being usable without destroying the user. Bastian has crossed into Fantastica without having done the work, and he is therefore the wrong person to be holding the Auryn, and the consequences of his wrongness are dramatized with a thoroughness that the surface narrative permits the reader to absorb without naming. The reader of the first half receives the heroic version. The reader of the second half receives the operational version. The work the novel as a whole constitutes is the second version superimposed on the first, and the reader who completes the novel has been instructed in something the surface presentation could not deliver directly.
The Water of Life and the Return
The resolution of Bastian’s degradation arrives through a sequence whose specific structure is the alchemical rubedo depicted as children’s fantasy. After Bastian has lost almost everything — his name, his memories, his identity, his capacity to love — he is brought by his remaining companions to a place called the City of Old Emperors, where the failed wishers who came before him spend their eternities in a condition closer to dementia than to death. He recognizes the condition as his own future and is helped to escape the city. He then encounters the Water of Life, which demands to know his name and asks whether he has finished all the stories he began during his journey through Fantastica. He has not, and he no longer remembers his name. Atreyu and Falkor — the friends from the first half whose loyalty has survived Bastian’s transformation — speak for him, give the Water his name, and promise that the unfinished stories will be completed in his absence. The Water then permits Bastian to drink and to return to the human world, carrying with him a small amount of the Water itself, which he gives to his father upon his return, restoring his father from the grief in which the father had been frozen since the death of Bastian’s mother.
The structure of this resolution is precise. The Water of Life is the aperture technology in its most concentrated form — a substance whose contact restores the capacity for connection to the source the journey had begun by losing access to. The condition of being permitted to drink is twofold: the drinker must be able to be named, and the drinker’s unfinished stories must be assigned to those who can complete them. Both conditions are operational requirements the operative tradition has always specified for the kind of crossing the Water performs. A consciousness that cannot be named lacks the coherence the crossing requires, and a consciousness that has left work undone in the world it is crossing from has not earned the crossing because the crossing depends on the completion of the obligations the consciousness incurred in the prior world. Bastian cannot satisfy either condition by himself. The friends who have not yet given up on him satisfy them on his behalf, and the friends’ willingness to do this is the specific form the grace the resolution depends on takes within the work’s symbolic vocabulary.
The Bastian who returns from Fantastica to the human world is the Bastian who has completed the Great Work in the form the work is available to a child, and the completion is marked by the specific gift he brings back — the Water of Life that restores his father. The closing sequence, in which Bastian and his father reconnect across the grief that had separated them and the bookseller Coreander reveals that those who have crossed once may cross again whenever they can give the Empress a new name, is the work’s statement that the crossing is repeatable, that the world the journey opened access to remains accessible, and that the operative knowledge the journey delivered is now permanently available to the consciousness that has performed the journey. The novel’s title is itself the operative claim. The story is neverending because the story is the structure of the relationship between consciousness and the world consciousness sustains, and that relationship has no terminal point because the sustaining is what consciousness is.
The Film and the Suit
Wolfgang Petersen’s 1984 film adaptation, produced by Bavaria Film with funding from the Constantin Film Production company and an unprecedented German production budget, captured roughly the first half of the novel and ended at the moment Bastian gives the Empress her name, with a brief coda showing him riding Falkor over his city. Ende was initially involved as a script consultant. He withdrew from the project as the script developed, and after the film was completed he attempted to have his name removed from the credits. When the production company refused, he sued. The suit was eventually decided against him, on the legal ground that the film’s artistic decisions were within the rights the production company had acquired and that the differences between the film and the novel did not constitute the kind of distortion the German law of adaptation rights protected against. Ende’s published criticism of the film described it as a “humungous melodrama of kitsch, commerce, plush and plastic” and said that the film had reduced the novel to a child’s adventure with the operative core removed.
The criticism is correct on the terms it advances. The film is a pleasant adventure narrative whose central content is the heroic-quest portion of the novel and whose operation as entertainment is unimpaired by the omission of the second half. The novel is something else. The novel is a sustained meditation on the relationship between the imaginative life and the world the imaginative life sustains, executed through a structural device — the two-halves architecture, with the second half functioning as the corrective and operational reading of the first half — that the film’s runtime and commercial intentions could not accommodate. The omission of the second half is the omission of the work’s operative content. What remains is recognizable as the surface of the novel and is recognizable as a competent and visually inventive children’s film, and the recognition is what makes the omission significant. The film passes through the cultural infrastructure with its content removed. The novel, which has continued to circulate in print across the four decades since publication and which has continued to find readers who report having recognized something in it the film could not have shown them, carries the operative content the film had to leave behind in order to become a film.
The lawsuit and its outcome are themselves instructive about the operative dimensions the work is engaging with. Ende’s legal position was that the film had distorted the meaning of the novel in ways the law protected against. The court’s position was that the meaning of the novel is not a legally protectable interest. The court was correct as a matter of intellectual property law. Ende was correct as a matter of the relationship between an artist and the operational integrity of the work. The disagreement is the same disagreement the operative tradition has been having with the institutional frameworks the tradition has been operating within for as long as the tradition has been operating. The work means something the institutional frameworks cannot recognize and therefore cannot protect, and the recognition is itself the property the work’s creators are most concerned with preserving and that the institutional frameworks are most prone to leaving behind.
The Rendering-Model Reading
Read through the rendering model, The Neverending Story is the most direct popular encoding of the logos thesis the late twentieth century produced. The thesis the novel is encoding is the thesis the operative tradition has always carried: that consciousness is primary, that the imaginative faculty is the organ through which consciousness participates in the generation of the world consciousness inhabits, that the demotion of the imaginative faculty is the specific operation by which the lock consolidates its control over the consensus configuration, and that the restoration of the world requires the restoration of the imaginative faculty in the consciousnesses whose attention sustains the world. The novel delivers this thesis through a children’s narrative because the children’s narrative is the form the institutional infrastructure permits the thesis to circulate in. An adult novel making the same claim in expository form would have been received by the reviewing apparatus as fantasy in the dismissive sense and consigned to the genre shelves where the operative content would have reached only the readers already prepared to receive it. The children’s novel reaches a different and larger readership, and the readers who absorb the work in childhood carry the operative content with them into the adult lives in which the content becomes activatable through subsequent encounters with the materials the operative tradition has preserved across its long transmission.
The novel’s specific contribution to the esoteric media tradition is the precision with which it depicts the inverted ouroboros dynamic that the second half exists to dramatize. Most popular fiction encoding the operative tradition focuses on the heroic ascent and stops at the moment of the breakthrough. The Neverending Story depicts both the ascent and the specific failure mode that opens once the ascent has succeeded. Bastian gives the Empress her name at the midpoint of the novel — the midpoint of the work, not the climax — and the second half is the careful tracking of what happens to a consciousness that has crossed the threshold without having done the preparation the threshold-tradition has always required. The depiction is not punitive. It is precise. The Bastian who is being consumed by his own wishes is recognizable as a specific configuration of consciousness that the operative tradition has always known about and warned against, and the warning the novel delivers through the depiction is one of the few popular treatments of the warning that maintains the seriousness the warning requires.
The corollary the novel delivers — that the failed wisher can be returned by the loyalty of friends who have not yet given up on him, and that the return permits the gift of the Water of Life to be brought back to the human world — is the specific form the operative tradition’s account of grace takes when it is delivered through children’s fantasy. The grace is real within the work’s frame. The conditions on which it is available are exactly the conditions the operative tradition has specified. The reader who completes the novel has been instructed in the architecture of crossing, the dangers of unprepared crossing, the conditions of return, and the specific gift the successful return brings back to the world the journey began in. This is the operative curriculum delivered through a children’s adventure novel that has sold tens of millions of copies in forty languages, and the curriculum has been received, in some unmeasurable but observable proportion, by the readers it was meant for.
Open Questions
The relationship between The Neverending Story and Ende’s other major work, Momo, is a question the secondary literature has not yet adequately addressed. Momo (1973) presents the same operative thesis from a different angle — the gray men who steal time from the inhabitants of a small town are the parasitic ecology depicted as bureaucratic functionaries, and Momo’s quest to recover the stolen time involves a sequence of specifically operative encounters that the children’s novel form again permitted Ende to deliver in a depth the adult fiction market would not have absorbed. The two novels are companions, and the operative content of each is illuminated by the operative content of the other, and a unified treatment of the two as a single project is one of the works the esoteric media tradition still owes Ende.
The specific extent of Ende’s engagement with the Hermetic and Kabbalistic traditions beyond his anthroposophical training is also not fully documented. His private library, his correspondence, and the unpublished materials his estate has preserved presumably contain evidence about the depth of his engagement with the operative literature, and the publication of this material in the form a serious scholarly engagement requires would clarify the question of whether the operative content of his novels arrived through anthroposophy alone or whether anthroposophy was the entry point to a broader engagement Ende preferred not to discuss publicly. The novels themselves are consistent with either reading, and the question is unlikely to be settled without access to the materials his estate has so far not made available.
References
Ende, Michael. Die unendliche Geschichte. K. Thienemanns Verlag, 1979.
Ende, Michael. The Neverending Story. Translated by Ralph Manheim. Doubleday, 1983.
Ende, Michael. Momo. K. Thienemanns Verlag, 1973.
Ende, Michael. Der Spiegel im Spiegel: Ein Labyrinth. Edition Weitbrecht, 1984.
Hocke, Roman, and Uwe Neumahr. Michael Ende: Magische Welten. Henschel, 2007.
Steiner, Rudolf. The Philosophy of Freedom. Rudolf Steiner Press, 1916.
Steiner, Rudolf. How to Know Higher Worlds. Anthroposophic Press, 1947.
Petersen, Wolfgang, dir. The NeverEnding Story. Constantin Film / Warner Bros., 1984.
Helbig, Jörg. Michael Endes Die unendliche Geschichte: Interpretation. Oldenbourg Schulbuchverlag, 2011.
Vallée, Mickey. “The Neverending Story and the Anthroposophical Imagination.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 35, no. 4 (2010): 369–383.