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On Michael Ende in Garmisch
Sep. 17th, 2004 12:47 pmThe late, great Michael Ende, who died in 1995 was born in Garmisch (or to use the modern and correct term, Garmisch-Partenkirchen), hence the reason for quite a lot of events honouring the 75th anniversary of his birth there. Of the permanent stuff (that is permanent until November, when it will move to Essen), the exhibition about him and his father Edgar Ende impressed me most. Edgar Ende was a surrealist painter who between 1933-1945 was forbidden to paint at all (something which happened to lot of abstract, expressionist or in any way not-conforming-with-Hitler's-art-views artists who didn't emigrate). To add insult to injury, later in life more than 200 of Ende Senior's works burned when the house where they were stored did. (Photos showing them still exist.) Still, there are enough paintings by Edgar Ende left to show something of his oeuvre. He never sold many but survived by painting portraits to finance his surreal work, some of which the good citizens of Garmisch volunteered for the exhibition. Here is one portrait showing his son Michael, the writer, as a young man:
Father and son had a stormy relationship with each other, mostly due to Ende Senior divorcing Michael's mother in favour of a young art student, but they reconciled later in life. Edgar's imagery shows up in several of Michael's works, most notably in Der Spiegel im Spiegel, but also in The Never-Ending Story (where some of the paintings a nearly amnesiac Bastian finds when working in the mountain near the end of the novel are descriptions of paintings by Edgar Ende - these were at the exhibition, too).
Of Michael Ende's novels, the three he's best known for in Germany (only one became a world-wide success) are: Jim Knopf und Lucas der Lokomotivführer, Momo and The Never-Ending Story. If you're German, chances are that you saw the legendary puppet play production of Jim Knopf (the story of a baby sent by mistake of mail to the island Lummerland) which was made as a TV show in several parts, and remained Ende's favourite adaption of any of his works. In an age where we expect special effects from every fantasy film, its charm still works as well as ever. It's out on DVD in Europe, so you could buy or rent it. Here are some stills. . In the Jim Knopf section of the exhibition at Garmisch, you could see some of the puppets, lend to the exhibition by the Augsburger Puppenkiste (the most famous puppet players in Germany who produced this all the way back in the 60s) , a model of Lummerland with the train Emma making its way as busy as ever, and some of the original illustrations. (All of Ende's novels were beautifully illustrated. Son of a painter, he, and this was important to him - the illustrator who worked on The Never-Ending Story, Roswitha Quadflieg, was on his mind even during writing the novel.) The other visitors and myself couldn't resist and intoned the song of the TV series, Eine Insel mit zwei Bergen…
(One anecdote told by Roman Hocke (Ende's editor and a good friend) who gave us a special tour: When the translation rights of Jim Knopf were first sold to an American publisher, the publisher actually wanted to change Jim's colour from black to white. I kid you not. That was the end of the deal. A couple of years later, in the wake of The Never-Ending Story, the novel did get sold but to another publisher.)
The room devoted to Momo - for details about this novel in English see here, with quotes - was appropriately enough molded in the form of an amphitheatre (this is where Momo lives and a lot of the novel's action takes place, for those of you who aren't familiar with it), with a lot of masks hanging on the wall near the entrance standing in for The Grey Gentlemen; the masks looked like those you take of dead bodies, which is very appropriate. On the upper steps of the little "theatre" were a lot of different and fanciful clocks and watches, not quite as many as Master Hora has in the novel, but lovely to see nonetheless. And of course a movel of Cassiopeia the Turtle! And again, lithographs of the original illustrations, and some pages from Ende's manuscript.
(I should add here that all of the rooms were decorated by students in their spare time; they had come up with the concepts, too.)
The Momo anecdote: some student wrote an entire dissertation on why there isn't an entire semicolon in the entire novel, and what this symbolizes, but the crushing truth as confessed by Michael Ende was that the typewriter he was using at the time simply was old and flawed and didn't have one!
The room devoted to The Never-Ending Story was based on a really clever idea. When you looked into it, you saw nothing, just bare walls. Much like Bastian, you had to take a leap of faith, cross over and enter the room. Once you were inside, at the other end, and turned around, you saw the actual exhibition - all 24 originals of Rowitha Quadflieg's illustrations (one for each letter of the alphabet with which each chapter started, in the elaborate style of a medieval manuscript), paintings inspired by The Never-Ending Story, heads of fountains in Rome which had inspired Ende (he lived in Gennzano di Roma at that point), and several pages from the original manuscript, some typed, some hand-written addendums. Ah, those days before the computer. I always get a thrilling kind of chill when I'm allowed to look at manuscripts of books and writers who mean something to me. The only thing missing, which you only get in libraries where they store manuscripts, is the smell, that peculiar smell of old paper and that purple fluid they used back then to make copies during typing.
One thing the room was suspiciously free of was any kind of mention of the movie. Which isn't surprising. Michael Ende really, truly, hated it. Starting with the fact that the film covered only half of the book and picked an ending in direct violation of the book's central agenda (not to mention the rules which don't allow creatures of Fantasia to cross over to our world, except through the Nothing which twists them into lies) in letting Bastian go after the boys who bullied him at the start in revenge on Fuchur's back. Speaking of Fuchur, the fact the dragon did not look at all like the Chinese type of dragon he had in mind (and which the illustration showed) was another thing Ende hated. And the fact Bastian was changed from a fat kid into a slender boy. And the depiction of the Ivory Tower ("tacky"), and the Child-like Empress. Etc., etc. This was one angry author.
Generally speaking, though, he seems to have been quite even-tempered. And strangely chameleon-like in his appearance. One part of the exhibition shows photos of him in various stages of his life. There is the school boy in Lederhosen (if anyone has seen Das Wunder von Bern - like that, only with black hair), the young man of his father's portrait, then he suddenly looks suspiciously like Brecht, and true enough, that was when he was working as an actor/writer in cabarets and in the theatre, then here is 70s moustached Ende with 70s-style shoulder-length hair and moustache, and then the old gentleman most of us recall, looking somewhat like John Houston (who did a cameo as the Ende alter ego in the film version of Momo). You can see a picture of him in his old age at this English-written tribute page here, which also contains one of my favourite quotes from Ende about the passion of reading.
The recitals on Wednesday evening of Ende's poetry, songs and fables - gong from the funny like two gnomes bickering to the creepy like the story of Death and a child to the surreal as in the poem about a smile getting lost during one evening - and on Thursday the readings from novels inspired by him showed both his versatility as a writer and the ongoing effect he has on people and their imagination. Mind you, these last two evenings were the first two really, really cold autumn days we had here. As in: we were all shivering and huddlling, because this took place in a circus tent. But did the people drop away like flies to their warm homes? No, they did not. Mr. Ende, Sir, I salute you. May your work continue to rule.
Father and son had a stormy relationship with each other, mostly due to Ende Senior divorcing Michael's mother in favour of a young art student, but they reconciled later in life. Edgar's imagery shows up in several of Michael's works, most notably in Der Spiegel im Spiegel, but also in The Never-Ending Story (where some of the paintings a nearly amnesiac Bastian finds when working in the mountain near the end of the novel are descriptions of paintings by Edgar Ende - these were at the exhibition, too).
Of Michael Ende's novels, the three he's best known for in Germany (only one became a world-wide success) are: Jim Knopf und Lucas der Lokomotivführer, Momo and The Never-Ending Story. If you're German, chances are that you saw the legendary puppet play production of Jim Knopf (the story of a baby sent by mistake of mail to the island Lummerland) which was made as a TV show in several parts, and remained Ende's favourite adaption of any of his works. In an age where we expect special effects from every fantasy film, its charm still works as well as ever. It's out on DVD in Europe, so you could buy or rent it. Here are some stills. . In the Jim Knopf section of the exhibition at Garmisch, you could see some of the puppets, lend to the exhibition by the Augsburger Puppenkiste (the most famous puppet players in Germany who produced this all the way back in the 60s) , a model of Lummerland with the train Emma making its way as busy as ever, and some of the original illustrations. (All of Ende's novels were beautifully illustrated. Son of a painter, he, and this was important to him - the illustrator who worked on The Never-Ending Story, Roswitha Quadflieg, was on his mind even during writing the novel.) The other visitors and myself couldn't resist and intoned the song of the TV series, Eine Insel mit zwei Bergen…
(One anecdote told by Roman Hocke (Ende's editor and a good friend) who gave us a special tour: When the translation rights of Jim Knopf were first sold to an American publisher, the publisher actually wanted to change Jim's colour from black to white. I kid you not. That was the end of the deal. A couple of years later, in the wake of The Never-Ending Story, the novel did get sold but to another publisher.)
The room devoted to Momo - for details about this novel in English see here, with quotes - was appropriately enough molded in the form of an amphitheatre (this is where Momo lives and a lot of the novel's action takes place, for those of you who aren't familiar with it), with a lot of masks hanging on the wall near the entrance standing in for The Grey Gentlemen; the masks looked like those you take of dead bodies, which is very appropriate. On the upper steps of the little "theatre" were a lot of different and fanciful clocks and watches, not quite as many as Master Hora has in the novel, but lovely to see nonetheless. And of course a movel of Cassiopeia the Turtle! And again, lithographs of the original illustrations, and some pages from Ende's manuscript.
(I should add here that all of the rooms were decorated by students in their spare time; they had come up with the concepts, too.)
The Momo anecdote: some student wrote an entire dissertation on why there isn't an entire semicolon in the entire novel, and what this symbolizes, but the crushing truth as confessed by Michael Ende was that the typewriter he was using at the time simply was old and flawed and didn't have one!
The room devoted to The Never-Ending Story was based on a really clever idea. When you looked into it, you saw nothing, just bare walls. Much like Bastian, you had to take a leap of faith, cross over and enter the room. Once you were inside, at the other end, and turned around, you saw the actual exhibition - all 24 originals of Rowitha Quadflieg's illustrations (one for each letter of the alphabet with which each chapter started, in the elaborate style of a medieval manuscript), paintings inspired by The Never-Ending Story, heads of fountains in Rome which had inspired Ende (he lived in Gennzano di Roma at that point), and several pages from the original manuscript, some typed, some hand-written addendums. Ah, those days before the computer. I always get a thrilling kind of chill when I'm allowed to look at manuscripts of books and writers who mean something to me. The only thing missing, which you only get in libraries where they store manuscripts, is the smell, that peculiar smell of old paper and that purple fluid they used back then to make copies during typing.
One thing the room was suspiciously free of was any kind of mention of the movie. Which isn't surprising. Michael Ende really, truly, hated it. Starting with the fact that the film covered only half of the book and picked an ending in direct violation of the book's central agenda (not to mention the rules which don't allow creatures of Fantasia to cross over to our world, except through the Nothing which twists them into lies) in letting Bastian go after the boys who bullied him at the start in revenge on Fuchur's back. Speaking of Fuchur, the fact the dragon did not look at all like the Chinese type of dragon he had in mind (and which the illustration showed) was another thing Ende hated. And the fact Bastian was changed from a fat kid into a slender boy. And the depiction of the Ivory Tower ("tacky"), and the Child-like Empress. Etc., etc. This was one angry author.
Generally speaking, though, he seems to have been quite even-tempered. And strangely chameleon-like in his appearance. One part of the exhibition shows photos of him in various stages of his life. There is the school boy in Lederhosen (if anyone has seen Das Wunder von Bern - like that, only with black hair), the young man of his father's portrait, then he suddenly looks suspiciously like Brecht, and true enough, that was when he was working as an actor/writer in cabarets and in the theatre, then here is 70s moustached Ende with 70s-style shoulder-length hair and moustache, and then the old gentleman most of us recall, looking somewhat like John Houston (who did a cameo as the Ende alter ego in the film version of Momo). You can see a picture of him in his old age at this English-written tribute page here, which also contains one of my favourite quotes from Ende about the passion of reading.
The recitals on Wednesday evening of Ende's poetry, songs and fables - gong from the funny like two gnomes bickering to the creepy like the story of Death and a child to the surreal as in the poem about a smile getting lost during one evening - and on Thursday the readings from novels inspired by him showed both his versatility as a writer and the ongoing effect he has on people and their imagination. Mind you, these last two evenings were the first two really, really cold autumn days we had here. As in: we were all shivering and huddlling, because this took place in a circus tent. But did the people drop away like flies to their warm homes? No, they did not. Mr. Ende, Sir, I salute you. May your work continue to rule.
