“Siehst Du, Momo', sagte er, 'es ist so: Manchmal hat man eine sehr lange Straße vor sich. What's more, you aren't out of breath.' He nodded to himself. At last he went on, 'And all at once, before you know it, you find you've swept the whole street clean, bit by bit. Nothing else.'Īgain he paused for thought before adding, 'That way you enjoy your work, which is important, because then you make a good job of it. Then he said, 'You must never think of the whole street at once, understand? You must only concentrate on the next step, the next breath, the next stroke of the broom, and the next, and the next.

'You work faster and faster, and every time you look up there seems to be just as much left to sweep as before, and you try even harder, and you panic, and in the end you're out of breath and have to stop - and still the street stretches away in front of you. 'And then you start to hurry,' he went on. He gazed silently into space before continuing. Sometimes, when you've a very long street ahead of you, you think how terribly long it is and feel sure you'll never get it swept.'

Michael Ende's works have been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 20 million copies, and have been adapted into motion pictures, stage plays, operas and audio books.“You see, Momo,' he told her one day, 'it's like this. Other books include Momo and Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer (Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver). He was interested in and influenced by anthroposophy.ĭie unendliche Geschichte (The Neverending Story) is Ende's best known work. The reader is often invited to take a more interactive role in the story, and the worlds in his books often mirror our reality, using fantasy to bring light to the problems of an increasingly technological modern society.Įnde was also known as a proponent of economic reform, and claimed to have had the concept of aging money in mind when writing Momo. Ende’s writing could be described as a surreal mixture of reality and fantasy. Ende claimed, 'It is for this child in me, and in all of us, that I tell my stories,' and that ' for any child between 80 and 8 years' (qtd. However, Ende was not strictly a children’s author, as he also wrote books for adults. He was the son of the surrealist painter Edgar Ende.Įnde was one of the most popular and famous German authors of the 20th century, mostly due to the enormous success of his children's books. Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende was a German writer of fantasy and children's literature.

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