Human passions have mysterious ways, in children as well as grown-ups. Those affected by them can not explain them, and those who have not known them have no understanding of them at all.
Some people risk their lives to conquer a mountain peak. No one, not even they themselves, can really explain why.
Others ruin themselves trying to win the heart of a certain person who wants nothing to do with them.
Still others are destroyed by their devotion to the pleasures of the table.
Some are so bent on winning a game of chance that they lose everything they own, and some sacrafice everything for a dream that can never come true.
Some think their only hope of happiness lies in being somewhere else, and spend their whole lives traveling from place to place.
And some find no rest until they have become powerful. In short, there are as many different passions as there are people.
If you have never spent whole afternoons with burning ears and rumpled hair, forgetting the world around you over a book, forgetting cold and hunger …
If you have never read secretly under the bedclothes with a flashlight, because your father or mother or some other well-meaning person has switched off the lamp on the plausible ground that it was time to sleep because you had to get up so early …
If you have never wept bitter tears because a wonderful story has come to an end and you must take your leave of the characters with whom you have shared so many adventures, whom you have loved and admired, for whom you have hoped and feared, and without whose company life seems empty and meaningless …
Ende was born 12 November 1929 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Bavaria, the only child of the surrealist painter Edgar Ende and Luise Bartholomä Ende, a physiotherapist.
In 1935, when Michael was six, the Ende family moved to the ‘artists’ quarter of Schwabing in Munich. Growing up in this rich artistic and literary environment influenced Ende’s later writing.
In 1936 his father’s work was declared ‘degenerate’ and banned by the Nazi party, so Edgar Ende was forced to work in secret.
The horrors of World War II heavily influenced Ende‘s childhood. He was twelve years old when the first air raid took place above Munich.
In 1944 Edgar Ende’s studio at no. 90 Kaulbachstraße, Munich went up in flames. Over two hundred and fifty paintings and sketches were destroyed, as well as all his prints and etchings.
Ernst Buchner, Director of Public Art for Bavaria, was still in possession of a number of Ende’s paintings, and they survived the raids.
In 1945, German youths as young as fourteen were drafted into the Volkssturm and sent to war against the advancing Allied armies. Three of Ende‘s classmates were killed on their first day of action.
Ende was also drafted, but he joined a Bavarian resistance movement founded to sabotage the SS’s declared intention to defend Munich until the bitter end.
He served as a courier for the group for the remainder of the war.
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