Dissimilar Personalities

 
Michael Ende as a schoolboy

Cracks had started to appear in the Endes’ marriage. The personalities of husband and wife were very different: Edgar Ende was a quiet man who sketched his visions in the dark, spending days on end in his studio, while his wife was a highly determined and energetic woman whose meagre wages kept the family going in times of need. After a while the friction became unbearable, and the constant quarrelling took its toll on the couple’s son. Running from one parent to the other, Michael Ende tried to restore peace and keep the family together. At the time he didn’t realize that his mother could be difficult to live with too: ‘She had an incredible energy and a real intensity of emotion that sometimes turned into aggression. It must have been hard on my father.’