'Do what you wish or wish what you want?' Michael Ende's Fantastica and Rudolf Steiner's moral imagination.

In Ende's The Neverending Story, a boy named Bastian travels into the fantasy world of Fantastica which is being eaten up by 'Nothing' (Ende 1983, p. 19). He saves this ailing world by giving a new name to its ruler, the Childlike Empress, and goes on to create a new Fantastica through stories and names of his own invention. By following the instruction to 'do what you wish' (p.189), Bastian must eventually find his way back into the real world through his wishes.

Ende read and commented on Rudolf Steiner's philosophical writings, and The Neverending Story re-enacts Steiner's search for free will. Bastian's journey in Fantastica explores Steiner's idea of free will as an underlying principle. Existing scholarly interpretations of The Neverending Story vary greatly, but most commonly Bastian's journey is read as one of inner, psychological or spiritual development. But while psychological, didactic and religious readings can only give speculative interpretations of The Neverending Story, this article will source more definitively Ende's active use of Steiner and his philosophical concept.

A reading from a psychological stance is Groneman's (1985), who offers a walk-through of Bastian's journey as a process of individuation: 'In depth-psychology such a process as Bastian is undergoing [i.e. of accepting himself and gaining a positive outlook on the world] is called individuation, ... a synthetic process of integration of the unconscious and the conscious' (p.9: this and all subsequent translations mine). Groneman goes on to show parallels between the text and his interpretation in a methodical way. Step by step images and events from The Neverending Story are explained as stages of individuation. A basic example of this is Groneman's treatment of the character Atreyu as Bastian's shadow self and Fantastica as Bastian's psyche into which he must delve. Filmer (1991) similarly suggests that the Childlike Empress 'symbolises, perhaps, the realm of the subconscious mind, where archetypal images and shapes are manifested and from which the Imagination springs' (p.61). In both cases Ende's book is presented as a purely internal exploration into the main character's own psyche.

In another line of interpretation Huse (1988) sees the life/ death situation of Fantastica and the Nothing as one which Bastian must tackle in order to learn to '[control] the emptiness of the isolated self [after the loss of his mother] and [use] his last wish to learn to love' (p.40). Bosmajian (1986) takes the contrary stance that Bastian's journey is one of unsuccessfully working through grief at the loss of his mother, thereby confirming 'our cultural patterns of the denial of death' (p. 120). The main emphasis of both H use's and Bosmajian's reading is on the practical usefulness of Bastian's journey for the real world--Bastian's. and, particularly in Bosmajian's case, the reader's.

Similarly, the reading offered by von Prondezynsky (1983), who concentrates on the problem of Bastian following his wishes, is that of a life-lesson for the real world. Von Prondczynsky points out the need for Bastian to apply 'Wunsch-Okonomie' (economy of wishes, p.44) and presents the potentially endless possibility of wishes as a 'Strudel der Wunsche', a whirlpool of wishes (p.44). Bastian needs to control this whirlpool and give his wishes a definite aim which can lead him home. In this way the story is a learning process for Bastian and the reader to adapt the tempting idea of infinite wishes to more goal-oriented aspirations: 'goals can no more be reached without wishes, than there can be wishes without goals' (p.45).

Finally, writing from a fundamentalist Christian point of view, Klaus Berger sees The Neverending Story as a journey toward Occultism and Satanism. In his reading the Childlike Empress stands for Lucifer, and the reader is manipulated into an occult system where 'only in Evil one can infinitely do what one wills' (Berger 1984, p.96). For him The Neverending Story becomes 'the path into the realm of magic, from which the only escape is to actively reject it and accept God instead' (p.98). In a letter response to a concerned reader who had apparently read Berger's book, Ende dismisses Berger's reading by stating that the idea of The Neverending Story as an Anti-bible for the Godless is almost comical (Hocke 2004, p.291). Nonetheless, Berger's reading shows another, more external point of view. Here the central meaning of the book is neither the character's own exploration of his inner self, nor the lesson to be learned by the character or reader, but it is rather a tale ...