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Which book may have fed these experiences?

"Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver"?

"Momo"?

"The never ending Story"?

Or is it “Ophelia's shadow theater”, the story of an old lady who actually wanted to be an actress and yet had to become a prompter on a small town stage because her voice was too soft?

One day her stage closes and she takes up abandoned shadows and teaches them to play tragedies and comedies.

The writer Michael Ende knew something about theater in small towns.

One of his many great stories

Source: Thienemann-Esslinger Verlag GmbH

At the end of (1929–1995) he attended drama school in Munich, although he actually wanted to be a writer - the training was supposed to form the basis for the intended work as a playwright.

So he came to the ensembles of smaller theaters in the early 1950s.

For a few months he had an engagement at the Schleswig-Holstein State Theater in Rendsburg.

And from Rendsburg we took the ensemble bus to the small towns on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein, to Itzehoe, to Meldorf and to Marne.

These expeditions presented the actors with special challenges.

Peter Boccarius, Michael Ende's friend from school days, knew how to report in his Ende biography with the title “The beginning of the story”: “First they waited in the pub, drank, skated and were bored.” On the boards, the The mimes were only allowed to mean the world in Dithmarschen on the west coast of Schleswig-Holstein when the stage workers who had traveled with them had moored the scenery.

But not quite Dithmarschen listened to the poet's declaimed words.

The dream of writing

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Boccarius knew from the end: “The rolling of the balls thundered up from the bowling alley in the basement;

The commands boomed over from the riding stables next door;

beer was called in the ballroom itself, and heavily laden waitresses made their way through the rows of tables for their sauerbraten, while Fiesco mused: 'What an uproar in my chest!' "

In Rendsburg, the seat of the theater headquarters, the actor's thoughts turned towards writing.

And when Michael Ende talked about Rendsburg, he did not speak of the "satan archaeological lie-cohesive wish punch", but thought of cola with rum: "I have never again drank so much hard stuff in my life."

His friend Boccarius then summed up the Rendsburg years for Ende as follows: "The ideas, the writing, the drinking, the love: Michael fell off the meat." It shouldn't go on like this, in 1953 Ende took a look at the theater, his new course read: become a writer.

Michael Ende and the actress Radost Bokel during the shooting of the film adaptation of "Momo"

Source: ullstein picture - dpa

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Forty years after Michael Ende's time at the theater, I, at home in Dithmarschen and a fan of the writer, wanted to know in a letter from him whether the experiences in Rendsburg and Itzehoe, in Meldorf and Marne would find their way into one of his next books.

But for the now world-famous fantastic author, the question did not arise that way.

"It's not so much for me," Ende wrote back, "to describe personal memories of people or places." Nevertheless, I could continue to hope, because Ende let me know:

“But sooner or later everything that I have seen or experienced comes back to the surface in a different (fantastic) way.

That will certainly happen again during my time in Rendsburg, but it does not depend so much on my intention.

It has to result from a story. ”- So it cannot be ruled out that Lady Ophelia worked as a prompter before her time in the shadow theater, in Itzehoe, Marne or Rendsburg ...

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