In front of the Blutenberg Castle is the peaceful lake-like moat
The castle was drowned in the morning mist, like the mist of history: it was laid waste during the Thirty Years Wars (1618-1648) and was'nt rebuilt until 1680–81. It's still surrounded by a ring wall with three towers and a gate tower. From 1983, the castle has become the home of the International Youth Library (Internationale Jugendbibliothek) with concerts there every now and then at the chapel.
The part of the ring wall and the tower
The ring wall from another angle
The colors of autumn on its wall
An arbor right in front of the lake: a really nice spot for reading and resting and looking at the swans, geese and ducks and occasionally other passing wild water fowls.
Flowers growing close to the castle wall, adding a bit of excitement to the environment
Dew-covered cobwebs on the creepers of the arbor
A grandpa and grandson having fun feeding the swan on the lake
The quiet stream feeding the lake
Bronze sculpture of Duke Sigismund and his wife Agnes Bernauer on the castle grounds
A close up of the busts
Coat of Arms of the ducal family
The castle entrance
An aerial view of the castle from the internet
Above the entrance tower, the obligatory flag
A poster for an cultural perspective on the coming of winter, organized by by the International Youth Library: a song of ice and fire by George R R Martins, (b 1948), an American novelist and short story writer in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction genres, a screenwriter, and television producer, best known for his international bestselling series of epic fantasy novels, A Song of Ice and Fire, which HBO later adapted for its dramatic series entitled Game of Thrones.
A poster for another event: on Tisch and Bänke, the painted world of Llon Wikland at the Wehgang Galerie one of the galleries housed in the castle.Llon Wikland is an Estonian artist who emigrated to Sweden and was the one who illustrated the greatest number of Astrid Lindgren’s children books. including The Six Bullerby Children (aka The Children of Noisy Village), The Children on Troublemaker Street, The Brothers Lionheart, Karlsson-on-the-roof, Mardie, Mio my Son, Nils Karlsson Pyssling, Ronia the Robber’s Daughter, Seacrow Island, The Ghost of Skinny Jack as well as Sunnanäng. She has also provided the illustrations for many picture-books, including: The Dragon with Red Eyes, I Want a Brother or Sister/That’s My Baby, Brenda Helps Grandmother and Simon Small Moves in.
An exhibition of the paintings of the picture books for peace and humanity, a cause for which Michael Ende fought for all his life
The castle is the home of the Michael Ende Museum. Michael Andreas Helmuth Ende (1929 –1995) was a German writer of children and fantasy fiction. best known for his epic fantasy "The Neverending Story", others include "Momo" and "Jim Knopf und Lukas der Lokomotivführer" (Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver), his works having been translated into more than 40 languages and sold more than 20 million copies, some of them already adapted into motion pictures, stage plays, operas and audio books. He explained why he wrote those stories of fantasy: "It is for this child in me, and in all of us, that I tell my stories for any child between 80 and 8 years" and was frustrated that he seen as just a children's writer because he wanted to speak about the cultural problems of our increasingly technological society and disseminate "spiritual wisdom" to people of all ages. He wrote in 1985: " One may enter the literary parlor via just about any door, be it the prison door, the madhouse door, or the brothel door. There is but one door one may not enter it through, which is the nursery door. The critics will never forgive you such. The great Rudyard Kipling is one to have suffered this. I keep wondering to myself what this peculiar contempt towards anything related to childhood is all about." He said that writing Momo, he was thinking of the of paying extra for the aged in our society. He came from a family of artists: his father, Edgar Ende was a surrealist painter and his mother Luise Bartholomä Ende was a physiotherapist. In 1936, his father's works were banned by the Nazis as "degenerate" and he had to work in secret. As a teenager during WWII, his worldview was marked by the horrors of bombings he experienced during the period: ‘Our street was consumed by flames. The fire didn’t crackle; it roared. The flames were roaring. I remember singing and careering through the blaze like a drunkard. I was in the grip of a kind of euphoria. I still don’t truly understand it, but I was almost tempted to cast myself into the fire like a moth into the light.’ He fell in love with poetry during the period and learned from Novalis, a romantic poet
whose ‘Hymns to the Night’ left a great impression on him. In 1944, his father's studio went up in flames and more than 200 of his paintings and sketches were destroyed. During the war, three of Michael Ende's friends died as drafted soldiers and he himself joined a resistance movement in Bavaria to sabotage the Nazi's plan of defending Munich till the bitter end and served as a courier for the group for the remainder of the war.
He started his writing career as a dramatist but circumstances forced him to write short "stories" and "poems". As a young man, he had a stint as an actor, appearing in Chekhov’s one-act comedy "The Bear", playing the leading role there." and also in the German premiere of the innovative French actor and dramatist Jean Cocteau’s "Orpheus. His own first play "Denn die Stunde drängt (As Time is Running Out)" dates to this period. It was dedicated to Hiroshima but was never performed. After studying acting for two years on a scholarship in a drama school in Munich, the Otto Falckenberg School of the Performing Arts, he toured with a provincial theatre group in Schelswig-Hostein often on make-shift stages and learned about such Expressionist and Dadaist writers as Theodor Däubler, Yvan Goll, Else Lasker-Schüler and Alfred Mombert. but his real love was the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George and Georg Trakl.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French Nouveau Roman (New Novel) writer and theorist, once said that writing is often more "an adventure in writing" itself than writing about "adventures". That's exactly how Michael Ende started out writing his famous first novel Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver: ‘I sat down at my desk and wrote: “The country in which the engine-driver, Luke, lived was called Morrowland. It was a rather small country." Once I’d written the two lines, I hadn’t a clue how the third line might go. I didn’t start out with a concept or a plan - I just left myself drift from one sentence and one thought to the next. That’s how I discovered that writing could be an adventure. The story carried on growing, new characters started appearing, and to my astonishment different plotlines began to weave together. The manuscript was getting longer all the time and was already much more than a picture book. I finally wrote the last sentence ten months later, and a great stack of paper had accumulated on the desk." The logic of the story would somehow take over and the novel would, as it were, write itself.
Writing is one thing. Getting published is another. He had a geat deal of difficulties having the novel accepted for publication. It wasn't until 1960 that he got his first book published. When the announcement came that his novel had won the German Prize for Children’s Fiction, 5,000 marks, Ende was being sued by his landlady for seven months' rent back payment! Shortly thereafter, he wrote his first "Jim Knopf" novel, nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and received the Berlin Literary Prize for Youth Fiction. His second "Jim Knopf" novel, "Jim Button and the Wild Thirteen" was published in 1962. Both books were later serialized on radio and TV and he became famous and more financially secure . The Augsburger Puppenkiste famously adapted the novels in a version filmed by the Hesse Broadcasting Corporation.
It was his first wife, Ingeborg Hoffman (1921-1985) whom he first met in 1952 and married in 1964, who encouraged Ende to join the Humanistic Union, an organization committed to furthering humanist values. Together they campaigned for human rights, protested against rearmament, and worked towards peace. She also introduced him to various cabaret groups and in 1955, Therese Angeloff, head of Die kleinen Fische (the ‘Little Fish’ cabaret), commissioned Ende to write a piece in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Friedrich Schiller’s death. Ende produced a sketch in which a statue of Schiller was interviewed about newsworthy issues, and replied with quotes from Schiller’s work. ‘There was rapturous applause, and commissions arrived from other cabarets too.’ Michael Ende began to compose sketches, chansons and monologues. For fourteen years, Ende and Hoffmann, who greatly admired Italian culture, lived just outside of Rome in Genzano, Italy, in a house they called Casa Liocorno ("The Unicorn"). It was there that Ende wrote most of the novel Momo.
Ende met his second wife Mariko Sato in 1976, when she was then working for the International Youth Library. From an early age, even as a child he had been fascinated by Japan and he loved Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese legends and ghost stories, and in 1959 he wrote a play inspired by Hearn’s material. Die Päonienlaterne (‘The Peony Lantern’) was written for radio, but never broadcast. He was interested in Japan because of its radical otherness: its language, its values, its consciousness, its fondness for turning every daily routines into intricate rituals, like its tea ceremony and flower arrangements. After their 1976 meeting at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Sato translated some of Ende’s books into Japanese and helped answer some of his questions about Japanese culture and from 1977 to 1980, they co-wrote German translations of ten fairy tales by the Japanese writer Kenji Miyazawa (宮澤賢治) (1896 –1933), a writer of children's book,a poet, cellist, a devout Buddhist and social activist in the late Taisho and early Showa periods, the author of Night on the Galactic Railroad (銀河鐵道之夜), Kazeno Matasaburo (風の又三郎 ), Gauche the Cellist (大提琴手葛許) and the Night of the Teneyamagahara (種山ヶ原の夜)
whose ‘Hymns to the Night’ left a great impression on him. In 1944, his father's studio went up in flames and more than 200 of his paintings and sketches were destroyed. During the war, three of Michael Ende's friends died as drafted soldiers and he himself joined a resistance movement in Bavaria to sabotage the Nazi's plan of defending Munich till the bitter end and served as a courier for the group for the remainder of the war.
He started his writing career as a dramatist but circumstances forced him to write short "stories" and "poems". As a young man, he had a stint as an actor, appearing in Chekhov’s one-act comedy "The Bear", playing the leading role there." and also in the German premiere of the innovative French actor and dramatist Jean Cocteau’s "Orpheus. His own first play "Denn die Stunde drängt (As Time is Running Out)" dates to this period. It was dedicated to Hiroshima but was never performed. After studying acting for two years on a scholarship in a drama school in Munich, the Otto Falckenberg School of the Performing Arts, he toured with a provincial theatre group in Schelswig-Hostein often on make-shift stages and learned about such Expressionist and Dadaist writers as Theodor Däubler, Yvan Goll, Else Lasker-Schüler and Alfred Mombert. but his real love was the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George and Georg Trakl.
Alain Robbe-Grillet, a French Nouveau Roman (New Novel) writer and theorist, once said that writing is often more "an adventure in writing" itself than writing about "adventures". That's exactly how Michael Ende started out writing his famous first novel Jim Button and Luke the Engine Driver: ‘I sat down at my desk and wrote: “The country in which the engine-driver, Luke, lived was called Morrowland. It was a rather small country." Once I’d written the two lines, I hadn’t a clue how the third line might go. I didn’t start out with a concept or a plan - I just left myself drift from one sentence and one thought to the next. That’s how I discovered that writing could be an adventure. The story carried on growing, new characters started appearing, and to my astonishment different plotlines began to weave together. The manuscript was getting longer all the time and was already much more than a picture book. I finally wrote the last sentence ten months later, and a great stack of paper had accumulated on the desk." The logic of the story would somehow take over and the novel would, as it were, write itself.
Writing is one thing. Getting published is another. He had a geat deal of difficulties having the novel accepted for publication. It wasn't until 1960 that he got his first book published. When the announcement came that his novel had won the German Prize for Children’s Fiction, 5,000 marks, Ende was being sued by his landlady for seven months' rent back payment! Shortly thereafter, he wrote his first "Jim Knopf" novel, nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Award and received the Berlin Literary Prize for Youth Fiction. His second "Jim Knopf" novel, "Jim Button and the Wild Thirteen" was published in 1962. Both books were later serialized on radio and TV and he became famous and more financially secure . The Augsburger Puppenkiste famously adapted the novels in a version filmed by the Hesse Broadcasting Corporation.
It was his first wife, Ingeborg Hoffman (1921-1985) whom he first met in 1952 and married in 1964, who encouraged Ende to join the Humanistic Union, an organization committed to furthering humanist values. Together they campaigned for human rights, protested against rearmament, and worked towards peace. She also introduced him to various cabaret groups and in 1955, Therese Angeloff, head of Die kleinen Fische (the ‘Little Fish’ cabaret), commissioned Ende to write a piece in commemoration of the 150th anniversary of Friedrich Schiller’s death. Ende produced a sketch in which a statue of Schiller was interviewed about newsworthy issues, and replied with quotes from Schiller’s work. ‘There was rapturous applause, and commissions arrived from other cabarets too.’ Michael Ende began to compose sketches, chansons and monologues. For fourteen years, Ende and Hoffmann, who greatly admired Italian culture, lived just outside of Rome in Genzano, Italy, in a house they called Casa Liocorno ("The Unicorn"). It was there that Ende wrote most of the novel Momo.
Ende met his second wife Mariko Sato in 1976, when she was then working for the International Youth Library. From an early age, even as a child he had been fascinated by Japan and he loved Lafcadio Hearn's Japanese legends and ghost stories, and in 1959 he wrote a play inspired by Hearn’s material. Die Päonienlaterne (‘The Peony Lantern’) was written for radio, but never broadcast. He was interested in Japan because of its radical otherness: its language, its values, its consciousness, its fondness for turning every daily routines into intricate rituals, like its tea ceremony and flower arrangements. After their 1976 meeting at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair, Sato translated some of Ende’s books into Japanese and helped answer some of his questions about Japanese culture and from 1977 to 1980, they co-wrote German translations of ten fairy tales by the Japanese writer Kenji Miyazawa (宮澤賢治) (1896 –1933), a writer of children's book,a poet, cellist, a devout Buddhist and social activist in the late Taisho and early Showa periods, the author of Night on the Galactic Railroad (銀河鐵道之夜), Kazeno Matasaburo (風の又三郎 ), Gauche the Cellist (大提琴手葛許) and the Night of the Teneyamagahara (種山ヶ原の夜)
Ende won a devoted following in Japan, and by 1993 over two million copies of Momo and The Neverending Story had been sold in Japan. Perhaps Ende’s critical treatment of modern industrial society found particular resonance in Japan. Mariko Sato accompanied Michael Ende on a number of trips to Japan. The first trip took place in 1977 and included visits to Tokyo and Kyoto. For the first time Michael Ende was able to experience Kabuki and Noh theatre, and was greatly impressed by traditional Japanese drama. In 1986 Michael Ende was invited to attend the annual congress of the JBBY (Japanese Committee for International Children’s Literature) in Tokyo. He gave a lecture on ‘Eternal Child-likeness’ , the first detailed explanation of his artistic vision. 1989 marked the opening of the exhibition ‘Michael and Edgar Ende’ in Tokyo. The exhibition was subsequently shown in Otsu, Miyazaki, Nagasaki, Osaka, Nagoya and Fukuyama. At the invitation of Shimbun, a Japanese newspaper, Michael Ende attended the opening and spent two months touring Japan. It was his third trip accompanied by Mariko Sato, whom he married in September 1989. The following year an archive devoted to Michael Ende was established at Kurohime Dowakan, a museum in the Japanese city of Shinano-machi.(信濃町駅). Ende donated letters and other personal items to the collection. On 23 October 1992 Michael Ende made his final trip to Japan. In the course of their three-week visit Michael Ende and Mariko Sato-Ende visited the Dowakan museum, joined Ende’s Japanese publishers, Iwanami, in celebrating the millionth sale of Momo, and travelled to Kanazawa and Hamamatsu and a number of other cities that were new to Ende. In1992, Ende was diagnosed with stomach cancer. and underwent various treatments,but succumbed on August 28 1995
Another poster for English choral music concert in Munich written by John Rutter, Bob Chilcott and John Tavener.
The interior of the castle
a cardboard figure at the Castle Court Garden in front of the chapel
the famous chapel
murals outside the chapel
murals outside the chapel
(photo from the internet as on the day of my visit, a private baptism ceremony of a new born baby girl was taking place)
The palace church, furnished with late-Gothic masterpieces, is a
simple building with a single nave and a choir enclosed on three sides.
The three altars by Jan Polack are among the best examples of panel
painting from the late-Gothic period. The main altar, with both wings
closed, shows the saints Bartholomew and Sigismund, together with the
duke as patron. When open, the left wing of the altar shows the baptism
of Christ and the right wing the coronation of Mary with the Holy
Trinity on the throne. The throne motif recurs in the majestic
representation of the mercy seat in the central picture of the altar.
The side altars – Christ as King among the saints and the Annunciation –
date from 1491. 
poster of a child flying out from the window
More cardboard figures outside the windows
posters outside the museum
Poster for English lessons for children
(To be cont'd)
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