text: Quite a few reviews of The Neverending Story mention the similarity between its Manipulators and the grey men in Ende's novel Momo. It's true that both groups are indistinct, other-worldly, and obsessed with obtaining control. But Momo's grey men are the up-front antagonists of Momo, whereas the Manipulators of The Neverending Story play only a bit part. They are never described, only mentioned, and infrequently so.
  The Manipulators, as the name implies, represent those who use stories and other elements of the public imagination to manipulate others. Their base intentions are outlined in a telling statement from Gmork, their werewolf servant:
  "Who knows what use they [the Manipulators] will make of you? Maybe you'll help them persuade people to buy things they don't need, or hate things they know nothing about, or hold beliefs that make them easy to handle, or doubt the truths that might save them. Yes, you little Fantastican, big things will be done in the human world with your help, wars started, empires founded . . ."
  Given that Ende lived through World War II Germany, I would guess that he might be thinking of the false appropriation of German folklore to support Nazi ideology, which is widely considered one of the greatest injuries to folkloric tradition of all time. Says Jack Zipes in Fairy Tales and the Art of Subversion:
  [In Nazi Germany] There was ... an enormous effort made by educators, party functionaries, and literary critics to revamp the interpretation of the tales in accordance with Nazi ideology and to use these interpretations in socializing children. ... Aside from obvious anti-Semitic explications of such tales as "The Jew in the Thorn" or the association of thievery and cheating with Jews, most of the National Socialist interpretations stressed the struggle between two worlds: the pure Aryan world versus the contaminated alien world.
  Michael Ende was one of those "socialized" children, and he grew up to question simplistic views of contamination by "alien" thoughts and traditions. The way his contorted, soulless Fantasticans convulsively jerk toward the Nothing bears a resemblance to the grotesque distortions the Nazis created out of authentic German folklore.
  Still, Ende chose not to make the Manipulators a strong element in The Neverending Story. He depicts them as weak, grasping opportunists, vultures feasting on the "living corpses" of imaginary creatures. They are unable to enter Fantastica, presumably because they have no imaginations of their own. They can do nothing but stand and wait for Fantasticans to fall into the Nothing, which they didn't (and couldn't) create on their own. I believe this is Ende's comment on the ultimate failure of attempts to exploit the public imagination for the purpose of control.