Although Michael Ende wrote "The Neverending Story" as a children's book, it became a nationwide best seller in West Germany and a bible of the peace movement there. Its success is particularly strange because the book travels to an imaginary land and has virtually no political content. It's as if "The Hobbit" had become the rallying cry of the SDS…. (p. 112)

In the first half of the book, Fantastica is a conventional, even saccharine fairyland with the usual cast of princesses, gnomes and dragons. But the book comes to life when Bastian enters the story, ingeniously playing on the relation between imagination and reality. Ende has attempted an ambitious, if not always successful, mix of modernism and children's literature: Pirandello turned loose in Disneyland.

What does this have to do with nuclear weapons? In Fantastica, what you wish happens. During the Vietnam War, Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies...