Yes, that's actually what I meant -- less an artifact of having been written in the German language, and more an elusive flavor of having been written by a German writer.

I mean there are content similarities too, of course, but beyond that there is a something that I would probably be better able to articulate if I had made a study of regional variations in literature / fairytales / children's fantasy.

(And of course she directly references Ende in the chapter epigraphs, along with a lot of others.)