Margaret Atwood

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143 appearances 2 recordings 2 series first heard May 2025 last heard 9 Mar

Margaret Atwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.

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The Ezra Klein Show · Best Of: Margaret Atwood on American Myths and Authoritarianism · 9 May 2025 podcast

Well, that would be tragic because the result would be another civil war. And there are no wars worse than civil wars. They're actually the worst wars. And that has been a motif actually throughout American history, that there were righteous people and that there were not righteous people. So the founding, going back to the original founding amongst the Puritans, that wasn't a democracy.

It was a theocracy. And only those who'd seen God in a cornfield were full members of the church to begin with. Then, as usually happens with fervent utopian movements, which it was one, you have the first generation who were the fervent utopianists, let's say the original French revolutionaries, the original Bolsheviks. And then you win. And then what do you do when you win?

What's supposed to happen is the golden age is supposed to appear. Then it doesn't appear. Then what? Well, you've won and you've eliminated your enemies, your original enemies, but it's still not working. So it must be betrayal from within. It must be witches. It must be capitalist rotors.

It must be somebody undermining it, secret monarchists in the case of the revolution, enemies of the revolution. It must be them from within your own country. So what you're seeing now is a wrestling match for what is the real America? What is the authentic America? And you see people wrapping themselves in the flag both ways and saying that they are the real America.

And you just saw that in Canada. So these people at the blockades wrapping themselves in the Canadian flag, we're standing up for the real Canada. pretty fuzzy about what that is. But that's what they were doing, and their role model was what had been going on in the States, where we're overthrowing the government in the name of the real America, like that. Did you ever play arm wrestling?

So that's what you're seeing. It's an arm wrestle for the soul of America.

I'd actually started making notes on it in 1981, but it took me a while to actually work up to writing it because it was somewhat nutty, or such was the ambience at the time. So there I was in West Berlin, and because we weren't German, we could go to East Berlin more easily than Germans could. And we could also go to Czechoslovakia, which we did, and we went to Poland.

So we had experiences of three Iron Curtain countries at the time, and they were somewhat different. The East Germans, I think, were sewed up the tightest of anybody. And we now know from the Stasi files that indeed there were a lot of informants, so people were pretty careful about what they would say. In Czechoslovakia, we could talk to people, but only in open spaces.

So you couldn't have a frank conversation in a building or a car, because people just assumed it was bugged. In Poland, it was already pretty wide open in 1994. So Poland has had lots of experiences of people marching across them and occupying them. Some of those experiences for them were pretty recent. the general populace was not paying a lot of attention to what the rules were.

So a taxi driver drove up and he said, dollars? And we said, zlotys? And he drove away. Once that starts happening, once you start preferring somebody else's currency, you know that the government is losing some authority. Anyway, very interesting to be there at that time.

And I think some of the stuff that's been going on recently is that the people doing that stuff are too young to remember any of that. They don't know what a real totalitarianism is like, and they're not paying attention to the kinds of steps that lead to it. You know, how you get one of these things going, how you get buy-in What sort of propaganda is likely to be put out there to begin with?

And you never begin by saying, I'm going to be a tyrannous dictator and I'm going to ruin your life. You don't start out that way. You start out by saying, I'm going to make things so much better. And you want that to happen, don't you, Ezra? Because you're a good person. But first we have to get rid of those people because they're not good people.

Well, this is one of the things from East Berlin. And after I'd written The Handmaid's Tale, it got made into a movie. And we launched that movie in Berlin just as the wall was coming down. And we launched it twice. We launched it in West Berlin.

And the after party was talking about the acting, talking about the set design, talking about the usual things you talk about in movies when there aren't any other considerations. You're talking about how good a movie is it. Are you not? And then we went across to East Berlin and we launched it there and it was packed.

People watched it very intently and threw bouquets up on the stage afterwards and said, this was our life. And they didn't mean the outfits. They meant you couldn't talk to anybody because you didn't know if they were spying on you. So it was that sort of eerie feeling of things look normal, but who is really actually who? Prague was similar.

Similarly, rather shut down, and similarly, you didn't know just who was listening in. But when we got checked into our room in the hotel, the bellman said, pointed to the chandelier and put his finger to his lips. In other words, that's bugged. Whenever we wanted anything in the hotel room, we would just stand under the chandelier and say, I wonder why they haven't changed that light bulb?

And knock, knock, knock, there would be the light bulb. But after telling us about that, he then took us into the vestibule and said, want to change some dollars? Anyway, everything was sort of underneath. So we went in search of Kafka at that time in Prague, trying to find Kafka, because I'm a big fan of Kafka, and couldn't find any Kafka things.

Graham actually went to his addresses trying to find Kafka, knock on the door, Kafka, no, no, no, no, no, Kafka, no, goodbye, slam. So very verboten Kafka at that time. We then went back in 89. And already there were Kafka handkerchiefs, Kafka playing cards, Kafka tchutchkas were already beginning to appear. And then I went back a little bit later and it was full-blown Kafka. You couldn't...

You sort of couldn't avoid Kafka. There's a statue, there's an award. I've got the award. I've got the Kafka award. I was thrilled. And in the hotel where I was staying, they had a whole sort of display of sort of Kafka's pencil, Kafka's typewriter, Kafka's chewing gum, you know, just anything that they could collect was in there. So this is a story about two things.

Number one, about how some literary figures get repressed under certain kinds of regimes. Why Kafka? Because he wrote stories about impenetrable bureaucracies, the justice of which could not be figured out. And that was a bit too close to the bone, I suppose. And the other part of the story is how something can disappear, but then reappear.

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