Lithouse Podcast

When she began her masterpiece The Handmaid’s Tale in 1984, Margaret Atwood was living in West Berlin, just a stone’s throw away from the Wall to East Berlin, with its omnipresent secret police. The world behind the Iron Curtain clearly influenced her famous future dystopia, in which she set as a rule that she would not include any horrors that humans had not already done in some other place or time in history.On the other side of the Wall, author Jenny Erpenbeck grew up in the east, the German Democratic Republic (DDR), experiencing the country’s zenith as well as its disintegration and the victorious capitalist West just a few years later. In her award winning body of work, Erpenbeck has gone on to explore the complex history of Germany and greater Europe, where ordinary citizens become hostages to the grand ideas and ruptures of the times.Both Atwood and Erpenbeck are concerned with totalitarianism, with history and how it informs the present and the future, with our fragile n