Eliza Apperly: Gender, Juggling, and Reciprocal Pluralism
German editor Richard Sharman and Co-Editor-in-Chief Liv Bonsall speak to Cambridge graduate and writer, editor, producer, and cultural programmer Eliza Apperly about her interdisciplinary ethos, the ethics of free speech and engaging with the German language.
“I'd say unifying factors of my work, whether it's journalism, criticism, production for a podcast or a live event, are storytelling and dialogue”. Eliza Apperly takes a break from telling these stories to tell us hers. Joining us from Italy, where she spent the winter lockdown, she reminisces on how her career has taken her from Cambridge to Paris, Rome, London and finally Berlin, where, in normal times, she now works as a writer and producer.
How did Cambridge help her get where she is now? “[The MML course is] so interdisciplinary in nature, as you know. It's not strictly only language learning. You also get so many opportunities to study literature, history, art history, politics, philosophy; That's definitely stayed with me, because the kind of portfolio of work I do now is also quite interdisciplinary”, Apperly remarks. For her, the year abroad was crucial in beginning to gain experience. Interning in an auction house in Paris, and alternating as a trainee culture reporter for Reuters and a news assistant to the Guardian’s Italy correspondent in Rome, were formative experiences. “All of those working experiences, and particularly my journalistic work in Rome, were really useful and important for me, and ultimately, they coalesced in what I do now, in that my work often bridges cultural and political questions.”
Apperly, moderating an event with author JJ Bola at the International Literature Festival, Berlin.
Apperly’s interest in journalism started early; she envisioned a journalistic career path from the age of twelve. The move to Germany, however, was by no means part of the plan. Following her Master’s in art history at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she briefly worked as an editorial trainee for The Art Newspaper, and then began to look for permanent positions around London. “Nothing was really coming up; there were a lot of short term gigs, part time jobs, and I was really hungry for a permanent contract. Then I got this job offer at a publishing house - Taschen - in Berlin. It was definitely a horizontal move, not only geographically, but also out of journalism and into publishing”.
But perhaps the biggest change was a linguistic one. Apperly was lucky to have taken a few evening German classes while studying for her Master’s, and to have taken a very informal German crash course with a friend’s dad before she moved. “But the bulk of my German learning was definitely a fairly panicked process once I landed in Berlin”, she laughs. “I was very nervous at certain points before making the move because I had limited language skills, and I didn't know anyone in Germany, let alone in Berlin. But I do think having had a year abroad gives you a kind of basic confidence that you can relocate, that you can navigate a new system”. She loves the language, too. For her, it’s been a real joy to learn, and she still relishes day to day life there, eight years later.
We discover that novelty certainly isn’t a problem for Apperly. She enjoys having an interdisciplinary ethos in her work, in which she can find connections between different fields and explore how ideas play out in different contexts. European current affairs are a regular current of her work. “Obstacles and opportunities for cohesion and integration within Europe, particularly post-Brexit, are areas that I find very motivating and very important”.
Apperly visiting the Goethe Haus in Weimar.
Otherwise, her interests in gender and gender equality, as well as visual culture, stand out, especially “the question of how we are reappraising historic female artists”. It is significant, then, that among the many famous artists she has interviewed, notably Christo, David Hockney and Sebastião Salgado, she chooses the Cuban-American Carmen Herrera as her most memorable interviewee.
“At the time, she was starting to get major exhibitions and to sell a lot of paintings, but for decades, she'd been working without any institutional or market recognition. She sold her first work when she was 89 – and gender was certainly part of that struggle. She was not only a woman, but she was also a woman working in geometric abstraction, which was broadly received as unfeminine”.
“When we met, she was 97; she was physically very frail. But she still had such wit and verve and determination. I found her a really powerful and memorable example of perseverance, of doing what you love, and of not being overly dependent on external validation. To me she was a real paradigm of wise and graceful success. She was obviously delighted with her late-found success, but she said very clearly that there was only so much that it could mean when so many people in her life were no longer alive to share in it. That prioritisation of human connection, that sense of the grand scheme of things – combined with her tenacity and talent – is something that I really, really admired”.
With her fingers seemingly in so many pies all at once, we’re interested to know what an average day looks like for Apperly, or whether that even exists. She says that while there is a lot of variation from week to week, she tries to structure her day with a morning routine of sport and coffee, and dedicate different sections of her day to different projects. “I find that I'm at my most productive and balanced if I have clear segments of activity” she says, adding that it is important for her to balance independent, solitary work with more collaborative tasks. In addition, she always tries to keep an eye on the future, making sure to maintain contacts, keep watch on international developments and cultivate potential opportunities. The pandemic has predictably thrown her off balance somewhat, and one of Apperly’s New Year’s resolutions was to build in at least half an hour of free reading time every day, away from the constant doom-scrolling, and preferably without a screen at all.
Apperly (right) with some Intelligence Squared colleagues, Berlin.
We shift the focus onto Intelligence Squared, the debate and discussion platform founded in London in 2002, and co-launched by Apperly in Berlin in 2017.
Since then, she and the Berlin team have put on debates on topics including big data, monogamy, the European Green Deal, and EU-China relations. Speakers include Carole Cadwalladr, Nick Clegg, Timothy Snyder, human rights activist Anastasia Lin, political activist Flavia Kleiner, and Director of the Digital Freedom Fund, Nani Jansen Reventlow. Apperly remarks that the dynamism of the debate format is something fresh for German audiences, who are more used to “slightly drier, slightly more formal panels”. For her, the debates are a vibrant corrective to the “filter-bubble myopia” that social media algorithms allow us to fall into so easily. Intelligence Squared provides a structured format that allows people to experience different perspectives on complex and sometimes controversial issues in an environment of mutual respect.
Nick Clegg speaking at an Intelligence Squared Germany debate about the European Union.
Producing the debates is a complex, delicate act of choreography. “We want our audiences to expand and interrogate their views on a given subject. We want them to come away with new nuances and to be exposed to perspectives they might not be in their regular on-or off-screen silos. At best, I think this model can really build openness, critical thought and compassion. At worst, it can entrench polarisation. So I’m obviously highly aware of our responsibilities as a platform – both in terms of who we do not invite, and who we do.”
Apperly speaks of her commitment to diversifying the pool of speakers and her satisfaction in bringing younger and non-male voices to the stage. “A lot of my work and effort goes into ensuring that we do not only see the same pale, male, establishment faces.” She cites, too, past instances where the team has decided against obvious speaking candidates who had shown a tendency to shut down - rather than genuinely nurture - democratic discussion.
This speaks to, and is in line with, the principle of “reciprocal pluralism” – an idea Apperly developed while researching an article she wrote for The Atlantic in 2019 on the German far-right’s culture war. “The AfD (Alternativ für Deutschland, Germany’s foremost far-right party) repeatedly wields the right to freedom of expression to legitimise their extremist views - and to characterise German media and culture as exclusionary and anti-constitutional. I was trying to find some kind of solution, some kind of reliable principle, to that democratic bind, and I landed on this idea of “reciprocal pluralism”. In other words,“You can engage”, she states, “if you’re going to let others engage. But if you’re using your platform to autocratic ends, or to the detriment or disqualification of others’ freedom, then you shouldn’t be on stage”.
We’re keen to explore this idea further via another story Apperly reported on last year for The Guardian. In it, she spoke to Hilke Wagner, Director of the Albertinum museum in Dresden, birthplace of the anti-Islamic movement PEGIDA[1]. At the time, 27% of the city’s population were voters for the far-right party AfD. In such a context, Apperly remarks, it would be much less viable for the museum to follow the example of some cultural institutions in more liberal cities like Berlin and unilaterally refuse to engage with AfD supporters and affiliates. Instead, when Hilke Wagner received backlash and vitriol from the AfD and its supporters, much of it personal, she opened up the museum – and herself – to constructive discussion, including one-on-one phone conversations.
“She had a strong capacity, which I also think is very important, to distinguish between individuals and collective movements, and to see the extent to which individuals had been absorbed into a movement that became more extremist than their own opinions”.
Apperly shares Wagner’s belief in the innate human potential to grow and change. “I think that part can get a little lost in our conversations about the far-right. Of course, there are always individuals who are burrowed down the tunnel of right-wing radicalism with no hope or intention to find their way out. But I think many people found affinity with the AfD from an emotional rather than ideological place, especially in former East Germany, where many people felt very unheard for a very long time. And emotions, as we know, are always in flux. The sense or absence of recognition is such a huge factor here”.
With just a few minutes left to the interview, we change the subject back to the situation of the pandemic. For someone used to being so busy, how has it affected her motivation? She laughs. “I really appreciated this question as well, because it made me really think about, how am I staying motivated? And the answer is, [I’m] not always.”. She struggled throughout January in particular when Germany entered the third lockdown (“or is it two extended, I’m not really sure”), and found herself starting and ending her working day later than normal.
Exercise has helped. She’s taken up juggling again – “it really gets the synapses buzzing!” – and has discovered bird-watching. “I’m so lucky to have a green view in Berlin and I have found it incredibly soothing to pick up my binoculars and watch the birds. I really knew so little about birds before. Now I recognise a few different species - and birdsongs! - and that different mode of attention, waiting, watching, seeing the birds go about their regular business, has provided me with some of the more beautiful moments of this really tough year.”
Apperly, caught in a rainstorm on Tempelhofer Feld.
Our time is up, and it feels like we’ve come full circle in our discussion, which has proved, for us at least, a fascinating and genuinely entertaining insight into the life of a Cambridge graduate, who has stepped out into the adult world, and found their own path.
Learn more about Eliza Apperly on her website.
[1] PEGIDA stands for “Patriotische Europäer gegen die Islamisierung des Abendlandes”, or “Patriotic Europeans against the Islamisation of the Occident”
