Review: ‘Ausländer,’ Michael Moritz’ family tale of escape, exile and death

The year is 1938 and two brothers, young Jewish immigrants from Germany who are at school in England, adapt the board of a Monopoly game as a birthday gift for their parents back in Munich.

London neighborhoods are papered over with the names of Munich streets and landmarks, the rule book is translated into German and the currency converted from pounds to deutschmarks, and the brothers painstakingly craft red and green houses from small bits of wood. 

The parents dutifully report spending evenings playing the game. But Kristallnacht is imminent, and so is the father’s transport to Dachau. As Michael Moritz, the son of one of those two young brothers, notes, “tragically, the ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ card supplied by my father and uncle went unredeemed.” 

The story is one of innumerable heartbreaking anecdotes that Moritz recalls in “Ausländer,” his beautifully-written narrative of his family’s escape, exile and, for a great many of its members, death in the Holocaust. 

He never knew his paternal grandparents, Max and Minnie, who played Monopoly and lost their lives in Germany in 1942. His maternal grandparents narrowly got out in time and spent the rest of their lives in Cambridge. Moritz’s own parents were the beneficiaries of better timing — Alfred as a scholarship student, Doris escaped the continent via Kindertransport — and Michael was born in Cardiff, Wales, in 1954. 

His own life story, familiar to many San Franciscans, included a career as a financial journalist, a phenomenally successful venture capitalist and, with the proceeds of those investments, the cofounder with his wife, Harriet Heyman, of Crankstart, the largest family foundation in San Francisco and among the largest in the United States. He is also the founder of San Francisco Standard, a daily online news site.

In fact, there is very little of Moritz’s own biography in this book, and that in itself helps make it such a compelling read. His focus is the family he gained and lost over centuries in Germany and ultimately through the Holocaust. Moritz never disappears from this story–there are continual references to the emotional toll imposed by his parents, who rarely shared their experiences with him and his sister – but he concentrates on the past. The result is an exhaustively researched saga of a family that seems to have been present in virtually every chapter of modern history. 

What led eventually to his plunge into family history, in his telling, was an out-of-the-blue diagnosis in 2006 of a rare form of blood cancer — an illness for which Moritz, as an Ashkenazi Jew, was particularly at risk. Despite his Welsh birthplace, his British accent, his Oxford degree, his U.S. passport and some 40 years in Silicon Valley, “I am a genuine, card-carrying member of an ethnic minority. I even have the scientific proof,” he notes wryly, citing his 23andMe genetic profile as well as his illness. It would be some 15 years before he began this book but, he notes, “I kept drifting towards the beginning.”

At the time of his diagnosis 20 years ago, he was led to expect that he’d be dead before age 70. He is now 72; in the years that have passed, while he has exceeded his prognosis, he has also been forced to come to terms with another ugly fact of life: The growing anti-semitism in America not created but unleashed by President Trump. With that, the pandemic, his mother’s death and the arrival of five large boxes “of what we knew about our shattered family,” Moritz undertook an exhaustive investigation into the lives and deaths of relatives, some of whom he met for the first time.

What he found is, to a large degree, familiar to any reader of Holocaust memoirs: a family of strivers and achievers, people who felt so comfortable with their assimilation into the German middle class that many felt impervious to the flood of hatred sweeping their country. Some, like his grandfather Max Moritz, had served in World War I, fighting for the Kaiser only to be exterminated by Hitler less than 30 years later — or, as Moritz says, following a line from Verdun to Dachau. 

What arguably distinguishes Moritz’s extended family is that, of those who escaped the Holocaust, it featured an extraordinary constellation of stars from academia, science, and (in his own case) business and public life. Moritz’s parents defy the usual classification only because they reject the label of “survivor;” they are, they insist, “British citizens who had once been refugees.” But whatever the nomenclature, there is nothing to protect them or their son from “the consequences of inherited despair.” 

It’s that inherited despair that inspires the most poignant reflections in “Ausländer.” Decades on, far too late to ask, Moritz wonders why his paternal grandparents — that Monopoly-playing couple — failed to read the signs and escape Germany in time. Was it complacency? Age? Or something as trivial as a refusal to accept a lower standard of living in England? 

He wonders about the relationship of his parents — his father, an introverted, noncommunicative professor and his mother, a woman seething with undirected rage. He reminisces about his own relationship with his parents. He is nostalgic for the early-morning walks he and his father took in the Bavarian Alps on summer holidays in the 1960s, pining “for the close relationship we never had.” He repeats his mother’s frequent insults:  “My mother could be relied on to cut to the quick,” he writes, particularly when she took aim at her closest relatives. 

Finally, there is Moritz himself, who never escapes his own keen scrutiny. For all his success, he is always an outsider — the ausländer of the title, the Jewish boy in Cardiff who was cast as Shylock in his high school class’s reading of “The Merchant of Venice,” the boy with the foreign surname among all the Joneses and Williamses. Even now, for all his billions of dollars, he is never entirely at ease nor at home. Unlike even those relatives who fled Germany, he lacks a heimat — the German word for a place “where you sense you belong.” 

While his father, perhaps inexplicably, brought his young family back to Bavaria in the ’60s to revisit his roots, for Moritz home is elusive, especially in Trump’s America. And so, at the end of his family memoir, Moritz comes full circle to announce that he has applied to receive German citizenship. (He later received it.)

His two sons have also taken out citizenship, creating the curious possibility of a Moritz enclave in the country that murdered their ancestors. It is, he recognizes, an imperfect choice. “It’s odd to feel like an outsider when everyone considers you an insider,” he writes. “But that’s how I feel eighty years after the Shoah.”