Ausländer

One Family's Story of Escape and Exile

Michael Moritz

A deeply moving and intimate story that reveals how the ravages of history that tore one family apart echo across continents nearly a century later.

"A memoir which ranks alongside The Hare with Amber Eyes."—The Times (London)

Sorting through papers and photographs after his mother's death, Michael Moritz uncovers the history of close family members murdered by the Nazis. Exploring their journey takes him into a past of tragedy, grief and the dark shadows cast on Jewish life by the Holocaust.

Leaving Germany as child refugees, Moritz's parents escape to London before settling in Cardiff, Wales, after the war. But the idea of being a stranger or outsider—Ausländer—haunts the family; running through Moritz's childhood and resurfacing in his adopted home of California, where he has become one of Silicon Valley's most celebrated investors.

"As the shadows of Trump lengthened, the refrain I had heard from my parents rang ever more loudly ... 'If it did happen somewhere, it can happen here.'"

By turns disturbingly relevant and a haunting elegy to his family heritage, Ausländer shows what can happen to anyone, anywhere, when ordinary people hand licence to despots.

Michael Moritz was born in Cardiff, Wales in 1954. A former TIME journalist and regular contributor to the FT, he is the author of several books, including The Little Kingdom, the story of Apple's years as a private business. He was a partner in Sequoia Capital for 35 years and led the business between 1995 and 2012, becoming one of the most successful investors of his generation. Together with his wife, the author Harriet Heyman, he formed Crankstart in 2001—a San Francisco-based foundation devoted to helping those who might otherwise be left behind.

Buy it now in print:

Buy it now in ebook:

Endorsements & Reviews

"In Ausländer—which is German for 'outsider'—Moritz interweaves his own memories of growing up in postwar Cardiff with his investigations into his parents’ and grandparents’ lives in Nazi Germany—'the lives of those gone before.' But the real accomplishment of Ausländer is the way Moritz shows how 'inherited despair' gets handed down the generations. The result is a book that stands alongside Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes and Philippe Sands’s East West Street as a deeply personal immersion into the horrors of the Holocaust." The Times (London)

"The best memoirs are deeply personal but connect to the universal. By not straying far from an emotional centre, they can illuminate the present with a far greater urgency than more sweeping accounts. Ausländer, a family memoir from Silicon Valley investor Michael Moritz, more than meets this mark. Thanks in no small part to Moritz’s brilliance as a writer, Ausländer's emotional power and broader relevance reverberate long after the final page." The Financial Times

"Ausländer casts a unique shaft of light into the darkest years of European history, and a profoundly moving, personal story of disaster and triumph unlike any other you will read." Andrew Marr, author of The History of Modern Britain

"When Michael Moritz was diagnosed with a genetic disease, it launched him on a bracingly honest search into his heritage. It's an inspiring and unsettling family and religious tale, but also something larger: a guide to how we all struggle to figure out what we must embrace and what we want to banish from our past." Walter Isaacson, New York Times bestselling author of Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, Albert Einstein, The Code Breaker, and Leonardo da Vinci

"Michael Moritz's career as a tech investor has been astoundingly successful, a classic version of the American Dream. Yet this powerful memoir is focused on his Ashkenazi Jewish roots and his enduring sense of being a 'foreigner,' whether growing up in gritty South Wales or reaching the top in glamorous Silicon Valley. Alienated by recent political developments on both sides of the Atlantic, he articulates a sense of homelessness that many readers will recognize. Once a journalist, he writes with elegance but also with disarming candour." Niall Ferguson, Milbank Family Senior Fellow, the Hoover Institution, and author of The House of Rothschild

"A magisterial act of filial piety. Michael Moritz encodes and decodes his emotional DNA —and what that means for his reading of the world now. It is rare to be invited to see our world so fully through someone else's eyes." Neil MacGregor, former director of the British Museum and the National Gallery