Ausländer

Escape, exile, beginnings and endings   Book review by Dr Anne Sarzin

The word ‘Ausländer’, the eponymous title of this book, saturates this family story with meanings that evoke neutrality as well as negativity. The word’s literal meaning is that of someone from another country. But it is a slippery slope from there to the more pejorative meaning embedded in the word ‘foreigner’, and a step further to the antagonism, if not fear, aroused by the word ‘alien’.  The descent from ‘Ausländer’ to ‘alien’ traces exactly the geographic and psychological trajectories of author Michael Moritz’s father, Ludwig Alfred, who arrived in London as a 17-year-old student fleeing Nazi Germany’s persecution of the Jews.

For Michael’s father, a refugee in London without any resources or social support networks, his arrival in the United Kingdom was inauspicious. It was an unimaginably gargantuan leap from that situation to his son Michael’s elevation in 2013 as a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire, an honour conferred by Queen Elizabeth for his philanthropic work. Press reports have chronicled his generosity, which included a US$50 million donation for scholarships at his alma mater Oxford University, while pledging a further US$116 million to the University a few years later. Michael was equally generous to academic institutions in the United States, giving US$30 million to support basic-science PhDs at the University of California, San Francisco, among other munificent donations for scholarships at other educational institutions. In a Forbes interview, Moritz stated simply, ‘My parents were both given scholarships [in the United Kingdom], and the only way I could afford to come to the United States was on a student scholarship program. So, belatedly, this is our way of expressing our gratitude to people we didn’t know’.

Is this then the classic story of a refugee family putting down roots, working hard and achieving beyond their wildest dreams? In Michael’s recently published book, Ausländer: One family’s story of escape and exile, a far more complex story emerges, which he relates with admirable restraint, in most cases leaving it to the reader to fill in emotional responses we might associate with the cataclysmic events of World War Two that traumatised those who lived through those years, as well as successive generations affected by tumultuous events. The complexity emerges most strongly in Michael’s portrait of his father, Alfred, who was born in Munich, Bavaria, in 1921 and, after innumerable hardships, including incarceration on the Isle of Man as an ‘enemy alien’, returned to civilian life and, ultimately, became a professor of classics at Cardiff University. His wife, Doris, also experienced tragedy and displacement. Michael states, ‘The more I delved into my parents past, the more I had a sense that I was exploring the sources of inherited despair—conveyed unwittingly from one generation to another’.  A little later, he comments, ‘Both my parents carried the emotional shrapnel of their parents’ wounds’.

Inexplicably, after the war, Alfred made repeated trips back to Germany, which puzzled his son, as most Jews, at that time, avoided the European killing fields associated with the Nazi genocide of their families and people. Sadly, as was the case with many children in Holocaust households, Michael never posed important questions to either of his parents, which he later regretted, especially in the years after they died. He suggests that, as a young reporter, he had not yet learned the true art of interviewing and listening, ‘allowing silence to pry open the gates, of not intruding, of holding my breath, of maintaining eye contact’. Had he possessed the journalistic skills he later acquired, enabling him to conduct in-depth interviews at that time, it is doubtful whether his parents would have responded or opened up about the pain, deprivations, suffering and loss of their former lives. Not only did they want to get on with their lives, but they also wanted to remain ‘inconspicuous’, as ‘they knew the consequences of being singled out, of being labelled as different, of having a “J” stamped on their passports, of being stripped of jobs, possessions and relatives, and forced to wear a yellow badge on the left breast of their clothing’.

Fortunately, for their son and biographer, Michael’s sister Clare, after their mother died, sorted the documentation in their parents’ house and sent five large boxes of papers and photographs to his home in San Francisco. These contained ‘the entire heritage of what we knew about our shattered family’. Thus began Michael’s extensive research and profound reflections that underpin a saga revealing much about human nature, hatreds and conspiracies, inhumanity and endurance, and survival of the small remnant of a people despite overwhelming odds. Plunged in research that Michael hoped would help him understand his parents, he asked, ‘Where does one person end and the next begin?’

The massacre in Israel on 7 October 2023 affected Michael profoundly, as it did most children of survivors. Deep-seated transgenerational memories of past pogroms surfaced, lacerating in their intensity. It precipitated an evaluation of his fragile sense of belonging to the country where he lived and worked, the United States, any reassuring certainties eviscerated by the chants of white supremacists in Charlottesville, Virginia, ‘Jews will not replace us’. Disillusioned by the absence of moral outrage in a Trumpian universe, Michael felt detached from the place he had called home for so long. ‘As the present closed in, I became transfixed by all the yesterdays,’ he states. ‘I began to have a keener sense for why relatives of mine in the Germany of the 1930s, confronted with a nation moving against them, chose suicide over life.’

Thus begins Michael’s quest for security in a threatening and rapidly changing world, his search for a true ‘home’. He rejects the United States mainly because he deplores Trumpian politics and policies, although it is the country where he met his wife, Harriet, where his sons were born and where he built a brilliant career. Neither is it Wales where he was born and educated. The reader will be surprised to learn why, where and how he resolves this conundrum.

Michael Moritz has a spare and statistical style, consistently factual and rational, with statements bolstered by innumerable details. If he mentions a book, he states the publisher and date of publication, such is his attention to detail. Occasionally, glimmers of emotion and poetic evocations of places and people shine through, but only rarely. Above all, this is a thoughtful and honest appraisal of a family and, not least, of the author himself. In interrogating the erosion of ethics and the emergence of evils in Nazi Germany and in our own times, he is straightforward and direct in his assessments. He spares nobody, including himself, berating his failures and omissions. In a book that combines biography and autobiography, both are well served by the author’s powers of observation and candid judgements. At times disturbing in its documentation of the power and poison of Nazism, it is a moving picture of a family caught in the pincers of history and, miraculously, doing what survivors do best—starting again, striving courageously and cherishing life’s renewal.

 

Ausländer: One family’s story of escape and exile

Michael Moritz

Profile Books, London

2026