Ladies and gentlemen, it gives me huge pleasure to introduce Michael Moritz, best known as an investor and a philanthropist, leader of the very successful, hugely successful company Sequoia in Silicon Valley, and an early investor in some of the big tech companies like Cisco, Yahoo, Google, PayPal, YouTube, that Michael and his company identified early on in their lives and have gone on to be part of the fabric of the world.
But Michael is also a journalist. I call him a former journalist. He's still a journalist, still writing articles for the Financial Times. He's the author of several books on business and leadership, including the first history of Apple, a book on leadership with Sir Alex Ferguson, and a new book out, separate to the one we're about to discuss, again with Alex Ferguson, which we'll come on to later.
But it turns out with this book, Auslander — the word means outsider in German — that Michael is capable of something entirely different. This is a memoir of his family, a German family with Jewish roots, some of whom escaped in the 1930s, but many of whom didn't. And this really is quite a remarkable piece of writing. It's been compared in the Times to 'A Hideous Strength'... 'A Hideous Strength' with 'The Amber Eyes'. And it's a similar memoir of childhood and family. And on behalf of Clifton and myself, can I say what a pleasure it is, Michael, to be here with you and to talk about such a remarkable book. And I suppose my first question, which comes out of this book, is: you've spent your life in some ways studying the motivations of others, as a journalist, as an investor. And here you're turning the lens on yourself and your own family. Can you tell us a bit about how that came about?
Well, first of all, thank you for having me here. And thank you all for coming. It was completely accidental. I never set out to write this book. And it was a collision of coincidences that eventually made me put pen to paper, and three things happened. First of all, my mother died shortly before her 96th birthday. Second, my sister, who lives in Britain, cleared out the house, and there were the inevitable rummage sale of family papers and documents and some letters. And this was not the Rothschild archives, I can assure you. It arrived in California in four small cardboard boxes and a few photograph albums.
And then COVID occurred, and I suddenly found that I had a lot more time on my hands than normal because I wasn't commuting, I wasn't traveling, and the days were longer, and Harriet, my wife, and I were in the fortunate position of not having kids at home and not having elderly relatives to look after. So I had more time on my hands, and I started going through these. And I knew, obviously, the general arc of my family story. It's the atmosphere in which I grew up. But I didn't know any of the details. And it's the details that warm a journalist's heart, anyway, as you're pursuing a story. And I started going through these documents and discovering all these little tiny tidbits that I had no idea about, that were brand new to me. And I started making notes.
And then I took out a subscription to the pro version of ancestry.com. And after that, I was doomed. It was the road to perdition. And it started by looking at the names of family members to find out the normal sorts of details. And then, in these online digital archives that we can all access, whether it's ancestry.com, to a lesser extent Wikipedia, or the Arolsen Archives, or some of the archives in Germany, the real treasures are the footnotes. And the footnotes then start you off. They lead you on a journey to other places and other archives. So I got completely captivated and engrossed by this mystery tour of what really happened to some of the figures and the names that I'd heard in my childhood, but the particulars of which I just didn't know.
And your parents had left Germany in the '30s as children, as teenagers. And how did they get to Cardiff, where you were born?
So my father — both my parents grew up in Germany. My father grew up in Munich, and my mother up in the Rhineland area, which is in the rural area near the Dutch border. And both sets of my grandparents obviously realized the darkness that was enveloping Germany by the mid-to-late 1930s, and wanted their young teenage children to be safe. So they arranged, in both cases, with considerable difficulty, to get them to school in Britain. And my father came in as a 14-year-old in 1937, and then my mother came on the Kindertransport — this system organized by this wonderful guy called Nicholas Winton, who rescued via train about 10,000 Jewish children from continental Europe and brought them to safety — and she arrived in 1939. And they met after the war, actually, and my father was an academic, and in the early 1950s he got a job at the University of Wales in Cardiff and accepted a job teaching classics. And that's where the two of them made their lives and settled down and lived until the end of their days.
I want to go back to your grandparents, because in your book you write about the two sets of grandparents and their very different experiences. And your mother Doris's parents, Sally and Louise, is that right?
Came over to England with your mother. Your father Alfred's parents, Max and Minnie, brought Alfred over, your father, brought over, then they went back. And this is what, in the mid-1930s. So we're talking about: why did they go back, and why didn't they try and escape?
So my father's parents were eventually exterminated, my grandfather. And the book concentrates just on a few characters. I mean, obviously in any family you have all these siblings and brothers and sisters and dangling participles that you never want to see at the weddings. But I concentrate on a couple. So my paternal grandfather was called Max. He'd grown up in a little village in 19th-century Germany. And after Bismarck liberated things somewhat for the Jews, he became the first Moritz ever to have a higher education, became a lawyer in Bavaria. And then when World War I broke out, volunteered for the German army and served in the German army during World War I, including surviving the Battle of Verdun, which is the costliest to this day battle in human history. He went back to Bavaria, resumed his career as a judge, had great faith in the state, like thousands of other Jews who had served in the German army during World War I.
And I think he, from what I can make out, I think he liked the security, predictability of being a civil servant in the judiciary, the guaranteed pay, the prospect of a pension, the belief in the German state.
And he would be what, 60 or something?
And by the time war broke out, he was 60.
And as you said, he brought my father and then he brought my uncle to safety at school here. And on both occasions returned to Germany and then found that he couldn't get out till too late. But it's hard for all of us to empathize looking back at history about, you know, what eventually happened. So I think people like him went through these various stages of denial. First of all, there was the faith in the state. Second, that this madman — the storm would blow over and sanity would eventually return. Third, there were personal worries: doesn't speak a word of English, doesn't know how to support himself, doesn't have any real means of visible support if he and his wife came to Britain. And then, if you put yourself in the shoes of a Jew even in 1937, 1938, 1939 Germany, the notion of industrialized killing factories that had never existed before was inconceivable. The fact that six million Jews, millions of other people became part of this industry of death, utterly inconceivable. So that was an element as well. And then I came across some plaintive letters at the end of them trying to get out, trying to get into America, etc. But so that was the story of my paternal grandparents.
My other grandfather, whom I knew — they lived in Cambridge after the war — was Sally, abbreviated version of Solomon. And he was born very almost blind, and when I knew him, he was completely blind. But he came from a line of, you know, one of the occupations that were permitted for Jews in 19th-century Germany were, you know, there was peddling and leather goods and those sorts of things, but also butchery and cattle trading. And his parents had owned a butcher shop and engaged in some cattle trading, and he had a bunch of pasturage and raised cattle and made a middle-class living from it.
And I think he had — I'm not sure that he was a great believer in the state, even though he felt Germany, in his words, was his Heimat, his real emotional homeland. I don't think he was starry-eyed about the state. He didn't have a pension. He was more entrepreneurial than my —
Did he make a success of his life in England?
I'll come to that in a moment, if I may.
And then eventually got out, and he and his wife, my grandmother Louise, they arrived in England right after my sister — on the Wednesday before the Sunday when war broke out. So they got out by the skin of their teeth. And to answer your question, he was blind, didn't speak a word of English, felt completely useless here. Eventually, and I don't know that he'd smuggled out some money apparently, I learned from my mother. I don't know how much money, but he and my grandmother ran a little boarding house in Cambridge. And I remember it because that's where we used to go and stay, and they lived in one room on the ground floor, and there was a kitchen, and they had a bedroom, and then there were six rooms that they rented out, and there was just one bathroom in this house for everybody. And so they sort of scrimped and saved and made ends meet.
And then when I was going through these papers, I discovered that he'd left an estate. This is 1972. His estate when he left was in stock, and about — accumulated about 75,000 pounds. Completely startling to me. And a lot of money, and it listed the stocks, you know, as British Petroleum and Shell and Marks and Spencer's and all the British —
That's where you get it from.
And no, he and I never talked about it, but I do remember after breakfast, when we used to go to visit them, my grandmother would first page in the newspaper with the stock prices, and she'd read out the stock prices to my blind grandfather. So, yeah.
Extraordinary. And then moving on to your parents, who come across so vividly in this book. I mean, first of all, you describe them both — your parents carrying the emotional structure of their parents' wounds, and this applies particularly to your father, I guess. And one gets this very strong sense that they weren't really able, capable of looking inwards, of talking about — I mean, you say in the book that they barely spoke about the past, they barely acknowledged it. How did the memories of their parents and their wider family play into your childhood?
They were like a lot of — they had all these conflicting impulses. You know, their community in Cardiff, although it was partly around the university, it was also intensely around their synagogue and the other refugees from Europe. That was — they had a shared experience with these people. But this was also a generation where they wanted to assimilate, be accepted as Britons. That was part of it, but I think the bigger thing was this was the 1950s, the 1960s, where going to see a psychiatrist was considered beyond the pale. So there was no way that they even knew about how to ask for help. And I think they also had a fear of talking to people because of being deemed as mentally unable or mentally unfit if they went to go and see a psychiatrist. So it was all suppressed, but it was in the air and atmosphere of the house, pretty consistently, even though it was not a topic of conversation. It was there and expressed, I think, a lot through their general approach to life, which was always — you know, these were people who cherished stability. So any sense of unrest, whether it came from the left or the right or strikes, unsettled them. Protests unsettled them. And they had this great yearning for — [they were] very patriotic, but also didn't go into any of the details about what they themselves had experienced.
There's this fascinating scene in your book when you're watching the television with your father, and Albert Speer, Hitler's architect, comes on, having escaped Nuremberg and so on, and is in London promoting his memoirs on the TV, and your father sits impassively, doesn't comment.
He doesn't seem to raise any kind of — at some level he does, but he doesn't seem to raise any external response from him.
No, you had this professorial-looking figure on the television who didn't look that different from my father. They were about the same age. My father, who lived in his mind and had a very, very — no, I remember that quite vividly, and he was doing what he did every evening, was smoking his pipe and doing the Times crossword and half watching television and listening with half an ear to not miss anything of what Speer said, but no comment whatsoever.
Mhm. Now, tell me about your mother. She had this sense of impending doom, the way you describe it, I think.
Well, my mother is what war planners, you know, in the Defense Department here or in the Pentagon would call a target-rich environment, and every writer's sort of delight. But she had a great sense of foreboding and doom. And I remember as a kid, you know, going down to get some cornflakes or something before going off to school, and she'd have the radio on and be listening to the news, but inevitably it'd be morning: 'Have you heard the news? It's terrible. It's terrible. And let me tell you what happened last night or while we've been asleep. There was this coach crash in the Alps, killed 50 children. It was the worst flooding in Bangladesh you ever saw in your life. There are tens of thousands of little children dying of starvation in the Sudan. The railways are on strike. There are no newspapers today, and it's going to rain for the next 10 days.' That was my mother. So light did not shine into her life very much.
And what happened after the war? Did they go back to Germany? Was it Nanny you wrote about? Good Anna. Tell me about Anna and her role in your parents' life.
It was very, very different experiences. So I remember we did one little trip to my mother's hometown. And we were in this — my parents had a second-hand camper van, and for some reason, I don't know what propelled it, maybe it was curiosity, and we went to this town, and my father was driving, and my mother was pointing about where to go. And we're circling a square, and suddenly my mother is crouching down with her head below the dashboard, yelling at my father, 'Get out. Get out. Get out. Get out. Drive away.' And that's what we did.
Contrast that with my father, who, as I mentioned earlier, had grown up in Munich. And like a lot of bourgeois families, you know, my grandparents had a housekeeper who did all the sort of manual work around the house that we now do with washing machines and all the rest of that stuff. But these ladies also acted as surrogate mothers, nannies. And there was this lady whose name was Anna, whom I got to know as a child. And both my father and my uncle were closely attached to her. They just felt that she had played a very big part in their lives and in the memories of their lives and of times that were secure and of times that were warm. And this lady, Anna, had married a railway man, and they had built a wooden house in a little village in the Allgäu in Bavaria, and had taken in my grandparents and my father and my uncle in the summers leading up to World War II, at a time when almost all of their neighbors refused to house any Jews in the summer. And both of them were ferociously anti-Nazi, both Anna and her husband. And so until she died, both my uncle and my father felt this great kinship with her.
And we went back to Bavaria. I remember as a kid we went back there three times on summer holidays when I was a little boy, staying in Anna's house. And I think it was a place they remembered — they remembered the little kitchen with the oilcloth tablecloth and the wood-burning stove and playing cards. They spoke of happier times, safer times.
Yeah. Committing an act of great bravery in what she did for the —
And she was one of the righteous.
Yeah. And you say in your book how you divide people up, even to this day, into those who might be resisters, might be collaborators, might be those who remain silent.
I found I was doing this. I don't know if any of you have watched this marvelous series called 'A French Village'. If you haven't, you're in for — I hear you need to lose 36 hours of your life, or you're in for a treat. It's all about a French village that was taken over by the Germans during World War II, and it's from the time of occupation to the time of liberation, and the story is told on the way in which the villagers dealt with the occupying Nazis. Some — but the majority stayed silent. A very few resisted. And a whole bunch of them collaborated. And I watched this during COVID. I watched it while I was beginning to think about and researching and writing the book. And so I was on all these Zoom calls during COVID, you know, these business calls, and inevitably there are all the thumbnails across the top of the screen. And I'm going left to right and I'm saying to myself: silence, resister, collaborator, collaborator, collaborator, collaborator.
And tell me about your childhood in Wales, and I want to talk about your life starting there. The book is called 'Outsider'. Tell me about life as a young boy in Cardiff from a German Jewish background. How did it shape you? And how have you revisited the aspects of your childhood through this book in terms of what you became?
I think most children, unless they're exceptional, want to be like other children of their time. They want to fit in. They want to be accepted. They don't want to be seen as a pariah. And obviously when I was four or five years old, I wasn't aware of being different. And then as I got older and we had to go to synagogue on Saturday mornings or were kept out of school for the Jewish holidays, then it — but oddly enough, the thing that always hit me was a very, very small thing in the grand scheme of things, which was the annual arrival of the Cardiff and South Wales telephone directory. And the Cardiff and South Wales telephone directory probably hasn't changed very much, although the city is much more multicultural than it used to be. So I'd start flicking through it, and there were the Davises — pages and pages of Davises and Edwardses and Hugheses and Lloyds and Morgans and Morrises, and everyone apparently with the same last name. And then I'd go to the M's thinking, 'Oh, this year, please, please, please.' And I'd go through the M's, and there we are with one Moritz in the Cardiff and South Wales telephone directory. And to me, for some reason, that was — here we were, it was advertised to the whole community of people who are obviously thumbing through their telephone directories.
Yeah, trying to see if there's one Moritz in there that they can go and target. And that to me really highlighted — and then, you know, these are modest, very, very mild slights. Very mild. I don't want to come out and — and I had a good childhood in Cardiff. I don't want to whine or complain or anything. But it's these little things that sting and last. So I'd frequently get, 'Moritz. Now, what kind of name is Moritz then? It's not a Welsh name, is it?' And so this is a key — 'No, it's not German, is it?' And for the longest time I was, 'Oh, no, no, it's not German. It's Swiss. It's Austrian. It's anything but German,' because of course the one thing worse than being a Jew in Cardiff in the '50s and '60s was being German.
And so there were — well, it was always those sorts of things. Or there was an incident once at school where the English teacher thought, 'Ah, we're going to read Merchant of Venice, and I'm going to do the casting, and I think it would be ideal, Moritz, if you play Shylock.' So it was all these little twists. And I put this story in the book. I didn't name the guy. He's dead, and he can't fight back. He was the Secretary of State for Wales, comes to Silicon Valley. This is decades later, it's 40 years later, early 2000s, and you know, it's a boondoggle. It's another Welsh Assembly boondoggle where they have 25 people going on a booze cruise to Silicon Valley to come back and write a report about how South Wales can transform itself into Silicon Valley. And we're sitting down to this lunch in San Jose, and this rotund Secretary of State says to me, 'So, Michael then, what's a nice Jewish boy like you doing in Silicon Valley?' And everything came flooding back from growing up in Wales.
Yes. Yes. Let's move forward. Tell me about your life. You left Wales, you went to Oxford, you then wanted to go into journalism. Tell me how that led to America, where you spent the last 50 years of your life.
I hope it's not the last 50.
That's right.
I caught the journalist bug when I was at Oxford and was determined to go and work for the Times or Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, one of the big Fleet Street broadsheets. And then discovered that there were very — this was mid-1970s, strict trade union rules where the journalists' union wanted to protect its apprenticeship scheme, where 16-year-olds were hired and could make their way to the big newspapers. And so they had a rule forbidding college graduates from going directly from college to work on a broadsheet on Fleet Street. So instead you had to go and work for two or three years on a small provincial paper, which is not something I wanted to do. And then I had written to a whole bunch of editors of Fleet Street papers, and there was this gentleman called Bill Deedes, who was in journalism circles a sort of legendary —
figure. And he was the editor of the Daily Telegraph at the time, and he very kindly saw me in his office. It was right above Fleet Street at the time. And we chatted, and he said he couldn't do anything for me, and if he were in my shoes, the one thing he had regretted in his life, having gone to America as a fairly young man on some sort of scholarship for a few months or a year or something, he said his lifelong regret was not going to America, and that I should go to America. And that sort of planted a seed in my bonnet, and eventually, so very quickly after that, because I didn't have work permits or anything, I applied for scholarships, university scholarships in America, and I was lucky enough to get one, and then stayed in America after that.
So, he kind of changed the course of your life.
