He has run out of clean laundry, Michael Lerjen-Demjen apologises, tossing his holdall into the boot of my Volvo XC40 Recharge. Which, mercifully, has air conditioning; the rest of his olfactory travel souvenir I breathe away on the road to Spiez BE, where he lives. So where has he come from? “I was in Portugal,” the dishevelled man reports. Mountaineering in Portugal? “It can be done,” says Michael Lerjen-Demjen, but that wasn’t the reason for his trip. He had been visiting his company there. IT, in Lisbon. “Portugal is the tech hub,” the mountaineer (is he one or isn’t he?) informs me. “Lisbon hosts Europe’s biggest tech conference, and the Portuguese state supports it tremendously.” I am confused. “I can have a tech company in Basel and a branch of 30 people in Portugal, and people still think I’m a mountaineer,” he replies to my furrowed brow.
The invincible mountain guide
Indeed. Google his surname and various Lerjens appear. Many of them in Zermatt VS, serving as mountain guides and ski instructors. “In the sixth generation,” Michael Lerjen-Demjen confirms. He himself, at 25 in 2011, was the youngest mountaineer to have climbed all 82 four-thousand-metre peaks of the Alps. That earned him an entry in the imaginary history books of Swiss alpinism and fuelled the myth of the invincible mountain guide. Everyone wanted (and still wants) to go up the mountain with him. All over the world.
Climbing mountains, leading people up and back down again — from the start the boy was trusted to do it, and encouraged accordingly. I think aloud that this is simply what happens when you’ve inherited the mountain gene. But once again I’m wrong. “Much in my life was born of pain. Five years ago I had to come to terms with my father’s death,” Lerjen explains hesitantly. Do I know what that is like? No, I don’t — only that at the age of eight I wasn’t allowed to see my father when he died. Michael Lerjen-Demjen, however, had to look: Urs Lerjen had fallen 40 metres, his skull shattered. He had to identify, alone, the man who had taken his son up Switzerland’s highest mountains while he was still a teenager. Yet it wasn’t inherited — Urs Lerjen was Michael’s foster father, not his biological one: “I acquired the mountaineering gene myself; it was my way of fitting into this family.”
Michael Lerjen-Demjen also very quickly developed a feel for the mountain. He is sensitive, intuitive, down to earth; the challenge suits him. Was he ambitious? Is that why he set that record ten years ago? “I don’t know whether ambition is the right word in mountaineering,” he muses carefully. “I’d rather say you see how far you can go.”
At 16, Michael is already moving out of the family home, living here and there, but always with and beside the mountains. He is a good guide, one who understands people and responds to their wishes. Clients value that; most are regulars who book him again and again. Some of them are famous, but Lerjen-Demjen won’t say a word about that. After the four-thousander record it carries on like this for a few more years, but then he reaches a point he calls his Russi moment: “Suddenly I thought: do I really want to put myself through this again? I knew exactly how much I had risked up to that point, how much I had given — there was no more to give.” He bids farewell to extreme sport. But it is only the death of his mentor, his foster father, that drives him to actually build a second career. In the IT industry — developing apps, investing in start-ups, moving digital worlds.
Empathy for mistakes
In business, Michael Lerjen-Demjen profits from his life as a mountain guide: “In mountaineering, every decision is final. What I’ve learnt most over the past three or four years is to develop empathy for mistakes. If you make a mistake in mountaineering, you’re dead. But you also learn to handle pressure better; you have a high-performing body, your brain still works when you haven’t slept for two days, you don’t necessarily make downright stupid decisions. You have a little more buffer than everyone else.” And Lerjen-Demjen adds: “As a mountain guide, you lead. As a managing director, you lead. You have to lead a team. Lead your team to its maximum.”
He would make a perfect guru, a figurehead you hope will solve your own problems. But Michael Lerjen-Demjen profits above all himself from the people he takes out into nature: “Through mountaineering I’ve met an incredible number of good people. People who challenged me, who saw better than anyone else that I’m not stupid. And by lunchtime at the latest, you have to be able to hold an intellectual conversation.”
Avoiding fatal decisions
Does he, too, push himself to the edge of the strain zone? “No, you must never be at your maximum. You always have to keep a little in reserve, otherwise the next decision is fatal.” It all sounds very considered, very assured, very structured. I venture the thesis that this way of thinking ought to work just as effectively, and positively, in other areas of life. Lerjen-Demjen grins to himself. And replies: “As an extreme athlete you confront what has been. Even when relationships fall apart. You analyse in order to do better next time. You do it very quickly — things have to move forward, after all.”
It is the last thing I learn about my passenger before he gets into his Renault Koleos and drives home: “The human brain works like a computer’s hard drive. I’ve read all the books I could read, whatever interested me at the time. From Stefan Zweig to Russian crime novels.” Are they books to live by, I want to know right at the end. “A book to live by? No. Then you’re living someone else’s life. I believe that, the way I live, the way my life unfolds, no book is going to help me deal with it. Sooner or later I’ll write one myself.” I can hardly wait.
When we arrive in Spiez, my brain is churning; I would have many more questions for this man who appears so much at rest within himself. But our time is up. I draw my conclusion from the past two hours of stories: there are more than record-worthy reasons why his clients want to book Michael Lerjen-Demjen as a mountain guide again and again. He brings along a rucksack full of life wisdom, engages in conversation, has answers — but has no wish to preach.
This article appeared in MEN issue 1/21 (November 2021).
