A Subversive Family Memoir Tinged With Tragedy and Mustard Gas

New York Times

04-04-2025

Joe Dunthorne's new memoir, 'Children of Radium,' is an investigation into the life of his great-grandfather, Siegfried, who was involved in developing chemical weapons for the Nazis — which makes the book sound broadly unfun.
But Dunthorne's deeper purpose, as he trudges around Europe peering into holes and standing disconsolately outside old gas-mask factories where his great-grandfather might or might not have worked, is to shine a light on the absurdity of families, the unreliability of memoir and the general embarrassment of doing journalistic interviews, all of which make the gut punch of the book's final quarter more profound. And by acknowledging the form's limitations, Dunthorne's iteration rises to something genuinely, searingly meaningful.
Siegfried Merzbacher, Dunthorne's maternal great-grandfather, was Jewish. He was a chemist from a prosperous German family who, before World War II, developed household chemicals, in particular a brand of radioactive toothpaste called Doramad, which he gave to his young daughter, rendering her age at her death in 2017 — 92 — slightly surprising. It's in the wake of this death that Dunthorne, who had unsuccessfully tried to interview his grandmother about her family history (she 'recognized the tone of someone digging for trauma and her voice hardened'), decided to look more closely into the polished anecdotes passed down to him.
Dunthorne is a novelist and a poet, whose first novel, 'Submarine' (2008), is a larky bildungsroman, and his comic tone infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos.
After the war, Siegfried and his wife, Lilli, followed their son, Eugen, to America, where Siegfried spent the rest of his life working on his 2,000-page memoir. 'It wasn't until Eugen was in his 90s and living in a retirement community,' Dunthorne writes, 'that he decided to start translating the memoir so that the younger, English-speaking generations could also feel bad about not reading it.' That memoir is Dunthorne's window into his great-grandfather's epic emotional and factual evasions, as well as his scientific discoveries.
In 1926, he learns, following Doramad's commercial success, Siegfried was promoted by the chemicals company Auer to its 'protection department,' a euphemism for gas-mask technology that, by the mid-1930s, would see Siegfried and the Auer laboratories working under defense contracts with the German government.
The paper trail is secondary to what seems, at first, like Dunthorne's eccentric decision to visit the various towns, factories and chemical dumps where the fruit of Siegfried's research did the most damage. According to family lore, the Merzbachers fled Germany for Turkey in 1935, returning a year later to undertake a daring raid on their requisitioned house to rescue letters and heirlooms.
As Dunthorne investigates, this version of events falls apart, and he discovers not only that his family traveled from Munich to Istanbul on the Orient Express, but that for several years after relocating — indeed, until the Nazis revoked their German citizenship — Siegfried continued to work for Auer, which valued him so highly that it paid to ship the family's grand piano to Turkey.
Dunthorne has two central questions: What harm did Siegfried do? And how did he handle the guilt? Dunthorne buys a Geiger counter off the internet and goes to the German town of Oranienburg, the original site of the chemicals lab where Siegfried started work on mustard gas and its antidotes. (When the device starts beeping, Dunthorne and his wife walk very quickly back to the station.) He gets hold of a bunch of darkly hilarious old trade magazines with titles like War Gases and Die Gasmaske, and finds not only an article by Siegfried about carbon monoxide risks, but, in an issue from 1932, a photo of his infant grandmother sitting in an air-raid shelter.
In Turkey, Dunthorne travels with a guide to a Kurdish region where, in 1937, the Turkish government used chemical weapons purchased from the German government on the local population. And in the German town of Ammendorf, the site of 'Germany's leading mustard gas factory,' he tries to apologize to Erich Gadde, an elderly man whose family died of lung diseases associated with air pollution, by showing him the single, remorseful passage in Siegfried's memoir. The gesture backfires and the old man says, 'On behalf of all Germans, I apologize.' Dunthorne, mortified, writes, 'I should have understood that Erich would not accept remorse from a Jewish chemist.'
Most poignantly, Dunthorne uncovers the history of Siegfried's sister, Elisabeth, who, in 1939, fled Munich for Tel Aviv, leaving behind the friends and colleagues with whom she ran a Jewish orphanage — many of whom would be transported to Auschwitz. In 1965, while her brother was writing his impenetrable memoir, Elisabeth wrote a brisk book called 'Preservation in Decline,' in which she included tributes to her murdered friends. One had 'outstanding organizational talent' that was of 'great value during those difficult years.' Another 'stayed faithful to the orphanage until her death.'
In Dunthorne's hands, these disparate moments of bearing witness — sometimes in the most literal way — add up to a remarkable, strange and complicated story, full of the shame and humor a lesser memoir might have avoided.