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New York Times
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Subversive Family Memoir Tinged With Tragedy and Mustard Gas
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.
New York Times
23-03-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
Saving the Paper, and Our Memory of the Pandemic
Old newspapers are a common sight in the art department at the New York Times Building. They lie around on tables and countertops. On a recent walk through the second-floor space, a visitor could see the issues of The Times printed on April 11, 2019, with the first-ever image of a black hole on the front page, and the paper from Dec. 19 of that year, with a large banner headline: Trump Impeached. 'These are just transitory in case a designer might need something,' said Deborah Auer, an executive assistant at The Times who has worked in the art department since 2006. The copies were just for reference, and would most likely end up in recycling. But Ms. Auer has a set of old papers that will stick around. She has led an effort to archive every print issue of The New York Times published in 2020, when Covid-19 changed the world. The collection, Ms. Auer believes, allows viewers not only to see The Times's coverage of the first year of a pandemic but to relive those days of fear and uncertainty as journalists and readers experienced them. 'You see the context of what the editors were thinking that day,' she said of the print medium. 'Digitally, it's gone. Here, it's here,' she added, gesturing to several issues from the archive. Five years ago, in late March 2020, Ms. Auer and almost every other Times employee were working from home. That was during a wave of illness that would ravage New York City for months. She would not walk the corridors of the art department again until August 2020. By then, a few other newsroom employees had returned to perform a hodgepodge of office tasks, including the practice of maintaining back copies of published newspapers. The Times keeps a rolling 12-month collection of its newspapers. Most papers older than that are tossed away to make room for new ones. Ms. Auer thought that something should be done to preserve the work her colleagues were doing. 'It was this huge historical event, but also there were ongoing banner headlines — there were major design explorations done,' she said, referring to the unorthodox front-page compositions that editors and designers used to convey the intensity of the death and upheaval. So she began her own collection, saving a few copies of the daily paper and recouping issues of The Times that had been printed between March and August. 'I just started organizing it,' Ms. Auer said. Soon, colleagues pitched in. It became clear to Ms. Auer that she was not just preserving a print record of the pandemic, but of journalism during a tumultuous year in American history. On May 25, George Floyd was killed by a police officer in Minneapolis, igniting weeks of unrest in cities across the country. President Trump was seeking re-election. In print, those stories weren't isolated. They were laid out as they happened: next to each other, at the same time. Jenni Lee, who at the time was a member of The Times's product and design team, is one of the colleagues who pitched in to help Ms. Auer preserve the collection. In an interview, she described herself as always collecting books, newspapers, magazines and intriguing examples of graphic design. 'I just saw helping Deb as a really hands-on way of understanding the importance of print,' said Ms. Lee, who is now a digital news designer. With a few editions of every day's newspaper set aside, Ms. Auer, Ms. Lee and a few other colleagues began the work of preservation. Newsprint is manufactured to be inexpensive and disposable, and it degrades easily. The art department bought acid-free Gaylord archival newspaper boxes, which keep out light and dust and minimize yellowing. They placed the best-looking copy of each issue unfolded in the boxes, about two weeks' worth of news per unit. The 2020 archive, which extends through January 2021 to include Mr. Trump's denial of the presidential election results and the riot at the Capitol, totals 24 boxes. Today they are stacked on a counter in an art room on the second floor. The collection's final destination is uncertain. Ms. Auer said she had thought about trying to place her 2020 papers with a library, an archive or a university. But more important to her than a dignified home is a purpose: She wants reporters, editors and designers at The Times to use the collection for reference and inspiration — to turn the pages of a harrowing recent past and remember the work of their colleagues. 'I'm going to get little gloves,' she said. 'Cotton protective gloves.'
