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The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Children of Radium by Joe Dunthorne review – complicity, courage and cowardice examined in a slippery marvel
Joe Dunthorne tells us he originally envisaged this book as a story of his grandmother's childhood escape from the Nazis; the reality turned out to be more complex. Narrated with the twists and turns of a detective story, Children of Radium is a family memoir that records the mazy path by which the prize-winning Welsh novelist discovered just how little he knew of his German Jewish heritage. His journey begins with 'a foot-high block of A4': a 2,000-page unpublished memoir by his great-grandfather, Siegfried, a Jewish scientist who worked at a secret chemical weapons laboratory near Berlin before he and his family left for Turkey – not the panicky flit Dunthorne imagined, but a relocation bankrolled by employers with plans for what he could yet do. Hunches, tip-offs, false trails and dead ends abound in Dunthorne's quest to determine how much Siegfried knew – and when – about his work's murderous potential after he was reassigned in 1928 from toothpaste manufacture by his firm, a specialist in radioactive products. Siegfried's memoir is circumspect, and the hunt for answers isn't straightforward: not only was the site of Siegfried's lab heavily bombed, but Dunthorne's mum also chucked his papers into the recycling while clearing out her late mother's flat. An eye for that kind of comedy, honed in Dunthorne's novels – the best known is Submarine (2008), filmed by Richard Ayoade – brightens a quixotic voyage into the heart of 20th-century darkness. The trail leads through libraries, museums and medical records, but also less obviously writer-friendly locales: in Germany, he wriggles belly-first into a fenced-off radioactive site in a clandestine hunt for soil to test for gas traces; and in Turkey, Dunthorne blags his way through military checkpoints in the company of a formerly jailed member of the Kurdistan Workers' party, having learned that one of the letters he has from Siegfried might hold evidence of culpability for a massacre in an eastern mountain town prior to the second world war. Dunthorne's voice – affable, warm, wry – casts a spell right from the book's dedication ('This book is for – and, arguably, by – my mother'), making light work of tricky ground as he weaves fact and guesswork, reading and testimony. Despite everything, humour is never far away. When, in Germany, he suddenly feels the need to apologise to an elderly interviewee for Siegfried's work with chemical weapons, the man demurs and instead apologises on behalf of all Germans to Dunthorne, a descendant of expatriated Jews; at which point the author apologises for putting him in the position where he felt he needed to apologise. It takes a special writer to generate embarrassment comedy from this material, but you come to feel that Dunthorne is probably the kind of author who is witty in his sleep: the Nazis didn't deploy poison gas on the battlefield, he says, because Hitler personally vetoed its use, 'creat[ing] the uneasy situation in which my great-grandfather's work might have been far more lethal without an intervention from Hitler', a line that manages to be heartfelt as well as undeniably comic. As discoveries and ambiguities mount, the book plays out as a tangled investigation of complicity, courage and cowardice, ceaselessly yo-yoing between potential indictment and mitigation. Dunthorne's instinctively jokey tone doesn't minimise the ever-present horror, yet he recognises, too, that the darkest aspects of his story are tricky to separate from the frisson of proximity, the fundamental thrill of the chase (one chapter ends: 'The real revelation came, several weeks later, via email...'). We catch his perverse sense of disappointment when his hard-won soil sample contains traces of everything but gas from Siegfried's lab. There's steady intrigue, also, in the unmistakable resonance of Dunthorne's decision to embark on an all-consuming pan-continental research quest while slap-bang in the middle of early fatherhood. It's also a kind of stealth post-Brexit narrative, as Dunthorne obtains German citizenship – an ambivalent reintegration by which the convenience of an EU passport is weighed alongside 'formal reconciliation with the country which had tried to systematically eliminate [his mother's] forebears'. Dunthorne recently told the Guardian how much he admired Laurent Binet's tricksy 2010 novel HHhH, a book that conspicuously shows its own working as it unreliably imagines its way into the Nazi era, and you can feel its imprint here. Children of Radium put me in mind, too, of Richard Flanagan's Question 7, another genealogical retracing that turns into a meditation on guilt, atrocity and unforeseen consequence. Dunthorne's tome is a humbler enterprise, keenly aware that the writerly ego can be led astray by an impulse to join the dots: witness the belated recognition that his focus might after all be entirely in the wrong place, thanks to a splendidly deflating comment from his mother, who wonders if Dunthorne should be writing instead about her great aunt – Siegfried's sister – who bravely oversaw a Munich children's home, caring for Jewish refugees amid rising persecution. By necessity, Children of Radium is piecemeal, inconclusive, full of pregnant silences, maybes and what ifs. Near the end, Dunthorne and his mother soak up memories in north London, where Siegfried spent his last days in a care home, regularly greeting his granddaughter and her boyfriend – the author's dad – with a meal of ox tongue. 'It speaks to a paucity of other research materials that I thought it worthwhile to cook an ox tongue,' Dunthorne tells us. He didn't know what to expect, and was alarmed when the length of flesh seemed to revive in the pan, 'writhing and flexing', refusing to stay put when prodded with a spoon, 'lifting the lid off the pot'. A metaphor, you can't help think, but it befits the procedures and conclusions of this slippery marvel that we can't quite say for what. Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne is published by Hamish Hamilton (£16.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
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.
Los Angeles Times
26-03-2025
- Science
- Los Angeles Times
What to do when family history is radioactive? Work around stonewalling relatives
After World War II, with support from Albert Einstein, Eugen Merzbacher entered the United States from Turkey to pursue graduate studies in physics at Harvard. There, the story goes, my father lent him his quantum mechanics notes, so Merzbacher could enroll in the course midyear. In a nice irony, Merzbacher would later author the standard textbook in that field. That a family friend survived to make this contribution was the result of an unusual confluence of luck and circumstances. In 1935, Merzbacher's industrial chemist father relocated his German Jewish family from the outskirts of Berlin to Ankara, Turkey's capital. 'We didn't flee. I never call us refugees. We were émigrés,' Merzbacher told me in a late-life interview, stressing the distinction. Siegfried Merzbacher, it seems, had received a well-timed job transfer just as the persecution of Jews in Germany was reaching a crescendo. Joe Dunthorne's discursive fourth-generation memoir, 'Children of Radium,' unpacks that move, while wandering across Europe and through decades of family lore. Based in London, Dunthorne is a poet and novelist whose debut novel, 'Submarine,' was adapted into a 2010 film. In the memoir, he carefully chronicles his great-grandfather's unsavory involvement in Nazi chemical weapons research and gas mask development. In the process, he raises familiar questions about the limits of his own quasi-historical enterprise. The memoir displays Dunthorne's gift for wry understatement and his doggedness as a researcher: he dug through archives, toted around a Geiger counter and even cooked food that his great-grandfather once consumed. Post-Holocaust memoirs are often quest stories, and Dunthorne juxtaposes his attempts to uncover the truth, or some approximation of it, with a fragmentary narrative of Siegfried Merzbacher's life. But the book's circuitous, meandering structure, including a major digression about one of Siegfried's sisters, tests the reader's patience. Epiphanies are sandwiched between near-irrelevancies and reportorial dead ends. As is typical, Dunthorne confronts gaps in the historical record — documents incinerated by bombs, removed by the Allies, even discarded by unsentimental relatives. Aggravating those gaps are distortions of memory and uncooperative key sources. Dunthorne's grandmother (Eugen Merzbacher's sister) essentially stonewalls him in his interview attempts. 'We felt her presence in the lack of it,' he writes of her funeral, a fitting coda to her elusiveness. Even his mother, who plays an important role in his research and earns the book's dedication, requests anonymity. Dunthorne compromises by referring to her only as 'my mother.' With the passage of decades, facts are difficult to unearth, and emotions and motivations are even more recalcitrant. To promote readability, Dunthorne admits to taking 'significant liberties with the chronology' of his research and to dramatizing moments in his characters' lives — deviations from journalistic accuracy that, however minor, underline Dunthorne's unreliability as a narrator. That unreliability mirrors, whether intentionally or not, that of one of his principal sources: the voluminous, virtually unreadable memoir that his great-grandfather composed. Dunthorne had access to the German original, about 1,800 typewritten pages, as well as to a translated, abridged version distributed to family members. Eugen Merzbacher, afforded a few cameos in 'Children of Radium,' turns out to have been the translator, finishing the task shortly before his death in 2013 at 92. Dunthorne's title derives from one of Siegfried's early professional accomplishments: the manufacture of a radioactive toothpaste that became the choice of the German army. 'A branch factory in occupied Czechoslovakia ensured that the troops pushing eastward, brutalizing and murdering, burning entire villages to the ground, could do so with radiant teeth,' Dunthorne writes, combining ironic detachment with horror. In 1926, Siegfried worked to create 'activated charcoal' filters for gas masks, a task he justified as life-saving. In 1928, he was named the director of a German lab researching chemical weaponry. As late as 1935, with a Nazi named Erwin Thaler, he co-authored an article in a trade publication, The Gas Mask, about carbon-monoxide poisoning — a method used years later to kill Jews. 'The relationship between their article and the gas vans was purely speculation, an invention of retrospect,' Dunthorne tells himself. In his own memoir, Siegfried had denied ever writing for the publication. The Merzbacher family lived in Oranienburg, the eventual site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. And Siegfried's relationship with his non-Jewish colleagues was naturally complicated by the politics of the time. Their work fueled Nazi militarism but, in some instances, they themselves lacked ideological fervor. Or maybe Siegfried's expertise simply outweighed his Jewish background. The transfer to Turkey happened, Eugen Merzbacher told me, because his father's bosses 'saw the handwriting on the wall.' In Ankara, Siegfried became co-director of a gas mask factory, a joint Turkish-German enterprise next door to a poison gas laboratory. 'He and his family were fleeing the Nazis while remaining reliant on them, something that would only become more problematic in the years to come,' Dunthorne writes. The relocation saved the lives of Siegfried's immediate family, at some cost to his peace of mind. 'I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience,' Siegfried later wrote. Dunthorne, in his wanderings, uncovers some impacts, direct and indirect, of his great-grandfather's actions. He visits the town of Ammendorf, Germany, where a chemical manufacturing plant run by Siegfried's bosses, since transformed into a nightclub, has left behind a toxic mess and a high incidence of cancer cases. More chilling yet, Dunthorne finds a letter connecting Siegfried to Turkey's purchase of chemical weapons from Germany — weapons allegedly used to massacre Armenians and Kurds in the town of Dersim. He notes, too, that the gas mask filters Siegfried helped develop allowed Jewish prisoners to clear corpses from the gas chambers. Siegfried later emigrated to the United States with his wife, Lilli, and worked in a New Jersey paint factory. After his retirement, his lifelong anxiety and depression worsened, and he was, for a while, institutionalized. With his mother's help, Dunthorne obtains Siegfried's psychiatric records, an investigative coup, and uses them to reconstruct his early life. In the end, the memoirist wrestles with both his great-grandfather's complicity and his family's continuing ties to Germany. Among his discoveries are editorial missives by Siegfried that preach global disarmament. 'In his letters, he envisioned a safer future, and in his memoirs he invented a safer past,' Dunthorne writes, inching his way from condemnation to empathy. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and the Forward's contributing book critic.
