Latest news with #Dunthorne
The Herald Scotland
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste
Yes, I did listen to a bit of radio. Even a spot of Radio 4 comedy. Brave, I know, but I do like policeman turned comedian Alfie Moore's It's a Fair Cop (currently broadcast on Monday nights in the 6.30pm slot). But nothing serious. Nothing with any gravitas. Or nearly nothing. I did stumble on the latest series on Radio 4's The History Podcast. Well, I say, stumble but, actually, I was given a nudge by its producer. Read more I'd rather slept on Joe Dunthorne's current series Half-Life. I think I'd read the words 'Nazi Germany' in the blurb and decided it wasn't for me. How much Nazi Germany do you need, after all? But that really wasn't what Half-Life was about, as the arresting opening line testified: 'My grandmother,' Dunthorne began, 'grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste.' Strong opener. Better still was the information that it was his grandmother's father who had made said toothpaste. Half-Life is a family biography that - like all family biographies - weaves into the flow of history. Dunthorne's great grandfather was a Jewish chemist working in a poison gas lab with the Nazis. And that is just the start of it. All episodes are available on BBC Sounds and The Road Through the Mountains, the episode that aired on Radio 4 this week (on Wednesday) was a particularly tough listen. At the heart of it was a telling of the story of the Dersim Massacre in Turkey in 1937 and 1938, when the Turkish government killed thousands of civilians during a Kurdish rebellion; 14,000 is the government figure. Others suggest the death toll was three or four times that number. 'That's why most people say the river was flowing blood,' Dunthorne's guide told him. 'It was not water, it was just blood.' To escape the Nazis, Dunthorne's family had fled to Turkey. His great grandfather may have helped the Turkish government buy chemical weapons from the Germans. Poison gas was then used to kill those who had fled into the mountains. History, Dunthorne is telling us here, leaves a stain on those who come afterwards. In Half-Lifee you can hear it in his voice. Over on 6 Music Tom Robinson was celebrating his 75th birthday on his Now Playing show on Sunday evening. The BBC's present was to take the slot away from him. Mary Anne Hobbs is taking over this weekend. Tom Robinson celebrated his 75th birthday (Image: BBC) Robinson, who has been occupying Sunday night on 6 Music for the last 14 years - in fact he's been a regular on the station for 23 years, all told - drolly opened proceedings by playing Here's Where the Story Ends by The Sundays. What followed was an understandably slightly self-indulgent two hours in which he played quite a few of his own songs - as requested by his listeners - and, for the most part, displayed a commendably stiff upper lip. He did admit that the whole thing was a little bittersweet, though he encouraged his listeners to tune in to Hobbs's show when it started. At least there were plenty of birthday/farewell messages from his fellow 6 Music DJs and the odd musician - Lauren Laverne, Nithin Sawhney, Jason from Sleaford Mods and Peter Gabriel most notably. Tony Blackburn - still going strong at 82 - also offered his congratulations, as did The Blue Nile's Paul Buchanan. The latter was presumably prompted by that old social media meme of Robinson dancing around the studio to Tinseltown in the Rain. Understandably. That tune is one of 20th-century Scotland's greatest gifts to the world. I was at best an irregular listener to Now Playing, but rather like the late Annie Nightingale, it was always clear Robinson had built up a real rapport with his audience. We're promised a 'borderless spectrum of music' on the new Mary Anne Hobbs show. That's her USP, of course. But is that what listeners want at teatime on Sunday? Time will tell. Listen Out For: Bill Dare: Comedy Alchemist, Radio 4, Thursday, June 12, 6.30pm Talking of Radio 4 comedy … This tribute programme celebrates the career of the late radio and TV comedy producer Bill Dare, creator of The Mary Whitehouse Experience and Dead Ringers. Dare was killed in a motor accident earlier this year.
Chicago Tribune
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Chicago Tribune
Biblioracle: Joe Dunthorne explores his family's history in ‘Children of Radium'
It seems like every family has a bit of ancestral folklore, and Joe Dunthorne's is better than most, a tale of his great-grandfather Siegfried spiriting his family away from Nazi Germany in 1935, followed by a 1936 return during the Berlin Olympics in which they made off with the contents of the home they left behind. The story begins to unravel as Dunthorne, a writer in search of a story and subject, interviews his grandmother who was part of the escape at age 12, but has a version of the story at odds with the family tale Dunthorne thinks he knows. The furtive escape from Germany to Turkey was on the Orient Express — 'two days and nights of eating' — and the return in 1936 was for five weeks of summer fun, including French lessons. Chagrined, Dunthorne takes it upon himself to unravel the story of Siegfried Merzbacher, a German Jewish chemist who left behind a 2,000-page memoir that somehow ends before sharing the story of his people's persecution and fleeing to safety. Perhaps this is because, as Dunthorne quickly finds out, his great grandfather spent his career working on projects that resulted in chemical weapons that would one day be used by the Nazi regime that would soon turn genocidal. 'Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance' is the result of Dunthorne following the trail of his great-grandfather's life, including visits to Oranienburg, where Siegfried plied his trade, both producing dangerous chemicals and developing gas masks to defend against them. He also visits Ammendorf, another site of experimentation that remains so toxic today it is killing its citizens. Later, Dunthorne travels to the site of the Dersim massacre, where chemical weapons developed by Siegfried's employer were used in a genocidal attack on Kurdish Turks in the late 1930s. Dunthorne would like an answer to the question that nags at him: How could a Jewish man live with the fact that his work was turned on innocents, including his own people, while he apparently was able to live safely in exile because of this work? It would be wrong to say that Dunthorne is in search of 'the truth' because he is too perceptive an observer to believe that there are hard, unshifting truths to be found. He goes in search of experience, trying to put himself in the place of his grandfather and others who lived through these times, combing through archives, finding shreds of new information that suggest a fresh path and following along. There is no central mystery to the book, and it is better for it. We're on a journey. Very quickly and effectively, Dunthorne brings his characters to life, such as Erich in Ammendorf, who is campaigning for the government to recognize the literal poisoning of the community, and Metin, Dunthorne's guide in Turkey, who cannot let the authorities know what they are actually up to. Siegfried remains a mystery to both Dunthorne and the reader until a lucky discovery of a thick file of psychiatric reports from an inpatient stay following what appears to be a nervous breakdown. We learn that Siegfried has indeed paid a cost for his complicity, even as he remained unable to tell his story in his own words. Dunthorne, the author of numerous books, including the novel 'The Adulterants,' which remains a favorite of mine, is an excellent companion throughout, telling the story with a mix of comic timing, wry self-depreciation, and genuine appreciation for the strange and difficult lives people live. He feels no great guilt over his family legacy, but it is clear he feels a responsibility to tell the story well. Mission accomplished. John Warner is the author of books including 'More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI.' You can find him at Book recommendations from the Biblioracle John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read. 1. 'West with Giraffes' by Lynda Rutledge 2. 'The Demon of Unrest' by Erik Larson 3. 'Plainsong' by Kent Haruf 4. 'The Only One Left' by Riley Sager 5. 'City Primeval' by Elmore Leonard — Jim K., Wheaton 'Small Mercies' by Dennis Lehane will have the right mix of character depth and plot intrigue to keep Jim invested. 1. 'Lives of the Monster Dogs' by Kirsten Bakis 2. 'The Phantom Father' by Barry Gifford 3. 'Ghosts of Honolulu' by Mark Harmon and Leon Carroll Jr. 4. 'Take 'Er Up Alone, Mister!' by John Joseph Hibbits 5. 'Love & Whiskey' by Fawn Weaver — Mike S., Bolingbrook I think Mike is a good candidate for Hampton Sides' 'The Wide Wide Sea: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.' 1. 'Endurance' by Alfred Lansing 2. 'Devil in the White City' by Erik Larson 3. 'The Wager' by David Grann 4. 'Bare-Faced Messiah' by Russell Miller 5. 'Knife' by Salman Rushdie — Daniel M., Buffalo Grove For Daniel, I'm recommending 'The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia' by Paul Theroux.
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.
