Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne; Scribner, 240 pp., $28.99
We have entered the era of the third- and even fourth-generation World War II memoir. It comes with its own distinguishing features: these grandchildren and great-grandchildren must write not from memory but from investigation, sometimes as dispassionately as if they were outsiders to their own families. In his new book, Children of Radium, the Welsh novelist and poet Joe Dunthorne approaches the task of unearthing his great-grandfather’s story with profoundly mixed emotions. Siegfried Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist who helped develop gas masks and chemical weapons, for a time under the Nazis, until he left Germany in 1935. The story that Dunthorne comes up with provides an illuminating history of the Third Reich’s radioactive legacy. But from the start, something human is missing from this book.
Dunthorne first tries to mine his sour, difficult grandmother for material, to no avail. “It’s not as though I was the only one angling for a story,” he writes. “My eldest sister took notes for a graphic novel, while my filmmaker cousin, Charlie, tracked my grandmother through [Berlin] with a DSLR and a handheld microphone.” Here, then, is a baldly stated opportunism that sets Dunthorne on his quest to capture the story of his relatives, whose history he is intent on simultaneously exposing and distancing himself from. He forces himself to turn to the long memoir that his great-grandfather left behind, which he finds a slog, an exercise in “pathological graphomania.” And from this, he begins to piece together his family’s history.
From the 1920s until the mid-1930s, Merzbacher worked in Berlin with radioactive material. His first invention was a toothpaste called Doramad, promising “blindingly white” teeth. In 1928, he agreed to take over the directorship of a lab funded by the military in the Berlin suburb of Oranienburg. It was there that he designed and tested gas masks and chemical weapons—work he continued for two years after Hitler ascended to the chancellorship. (As it turned out, Hitler never used them.) Today, Oranienburg remains one of the most radioactive places in Germany.
By 1935, Merzbacher and his family had fled Germany and were living quite comfortably in Ankara, Turkey, in a community of strange bedfellows: here “stateless Jews, fervent Nazis, and German political outcasts could all live on the same street.” And though Dunthorne had always believed, or concocted, a myth about his great-grandparents’ departure—namely, that they stole back into Berlin under cover of the 1936 Olympics to recover their valuables—the truth, he discovers, is a different story. The family’s escape to Turkey was arranged by the chemical lab where Siegfried had worked, via cushy seats on the Orient Express. The lab even paid for the safe passage of Siegfried’s grand piano. Once in Turkey, Siegfried worked in a gas mask factory and remained connected to his former colleagues in Berlin as the lab’s “man in Ankara,” as his great-grandson puts it. In fact, he may have been directly responsible for supplying the Turkish government with German chemical weapons—weapons that Turkey later turned against ethnic minorities within its own borders.
Dunthorne takes us through the process of finding out these details, gathering what he can from his great-grandfather’s memoir and German archives, from travel to towns in Germany where unexploded World War II bombs can still be found in the irradiated soil, and from a painful, confusing trip through Turkey. He finds only a trace of guilt in his great-grandfather’s memoir: “Even today, that part of my past weighs on me. … I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.” The memoir itself, he learns, was composed in an American psychiatric hospital, where Merzbacher wound up in the 1950s, suffering from severe depression. It is not Dunthorne, however, who accesses the hospital files but his mother: she befriends a hospital employee over the phone, afterward telling her son that he “fundamentally failed to understand the nature of American bureaucracy.”
Dunthorne’s mother is never named in this book, yet in each of her many cameos, she comes off as chilly and elusive, repeatedly rejecting her son’s invitations to travel with him for his research because she is planning a walking tour of Anatolia or is otherwise occupied. We learn that she was Merzbacher’s favorite grandchild, the one he “doted on.” Yet when Dunthorne informs her that the portrayal he is planning of Merzbacher might not be flattering, she tells him to go ahead and “say it how you see it.” For this, he concludes, “my seventy-seven-year-old mother was, in the best sense, a cutthroat bastard.” Whether or not Dunthorne’s mother is a cutthroat bastard is an open question, but giving her son creative freedom to write his own truth about a man he never met doesn’t strike me as evidence of that particular trait.
These portrayals, of his mother, of his grandmother, of his great-grandparents, are all rendered in beautifully lucid, simple prose. Yet they add up to the central absence in this book: a lovelessness that alienates this memoir from those it seeks to be in conversation with, like the classic of the form, The Hare With the Amber Eyes, or more recently, Hadley Freeman’s stunning House of Glass.
Is this sense of remove a fourth-generation hallmark, or a pitfall? Perhaps it helps explain why, visiting the town of Ammendorf, where Merzbacher’s colleagues later set up a lab (one he never worked at himself), Dunthorne would choose to crawl over to a hole in a fenced-off, contaminated area, known to reek of different carcinogenic chemicals, and take a deep inhale. To connect with his great-grandfather’s mustard gas of yore. To feel something, anything. Unfortunately, later lab tests would show, he only succeeded in breathing in elevated levels of lead, chromium, and barium. His great-grandfather’s legacy evaporated from this soil a long time ago. This is an apt metaphor for Dunthorne’s entire search: it’s not that we don’t experience a rich variety of ingredients in the ground he lays for us. But we never quite touch a warm body.
