Irony and deadpan humour have defined Jewish storytelling for millennia. And it is with dry alacrity that Joe Dunthorne, the Welsh novelist and poet renowned for his hilarious yet anguished coming-of-age novel Submarine, tells the astonishing saga of his quest to discover the buried war history of his family, specifically that of his great-grandfather Siegfried Merzbacher.
Merzbacher was a German-Jewish chemist living in Oranienburg, a small town north of Berlin, where he developed various radioactive household items, including a dentifrice called Doramad. Due to its wildly popular success, Merzbacher was promoted by his respected German employer to develop new gas mask filters, as well as a chemical weapon laboratory.
“My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste,” Dunthorne begins. “The active ingredient was irradiated calcium carbonate and her father was the chemist in charge of making it … it promised gums ‘charged with new life energy’ and a ‘blindingly white smile’.” Doramad became the preferred toothpaste of the German Army.
The cover of Children of Radium features a photograph of children playing ring-a-ring-o’-roses while wearing gas masks. The shot was discovered in an edition of the popular magazine Die Gasmaske, which often included evidence of Dunthorne’s great-grandfather’s discoveries.
Forced to leave Berlin in 1935 because they were Jews, the Merzbacher family took “tubes of it with them, their suitcases gently emitting alpha particles as they travelled a thousand miles east”.
Like the radioactive ions slowly leaking poison into the Merzbacher’s possessions, a sinister undercurrent gradually poisons Dunthorne’s heroic imagining of his family’s escape from Nazi Germany.
Ten years before he began writing the book, Dunthorne was inspired by a “nuanced, cross-generational memoir about a wealthy Jewish family’s persecution and migration from Odessa to Vienna to Paris” – Edmund de Waal’s The Hare With Amber Eyes – to write his family’s own saga.
He began by interviewing his grandmother at her home in Edinburgh. Turns out, his usually cherubic Oma turned hopelessly sour. She had read the book and hated it, proclaiming, “this heralded history … wasn’t like that. Some people are awfully kind … and some people are like me, awful.”
All he really knew about the Merzbachers’ flight from Berlin was that the family left for Ankara in 1935, leaving their home and all their possessions behind. But in 1936, under cover of the summer Olympics in Berlin, they conducted a heist on their own house. As the war continued to rage, the Merzbacher family remained in Ankara as Turkey had retained its political “neutrality”. Though the Jews of Europe were doomed, “Ankara was somewhere that stateless Jews, fervent Nazis and German political outcasts could live on the same street”.
During those years, Merzbacher wrote frequently to his sister, who had remained in Germany. Those letters revealed “his queasy recognition of their ‘unheard-of-luck’. They had good friends. He kept his job. His wife could still play Mendelssohn on her German-made piano. His son got a physics degree from the University of Istanbul.” His daughter, Dunthorne’s grandmother, “solved the problem of her statelessness by becoming engaged to a Scotsman”.
Though most Holocaust survivors attributed their survival to simple acts of luck or chance, Dunthorne realised there had to be more than luck involved in his Jewish great-grandfather not only escaping Berlin with his entire family but continuing to work for his Nazi employers while living in Turkey.
Despite his aroused suspicions, Dunthorne and his grandmother never spoke about the war years again. But two years after her death, he ventured into her bedroom during a family get-together in search of a collection of documents she had referred to as “the family archive”. Among assorted recordings and memorabilia, he found the heaviest document: The Memoirs of Siegfried Merzbacher.
Dunthorne knew that his great-grandfather had worked on his memoir for the last decade or so of his life, “tapping away while smoking thousands of unfiltered cigarettes. He was still adding footnotes – clarifying details about his scientific work with numerous carcinogens – when he died, surprising no one, of cancer.”
This extraordinary document, eventually translated into English, becomes the touchstone for this narrative, along with interviews his grandmother gave with the Anne Frank Center, a BBC documentary, and an unreleased audio recording she made for a project called Refugee Voices.
With a journalist’s curiosity, a poet’s sensitivity, his own wry sensibility and his mother’s assistance at translating epic bureaucratic German documents, Dunthorne went on a quest to disinter the ominous truth buried beneath the crust of his family’s war narrative. Beginning with his great-grandfather’s rambling, nearly 2000-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne travelled to Munich, Ammendorf, Berlin, Ankara, and Oranienburg – a place where hundreds of unexploded bombs remain hidden in the irradiated soil – to uncover the sprawling, unsettling legacy of Merzbacher’s work.
The structure of this gripping, haunting tale is reminiscent of Daniel Mendelsohn’s search for his European Jewish relatives in his memoir, The Lost. But, like the half-lives of the chemicals that Merzbacher worked with in his hidden laboratory, the deadly effects of his experiments are steadily revealed through Dunthorne’s relentless search. He recounts reaching many dead ends in his quest for the reason his elderly great-grandfather spent his last years in psychiatric care, tormented by nightmarish guilt. But he never gives up. Despite its epic size, Merzbacher’s memoir ends where his great-grandson’s quest begins.
Unlike so many Holocaust narratives, Children of Radium does not conclude with the revelation of the tortured end of innocents slaughtered simply because of their Jewish heritage. It reveals the unabashed guilt of a brilliant man at the end of his life, whose discoveries led to the extermination of many, including his own people.
Despite the astonishing revelations, many unknowns remain. In the chaos of World War II’s end, so much was buried, so many lives reinvented, so many truths devolved into fabrication. But half-lives go on for thousands of years, hinting at all that is still left to be uncovered.
