Children of Radium
A Buried Inheritance
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4.0 • 2 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this subversive family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author’s great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist who wound up developing chemical weapons and gas mask filters for the Nazis.
When Joe Dunthorne began researching his family history, he expected to write the account of their harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1935. What he found in his great-grandfather Siegfried’s voluminous, unpublished, partially translated memoir was a much darker, more complicated story.
Siegfried was an eccentric Jewish scientist living in a small town north of Berlin, where he began by developing a radioactive toothpaste before moving on to products with a more sinister military connection—first he made and tested gas-mask filters, and then he was invited to establish a chemical weapons laboratory. By 1933, he was the laboratory’s director, helping the Nazis to “improve” their poisons and prepare for large-scale production. “I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error,” he wrote. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.”
Armed only with his great-grandfather’s rambling, nearly two-thousand-page deathbed memoir and a handful of archival clues, Dunthorne traveled 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 Siegfried’s work. Seeking to understand one “jolly grandpa” with a patchy psychiatric history, Dunthorne confronts the uncomfortable questions that lie at the heart of every family: Can we ever understand our origins? Is every family story a work of fiction? And if the truth can be found, will we be able to live with it?
Children of Radium is a witty and wry, deeply humane and endlessly surprising meditation on individual and collective inheritance that considers the long half-life of trauma, the weight of guilt, and the ever-evasive nature of the truth.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
Writer Joe Dunthorne thought he knew everything about how his Jewish ancestors fled Nazi Germany for Turkey—but as this historical memoir details, his great-grandfather Siegfried was far more involved with the Nazis’ warmongering than one might expect from a Jewish refugee. Dunthorne tells how Siegfried parlayed a chemist job, in which he invented magically (and unfortunately radioactive) whitening toothpaste, into something darker: developing poison gas for the SS to use in weaponry. More than just recounting his great-grandfather’s story, Dunthorne explores his own journey discovering this history, poignantly detailing his emotional reaction to his Jewish family’s possible contribution to Nazi crimes. Dunthorne’s witty writing style breaks new ground for its depiction of such a tragic period. The story’s unavoidable darkness is thoughtfully mixed with humor, pathos, and incredulity (especially at how his exiled family lived a strange life alongside Nazis in Turkey). This phenomenal memoir shines an unexpected light on the moral gray areas of World War II.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this riveting memoir, poet and novelist Dunthorne (Submarine) parses his family's complicated legacy in WWII-era Europe. What begins as a study of his grandmother's escape from the Nazis in 1935 soon evolves into an unsettling interrogation of the author's great-grandfather, Jewish chemist Siegfried Merzbacher, whose development of radioactive household products eventually led him to produce chemical weapons and gas mask filters used by Nazi forces. Combing through 2,000 pages of Merzbacher's memoirs, plus his personal letters and diary entries, Dunthorne pieces together a fractured history of the chemist's prolific work, which began in the toothpaste industry, and his deep guilt, which haunted him until he died. In unvarnished prose, Dunthorne recounts conversations with families affected by Merzbacher's weapons and his own visits to sites across Western Europe with concealed radioactive waste. Along the way, he unearths his family's buried legacy and struggles to understand his great-grandfather's motivations. Dunthorne strikes a near-perfect balance of history and personal reflection, and his questions about Merzbacher's moral dilemmas resonate. This is a must-read.
