Poisoning the Family Tree

It must be hard to find the appropriate tone in which to tell a family horror story that goes back generations—a problem compounded when an ancestor was not the innocent victim of that horror but one of its perpetrators, or at least a willfully obtuse collaborator. One doesn’t want to sound reflexively judgmental or apologetic, secretly proud of one’s criminal DNA, or resentful of the burden levied by the sins of the dead. It must be even more complex when the consequences of the crime are enormous, when the skeletons in the closet are, by any standard, numerous.

Such challenges must have faced Joe Dunthorne in writing Children of Radium, an account of his discovery of, and response to, the fact that his great-grandfather Siegfried Merzbacher, a German Jewish scientist, worked in a factory outside Berlin that developed chemical weapons for the Nazis. When Siegfried was forced to leave Germany and immigrate to Turkey in the mid-1930s, he was employed by a company in Ankara that manufactured the poison gas used by the Turkish army against ethnic minorities in the eastern part of the country.

Among the unusual and surprising things about Children of Radium is that this grim summary doesn’t remotely convey the experience of reading the book. Dunthorne, a British novelist and poet, has found a tone that is at once predictably appalled and unpredictably amusing, wry, and self-mocking. His animated narrative voice is often funny without ever seeming facile or irreverent, and without trivializing—or losing sight of—the gravity of his subject.

At the book’s center is the search for information about what exactly Siegfried did, a quest that begins after Dunthorne’s grandmother’s death:

I knew that somewhere in her room was a collection of documents known as “the family archive.” I imagined a crumbling bundle of letters hidden beneath a loose floorboard, but found a drawer neatly labeled with a luggage tag: family archive.

Among the keepsakes in the drawer are 519 single-spaced, typewritten pages—an abridged English translation, from the German, of Siegfried’s nearly two-thousand-page autobiography.

The dramatized, novelistic scene in which Dunthorne explains what he knew and didn’t know about Siegfried’s career typifies the counterintuitive jauntiness of the book:

You could not call any of this a family secret, since it was right here, on very white paper, with half a dozen bound copies distributed among my relatives. And yet I could not recall a time in which anyone had actually mentioned it.

“You must have known,” my mother said, before lowering her voice, “about the chemical weapons.”

Perhaps I had chosen to forget. This, as I was learning, was an inherited talent.

From the doorway my wife, only half listening, looked up. “Sorry. Who was it that made chemical weapons?”

My mother glanced down at Siegfried’s photo on the front of his memoir—her grandpa, crinkly eyed and smiling.

“So your grandfather…?”

“Yes.”

“But not…for the Nazis? Wasn’t he Jewish?”

My mother raised her eyebrows and left them there.

Siegfried’s lengthy memoir, together with his professional correspondence, enables Dunthorne to construct the outlines of a biography. In the 1920s Siegfried worked in the Oranienburg suburb of Berlin for a company that manufactured Doramad, a toothpaste made with irradiated calcium carbonate that promised to make its user’s smile “blindingly white.”

The firm also tested activated charcoal for its effectiveness in gas masks to be used in case of enemy attack. Though Siegfried disliked working closely with the military, he convinced himself that the protective gear would ultimately save lives. His discomfort increased when the masks were tested on humans; he collapsed during his own brief stint as an experimental subject. Understandably, he worried that a toxic leak from the factory would kill his family; he and his wife and two children lived nearby and downwind.

After the company experimented with masks that would safeguard their wearers against the lethal effects of phosgene, sulfur mustard, chlorine, and cyanide gases, the logical next step was for it to manufacture its own chemicals. “Since Siegfried had already become an expert in defending against poisons,” Dunthorne writes, “he had also, inevitably, become an expert in their production—and he was asked to be the director.”

In March 1933, soon after they came to power, the National Socialists began imprisoning dissidents in one of Germany’s first concentration camps. It was located in Oranienburg, on the grounds of an old brewery around the corner from the Merzbachers’ apartment. Siegfried’s job compelled him and his wife, Lilli, to lead a double life. Every Sunday they commiserated with a cousin whose husband, a Jew and a Social Democrat, was among the first to be imprisoned. The next morning, Siegfried went off to work in the weapons laboratory.

When the Merzbachers left Germany in 1935, they took tubes of Doramad with them, “their suitcases gently emitting alpha particles.”^* They fled to Turkey, where Siegfried found employment with “the Turkish Red Crescent, a long-standing charitable organization equivalent to the International Red Cross.” Surrounded by a vibrant community of refugee Jewish artists and intellectuals—“essentially the Bloomsbury group, but with better weather”—Siegfried, Lilli, and their children spent fourteen placid years in Ankara.

But as Dunthorne discovers, “Siegfried’s job at the Turkish Red Crescent was in no way equivalent to being a doctor for Médecins Sans Frontières.” Half his salary was being paid by his former employers in Berlin, who had financed his emigration on the luxurious Orient Express, shipping a

Bechstein grand piano…a thousand miles east. He and his family were fleeing the Nazis while remaining reliant on them, a contradiction which would only become more problematic in the years that followed.

By 1937 the factory had supplied 20,000 gas masks to the Turkish army. Siegfried wrote to his German bosses, explaining that his colleagues in Ankara wished to order large quantities of lethal chemicals. These weapons were subsequently used to subdue unrest among the Kurds and other ethnic communities in the mountainous regions near Dersim. “According to official data released by the Turkish government,” Dunthorne notes, “13,160 Dersimi civilians were murdered across 1937 and 1938. Other historians suggest the death toll was four times this number.”

In the 1950s Siegfried and Lilli moved to New Jersey, where their physicist son, Eugen, had been invited to work at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study and where Siegfried began writing his memoir. (Their daughter—Dunthorne’s grandmother—had married a Scotsman on VE Day in May 1945, obtaining a British passport.) When Eugen moved to the University of North Carolina, his parents followed him to Chapel Hill. There Siegfried’s mental health deteriorated, and he stayed briefly in the psychiatric unit of a local hospital. In 1966, a few years after Lilli died, he immigrated to London, where he died at eighty-eight in a German Jewish care home, “painlessly at breakfast time.”

As Dunthorne tracks the stages of his great-grandpa’s career, he attempts to figure out what Siegfried could have been thinking: what lies he told himself, what disquieting concerns he chose to ignore. Siegfried claims in his memoir that there were no plans to produce the chemical poisons industrially or to stockpile them. The German government simply wanted to have the weapons ready in case they were ever needed.

Fact-checking the memoir, Dunthorne uncovers significant inaccuracies and omissions. Though Siegfried insisted that he never wrote for Die Gasmaske, an industry publication, he did contribute an article about what happens when the carbon monoxide emitted by a moving vehicle is released into an enclosed space. This research, Dunthorne speculates, helped the Nazis produce their first mass-killing technology, “the gas van”:

I kept coming back to Siegfried’s claim that he had never written for the magazine at all…. I wondered if this was outright dishonesty, a trick of memory, or a blend of the two. Perhaps it was a lie so well established that he no longer realized he was telling it.

The enormous autobiography includes only two pages in which Siegfried expresses any remorse or regret:

Now I come to the darkest chapter of my professional life…. Today I confess to my descendants who will read these lines that I made a grave error. I have betrayed myself, my most sacred principles…. I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.

Punctuating Children of Radium are accounts of Dunthorne’s travels in a series of attempts to locate the places where his relatives lived and worked—and to assess the lingering damage that Siegfried’s labors may have caused. In Oranienburg, the earth near the former Doramad toothpaste plant is not only radioactive but mined with unexploded World War II bombs equipped with fuses that will eventually detonate:

Through the council’s website, local residents can arrange for the removal of garden waste, Christmas trees, and live explosives…. It was not unusual for the bomb disposal team to wear hazmat suits while digging.

An affecting chapter is set in the mountains of eastern Turkey. Reluctant to surprise his hosts there with the fact that his relative may have facilitated the massacre of their people, Dunthorne makes sure that his guides are aware of his family history in advance. He half hopes that they will tell him not to come. “Instead,” he writes, “I experienced nothing but kindness and hospitality and that was, in its way, harder to accept.”

Unprompted, Ali Ekber Kaya, the former head of the local human rights association, tells him, “If your great-grandfather was involved in this massacre, this genocide—if he had any single role in this genocide—we forgive him.” The trip is not only emotionally wrenching but socially awkward. When the travelers stop for gas on the drive back to Ankara, one of them—a Kurdish academic who speaks flawless English and is a passionate fan of the work of Virginia Woolf—makes an offhand joke about poison gas. “My laughter came out weird and loud, the kind of sound that makes everyone else stop laughing,” Dunthorne writes.

Several of the book’s brief chapters conclude with plays on a cliff-hanger ending: “The real revelation came, several weeks later, in an unrelated email.” Dunthorne turns his pursuit of the truth about Siegfried into a detective story and casts himself as a bumbling amateur sleuth following a series of unhelpful clues to the riddles of the past. He’s desperate for research opportunities.

Trying to imagine his parents’ courtship, to picture his father chatting up “his girlfriend’s strange, carefree grandpa in a house that smelled of boiling tongues,” Dunthorne decides “to cook an ox tongue, just to get a sense of it”—a culinary experiment that comes to seem like a metaphor for his search for evidence of Siegfried’s legacy:

The butcher gave me what looked like a sodden dishcloth. At home I held it, dripping, then plunged it into a pot of boiling water, where it instantly came alive. As it writhed and flexed, I tried to push it under with a wooden spoon, but it would not stay down. It kept lifting the lid off the pot.

Lugging along his Geiger counter, digging up soil samples that turn out to be no more radioactive than his bathroom medicine cabinet at home, he’s a literary Inspector Clouseau, stumbling, often by accident, on signposts and solutions. If the joke that runs through the book seems to be about his incompetence, we soon realize it’s a pose, since the confidence and daring with which Children of Radium is constructed would suggest that he knows what he’s doing.

Dunthorne’s ability to portray himself as unequal to the task of telling this story seems related to how reduced—how diminished in stature—he is in the presence of his forceful, lovingly portrayed mother and grandmother. An essay containing material that later appeared in the book was published in the summer 2020 issue of Granta. Its title, “Daughter of Radium,” is presumably a pun on Siegfried’s female descendants, so important to the memoir, and on the term “daughter product,” which refers to the isotopes that result from radioactive decay.

Dunthorne’s feisty mother—so charismatic that, on the phone, she persuades a hospital office worker in America to disclose the details of Siegfried’s confidential psychiatric record—knows what she wants. Her principal ambition—motivated, she says, by the boredom of retirement—is to reclaim her German birthright citizenship and to get a German passport. Together with her son and one of her daughters, she procures the official documents, which come with a complimentary government-issued package of vegan Haribo gummy bears made in Bonn. Dunthorne finds the experience of becoming a German citizen “simultaneously fraudulent and profound,” as “a flash of connectedness” coexists with the sense that “the whole thing was a long con to get our EU passports back after Brexit.”

In contrast to Dunthorne’s mother, his cranky, appealing grandmother knows what she doesn’t want: to talk about the past. “Whatever questions I asked were not the right ones and I remember her yawns becoming increasingly aggressive until at last she said, ‘Look, why don’t you just read a book about it?’”

Years later Dunthorne plays a recording of their conversation and hears it as “a master class in incompetence, an interview so embarrassing that, even now, I could only listen to it for a few seconds at a time, pausing regularly to do breathwork.”

When he sees, in a Munich shop window, a portrait of Siegfried’s sister Elisabeth, who is being honored by the city for her moral courage, his mother remarks that he has probably been writing about the wrong sibling. Elisabeth, it seems, was the angel to her brother’s demon of ambition and moral passivity. In the late 1890s, together with her friend Ida—and with help at various times from her younger sister Luise and Siegfried’s future wife, Lilli—Elisabeth founded a school for poor Jewish children, refugees from Eastern Europe. In the 1930s the authorities tried to shut the school down at least twice; Elisabeth resisted until 1939, when she and her husband left for Tel Aviv. Starting in late 1941 a number of the children were deported and murdered, some of them in Auschwitz, among the earliest victims of hydrocyanic gas. The Jewish prisoners assigned to disentangle the corpses wore gas masks produced at Siegfried’s factory in Oranienburg. It’s the first time in the book that we realize just how fatal his work was, not only for millions of victims whose names he would never know but for those close to him.

Beneath the book’s lively surface are a number of complex and serious themes: courage, self-delusion, conscience, the unreliability of memory, and the folly of believing romantic family stories about the past. Dunthorne avoids a sustained consideration of hereditary guilt and the ongoing debate about whether the descendants of slaveholders or of perpetrators of genocide or of the manufacturers of poison gas can be held accountable for the misdeeds of their ancestors.

Obviously the subject extends beyond the question of Germany’s obligation to Holocaust victims and survivors. Ta-Nehisi Coates has written about the moral debt America owes its Black population. Felix Moeller’s documentary Harlan: In the Shadow of ‘Jew Süss’ (2008) interviews the descendants of Veit Harlan, who directed one of the most widely circulated, grotesquely antisemitic Nazi propaganda films, Jew Süss. Gitta Sereny’s book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth (1995) tracks the relationship between Speer—Hitler’s architect—and Speer’s daughter Hilde, who urged her father’s early release from Spandau prison.

But Dunthorne does address the matter, like so much else in this remarkable book, through indirection. It’s partly why he visits the places where the toxic remnants of Siegfried’s work might still exist. In a town near Leipzig where a company named Orgacid was founded by two of Siegfried’s former bosses, Dunthorne meets eighty-two-year-old Erich Gadde, the “Erin Brockovich of Ammendorf.” Gadde has spent his career compiling statistics, tallying the large number of local residents whose severe health problems—like his own—can be traced to exposure to the chemicals that Orgacid manufactured.

Gadde shows Dunthorne a spot where, the year before, a local councilor and a scientist came upon a deep, freshly dug hole in the ground. The waste management company that owned the site had no knowledge of the hole, and when company employees came to examine it the next day, it had been filled in without explanation. Subsequent tests on soil retrieved from the excavation revealed dangerous levels of lead, chromium, barium, and thorium, the radioactive element in the toothpaste that Siegfried helped produce.

When Dunthorne shows Gadde the pages from Siegfried’s memoir in which he expresses his regrets, Gadde apologizes “on behalf of all Germans.” Dunthorne writes:

I should have understood that Erich would not accept remorse from a Jewish chemist. But equally it felt absurd that he should apologize to me and so I apologized to him for putting him in a position where he felt he needed to apologize, the two of us boxed in on all sides by regrets.

The book concludes with a final twist, an ironic turn suggesting yet another response to the question of whether we should—or unwillingly do—pay for the crimes of our ancestors. In 2023 Dunthorne’s wife went to work as a gardener in London’s Olympic Park, which, as he recalled from his research into radiation detection on “spectrometry forums,…was the site of illegally dumped radioactive waste.” In 2008, “under the lax mayoral guidance of Boris Johnson,” the contractors preparing the grounds for the Olympic Games mixed hundreds of tons of toxic earth with masses of uncontaminated soil to reduce the radioactivity to an acceptable level. The following year a report suggested that people who worked at—or lived downwind from—the site should “have a flag to this effect placed on their medical records.”

This recalls what Siegfried feared when he and his family lived near the Oranienburg factory. In London, Dunthorne’s Geiger counter, freshly equipped with new batteries, fails to turn up any damning evidence in Olympic Park. He is reassured when the swans that live in the park’s wetlands give birth to healthy cygnets. But his readers may remain concerned by the 2009 report, and by its implication that any of us might be victims of the crime against nature committed by Siegfried Merzbacher and all the others who have chosen a similar path. Whether or not we are responsible for the misdeeds of our ancestors, it’s come to seem certain that we will have to pay for them.