By Joe Dunthorne
A family memoir of toxic legacy
Subject
Themes
Joe Dunthorne set out to write about his grandmother Dorothea, a German-Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and died in Edinburgh in 2017 at ninety-two. What he discovered in her bedroom drawer, two years after her death, redirected him entirely. The family archive contained the unpublished memoir of her father, Siegfried Merzbacher, a chemist who developed Doramad, a radioactive toothpaste, before being appointed director of a secret chemical weapons laboratory in Oranienburg, on the banks of the river Havel. The memoir ran to nearly two thousand typewritten pages and culminated in a thirteen-page confession about having betrayed his "most sacred principles." Everything before those pages was, in a sense, throat-clearing.
Joe Dunthorne set out to write about his grandmother Dorothea, a German-Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and died in Edinburgh in 2017 at ninety-two. What he discovered in her bedroom drawer, two years after her death, redirected him entirely. The family archive contained the unpublished…
Children of Radium arrives in a literary landscape shaped by a growing body of cross-generational memoirs investigating family complicity with state violence. Works such as Philippe Sands' East West Street (2016) and Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost (2006) established a template for combining personal…
Silence in this family operates not as absence but as architecture. It is structural, load-bearing, passed down through generations with the same inevitability as Siegfried's bloodstone ring. Each member of the Merzbacher family participates in it, often without recognising their own contribution.…
Siegfried Merzbacher's path from radioactive toothpaste to chemical weapons was paved with reasonable-sounding arguments. When offered the directorship of a secret weapons laboratory, he and Lilli discussed the ethics over dinner in Vienna, choosing from twenty-four varieties of boiled beef. His…
The physical contamination left behind by Siegfried's work serves as the central metaphor of this investigation: poisons buried in the ground that refuse to stay there, surfacing across decades in forms nobody anticipated. In Oranienburg, the foundations of the rebuilt town are both explosive and…
Siegfried's career traces a line from wonder to weaponry that illuminates how scientific expertise can be redirected without its practitioner fully registering the shift. He began as a student of Wilhelm Rontgen, the discoverer of X-rays, a man who cared more about equipment than colleagues and…
When Dunthorne shows Erich Gadde the pages of Siegfried's confession, the two men find themselves boxed in on all sides by regrets. Erich cannot accept remorse from a Jewish chemist. Dunthorne cannot accept Erich's apology on behalf of all Germans. They are the wrong people to be having this…
Joe Dunthorne grew up believing his family's escape from Nazi Germany was a story of heroism: a daring heist on their own home during the 1936 Berlin Olympics, a race to the border with a heavy briefcase. The oval bloodstone ring his mother gave him for his wedding had "escaped the Nazis" in 1935.…
Despite the ominous atmosphere captured in a 1932 photograph of Dorothea and her brother inside their apartment building's air-raid shelter, published in Die Gasmaske, a trade magazine Siegfried insisted he "never wrote an article in," Dorothea remembered her childhood as "very free and easy." She…
Pacing the British Library, Dunthorne wrestled with Siegfried's claim of never having written for Die Gasmaske. Was it dishonesty, self-deception, or a lie so established that its teller no longer recognised it? He contacted Evonik Industries, the modern successor to Auer, which openly acknowledged…
At the council office in Ammendorf, Dunthorne found a war room: maps, aerial photographs, Soviet archive floor plans, and toxicology reports spread across a conference table. Councillor Streckenbach, Erich Gadde, local historian Wolfram Fischer, and chemical weapons expert Professor Preuss debated…
Dunthorne brought sixty-one typewritten letters to his parents' house in Wales for his mother to translate. She used a system of highlighter pens: red for chemical weapons, yellow for poor health, green for Nazis. The Ankara letters contained far more red and green than expected. Siegfried signed…
On the drive back from the Lac valley, the watchtowers glowed in the mist on the hilltops. Metin compared them to the Eye of Sauron. At the hotel, he showed a video on his phone: an enormous mountain of cyanide-laced soil from an American-owned gold mine had collapsed near the Euphrates. Nine miners…
In wartime Ankara, stateless Jews, fervent Nazis, and German political outcasts lived on the same street. Siegfried received news of family members persecuted in Germany: his brother-in-law interned in Dachau, his cousin Alice deported to Theresienstadt and never returned, others who took their own…
On September 10, 1957, Siegfried walked into the North Carolina Memorial Hospital psychiatric unit dressed in pressed grey slacks and thick-rimmed spectacles, looking more consultant than patient, though his feet barely left the ground. Admissions nurse Nancy Matthews gave him a thorough physical,…
At thirty-five, Siegfried lay in bed mentally listing "the few women of marriageable age whom I knew" and settled on Lilli, whom he had met once at a soiree. "In retrospect she appeared to me such a fine, good-hearted and lovable person," he wrote; few words set the heart alight like "in…
Elisabeth's kindergarten grew over five years from an improvised playroom into a registered organisation inspired by Frobel's philosophy that play is "not trivial, but of the deepest meaning." By 1912, they had capacity for a hundred children. A nineteen-year-old volunteer named Lilli joined the…
Elisabeth's biographies of her murdered colleagues were written from the Washington Home for Incurables, brief and matter-of-fact, their restraint carrying the full weight of what she could not confirm. Alice Bendix, born around 1895 in Konigsberg, had taken over the Jewish Youth Aid orphanage in…
After Elisabeth died in 1966, Siegfried and his sister Luise moved to German-speaking London, near Finchley Road, where bus conductors announced the stop as "Finchleystrasse." Dunthorne's mother visited weekly at twenty-two, finding the other refugee residents "extremely boring" despite their…
By Joe Dunthorne
Subject
Themes
Joe Dunthorne set out to write about his grandmother Dorothea, a German-Jewish woman who fled Nazi Germany in 1935 and died in Edinburgh in 2017 at ninety-two. What he discovered in her bedroom drawer, two years after her death, redirected him entirely. The family archive contained the unpublished memoir of her father, Siegfried Merzbacher, a chemist who developed Doramad, a radioactive toothpaste, before being appointed director of a secret chemical weapons laboratory in Oranienburg, on the banks of the river Havel. The memoir ran to nearly two thousand typewritten pages and culminated in a thirteen-page confession about having betrayed his "most sacred principles." Everything before those pages was, in a sense, throat-clearing.