Scribner
Review by Walter Cummins
We imagine writers doing research as individuals behind a computer screen or in a library carrel surrounded by piles of books and documents, perhaps also conducting interviews. Joe Dunthorne went far beyond, down on hands and knees with a Geiger counter, poking sticks in the soil in search for lethal contamination that he could trace back to his great grandfather, Sigfried Merzbacher, a chemist whose work involved radioactive toothpaste and deadly chemical gasses. The quest took Dunthorne to following the footsteps of a man he never knew to sites in Germany where the Auer Chemical Company had plants and to distant areas in the mountains of Turkey.
Children of Radium is a combination of family history, detective story, World War II facts, discovery of a genocide, analysis of Sigfried’s psychology, hope for expiation, and, most strikingly, the role of Jewish scientist in the Nazi killing machine.
When Dunthorne, a novelist, began this book project, he intended to write about his grandmother, Dorothea, Sigfried’s living daughter’s escape from the Nazis. But she turned out to be a tough subject, almost defiant in her recalcitrant unwillingness to reveal information in an interview.
Still seeking a subject to write about, two years after her death he discovered a drawer in her home labeled “Family Archive.” Among medals, diplomas, and coins he came across his great grandfather’s memoir, the two thousand page product of his final decade and “the foundational text of our family history.” It’s unlikely that Dunthorne could anticipate the complex task ahead.
A crucial uncertainly running through the book is when and how Seigfried felt remorse about the role in the creation of gasses and their alternatives in the deaths of millions, including the concentration camp chambers of the Holocaust where several family members had been taken. In Turkey during the war, Seigfried lived in a form of exile, transported with a number of Jewish and non-Jewish scientists and academics. A derivative of his gas work was used by the Turkish government to kill thousands of what were called Mountain Turks, actually Kurds far from the center of the country.
In Turkey, as in Germany, the man was also involved in the production of gas masks that protected against the deadly gasses. Was this Seigfried’s attempt to reverse what he had done or just another job assignment? The gas mask factory was located next to the poison gas laboratory that used German-made equipment.
For almost all of the many pages of his journal, he did not discuss or reveal the nature of his work with Auer. That part of the story was buried like the contaminants Dunthorne searched for, the residue of products often purposely secreted by authorities. Dunthorne revealed them as he did his great grandfather’s history.
How much of Seigfried’s work was a willingness to be complicit in evil or a tactic to hide from his fears, especially the fear of death? His preserved documents included letters that authenticated work that he had denied. “Why simultaneously deny all involvement and preserve evidence to the contrary? Was it possible he simply hadn’t seen any of this as a problem?”
After all the years of denial. It wasn’t until the final pages of his memoir that he confessed to guilt: “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. Although I had some outward successes and some comforts, I fell into a severe depression for many years. And even today, that part of my past weighs on me.… I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience.”
When Seigfreid lived near his physicist son in North Carolina during his final years and spent time in a psychiatric hospital, the long document he wrote for his doctors never included the debt on my conscience. An American psychiatrist wrote a long analysis of the man that concluded, “it is useless to attempt to let him understand his hostility… [the] patient’s insight is lacking and apparently has been all along.”
Yet also in his final decade while he was writing his journal, Seigfreid also wrote letter after letter in support of worldwide demilitarization and disarmament, including one sent to the White House. These seem the products of guilt and an attempt to atone, hope for expiation. But when did the repressed debt to his conscience emerge?
For Dunthorne the almost accidental writing of Children of Radium ended up as a project of information and transformation. He discovered his heritage, unburying it, finding where family members had been, searching for the buildings and sites of their lives. Along the way he learned that Seigfried’s sister Elizabeth dedicated herself to a kindergarten of Jewish and non-Jewish children, leaving Germany only when she could not stay. Dunthorne even applied for and received German citizenship with his mother and family, including his children, though with mixed feelings, both “a flash of connectedness” with generations behind and yet with a sense that the act had been a con to get EU passports after Brexit.
The book ends with Dunthorpe retrieving his Geiger counter to search for radioactive waste in London but then bringing his family to an artificial wildness, a place of new life, where they gave names to six newly hatched cygnets.
