Perpetual Sunshine

There’s​ a scene in Joe Dunthorne’s novel Submarine in which Oliver, the teenage protagonist, is served carrots so overcooked they look ‘out of focus’. It’s a joke repurposed in Children of Radium to describe Dunthorne’s acerbic grandmother’s ‘fuzzy’ woollen jumper. Here, though, the blurring effect becomes a metaphor for our misty view of the past, a foreign country where the customs are silence and dissimulation. Unlike Submarine, Children of Radium is non-fiction but the humour comes from similar places: family eccentricities neatly skewered and the unguarded innocence of the narrator, who, colliding with the world, notices everything but is sometimes slow to grasp its meaning. It’s not just that the past only grudgingly yields its secrets, but that their significance is often obscure until more details emerge. Starting out on his quest into his family history, Dunthorne doesn’t know what to ask his grandmother about the experience of Jewish families such as theirs in Hitler’s Germany. She tells him to go and read a book. He does, but it turns out she didn’t like that book. So he decides to write one instead.

Dunthorne knew this part of his family history mostly through objects. He describes being given a poster advertising the toothpaste invented by his great-grandfather, a prominent chemist. At his wedding, his mother gives him a ring set with a bloodstone, and he pictures his family fleeing Nazi persecution in 1935, then returning during the Berlin Olympics the following year to smuggle out precious possessions, including the ring. He conjures these scenes with ‘the unique clarity of someone untroubled by having done any research’. By the time he recognises the illusion, however, he’s done enough digging to bring his grandmother’s world back into definition. Freshly mined facts displace half-imagined stories until he is left with something like the truth – an account previous generations had either sugar-coated or dropped into an oubliette.

Seven years after the awkward interview with his grandmother and two years after her death, Dunthorne ventures into ‘the family archive’, the wallpaper-lined drawer containing letters, keepsakes and the bulky typescript, in German, of his great-grandfather’s ‘unpublished and unpublishable’ autobiography. Siegfried Merzbacher’s account turns out to be incongruent with family lore and exasperating in itself. Dunthorne realises it isn’t a work of record but a chunk of tendentious self-representation. The dead are no less cunning than the living. ‘If the narrator of the memoir was the ideal part of himself,’ Dunthorne asks, ‘then where had Siegfried hidden the rest?’

Unforthcoming about the important stuff, Siegfried is elsewhere far too generous with detail, which may explain why none of Dunthorne’s family had actually read the memoir. Four hundred pages in, Dunthorne still hasn’t reached his grandmother’s birth, only her conception. At the time, Siegfried was working for Auer, a company that made lighting mantles, whose clean glow came from radioactive thorium. Its competitors were already rolling out radioactivity across various domestic products, from face cream to mineral water, all infused with the ‘perpetual sunshine’ of streaming alpha particles. Siegfried was tasked with developing a radioactive toothpaste, which he tried out on his pregnant wife and later supplied to the German army, so that, as Dunthorne remarks, ‘troops pushing eastwards, brutalising and murdering, burning entire villages to the ground, could do so with radiant teeth.’ He devised auto-asphyxiating experiments to develop a toxin-absorbing powder used in gas masks – work heavy with foreboding for Dunthorne’s readers. The same is true of the factory’s location: Oranienburg, a town north of Berlin, which later became infamous as the SS hub for managing the concentration camps.

In 1928, Siegfried silenced his own ethical misgivings to take up the directorship of a laboratory that made chemical weapons, an endeavour forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles. The venture was funded by the military but run by Auer. Siegfried was 45, ambitious for himself and his young family, and this was an opportunity to advance his career. He worked with diphosgene, waste from which was dumped in the river where his children swam. The plant also synthesised diphenyl arsine chloride, a fiendish gas that penetrated soldiers’ respirators and made them vomit. The idea was that they would then remove their respirators and inhale deadly toxins such as mustard gas, which had burned out so many lungs during the First World War.

As Dunthorne makes progress with this story, he finds the past is not only indifferent to posterity but hostile to it. The records he needs were either spirited away by the Americans and Russians in 1945 or, in the case of Siegfried’s correspondence from this phase of his life, thrown away by his daughter. Cleaving to his mission, Dunthorne takes his pregnant wife to Oranienburg, which is not only ridden with buried Allied bombs – one monster is defused while they’re there – but, thanks to his great-grandfather’s laboratory, still radioactive.

Like many other German-Jewish families, the Merzbachers let the antisemitic policies of the Nazis, and the power that accrued to those implementing them, creep up on their lives. What else could they do? In 1933 a brewery in the centre of Oranienburg was converted into a camp for political opponents, part of the wider dismantling of Weimar democracy. By degrees, Siegfried’s town became, in his eyes, ungemütlich – an elusive word implying unfriendliness and discomfort. As unhelpful as ever, his memoir recounts this change, then abruptly ends.

Where Siegfried averted his gaze, his great-grandson tries to face facts head on. In the archives of the Jewish Museum in Berlin, he dusts off the original copy of the memoir, which was given to the library by Siegfried’s son, and finds a final volume missing from his grandmother’s typescript. But his excitement proves short-lived: it contains only evasive chatter and general history, adding nothing. The frustrations make fiction look easy. In the British Library, Dunthorne trawls through copies of the trade periodical Die Gasmaske, to which, contrary to what he’d heard, he finds Siegfried contributed an article. It concerns the dangers of carbon monoxide emissions from vehicle engines, and on the same page is another piece on the subject by Dr Ernst-Robert Grawitz, the future chief SS medical officer and Himmler’s extermination adviser, who in 1945 killed himself, his wife and their son with hand grenades. Some of the Nazis’ lethal experiments with carbon monoxide took place at Sachsenhausen camp, just outside Oranienburg.

Historical whodunnits tend not to lead to red-handed culprits. The backdrop to the story – Nazi crimes of genocide, accidentally abetted by his Jewish great-grandfather – justifies Dunthorne’s determined detective work, but Siegfried only ever plays a walk-on part. It’s not clear if he succeeded, as his bosses wished, in creating an ‘improved’ mustard gas, but in 1934 building work began on a factory to manufacture poisonous gases in Ammendorf, a suburb of the city of Halle. The company responsible, Orgacid, was a shady subsidiary of Auer, whose premises, Dunthorne discovers, have become an equally shady nightclub; the owner is in prison for drug trafficking and conspiracy to murder. Ammendorf’s earth is polluted: thousands of tons of mustard gas were disposed of in 1945 with little regard for safety or the environment.

By the time production at Orgacid was in full swing, in the later 1930s, the Merzbachers had left for Turkey, where Siegfried took a job with the Red Crescent. Dunthorne at first sees the role as giving ‘balance to his life story, from lethal gases to humanitarian aid’. Again, however, he is wrong-footed. Documents reveal that Auer continued to pay half his wages, at least until 1938, and even covered the family’s relocation costs. This raises as many questions as it answers: chiefly, what was Siegfried really doing there? Dunthorne travels to Istanbul and spots some clues in a military museum, but they don’t add up to much, and he wonders if his journey is just a self-beguiling exercise in imagination.

Surviving letters finally disclose Siegfried’s real reason for heading east: to make gas masks for the Turkish army. Destined to stay neutral in the war, Turkey nonetheless nurtured a close relationship with Germany, its ally from the First World War. Not only were they trading partners, but representatives of Deutsche Bank found Istanbul a conducive environment in which to sell gold stolen from murdered Jews. Other discoveries open up. Dunthorne locates Siegfried’s factory easily, ‘on account of its still being a gas mask factory’. No less amazing, it transpires that letters recording Siegfried’s involvement have survived, despite all the veil-drawing in the memoir and Mrs Dunthorne’s recycling habit. This is especially surprising when we learn that Siegfried also had a hand in supplying mustard gas to Turkey, used between 1937 and 1938 to murder thousands of Kurds in Eastern Anatolia. Turkey’s apology in 2011 is widely seen as politically calculated, and the memory remains fraught. By contrast, the forgiveness proffered to Dunthorne by his hosts in Dersim, the province where the massacre took place, is heartfelt.

It took the outbreak of war to sever completely Siegfried’s links to Oranienburg, and to Germany. His family’s citizenship was revoked. They stayed on in Istanbul, where, though stateless, they were better off than relatives at home. (Siegfried’s brother-in-law was hauled off to Dachau, a cousin was transported to her death in Theresienstadt and others were forced to flee or chose suicide.) Siegfried’s wife played Mendelssohn on the Bechstein piano they had shipped from Germany, their son graduated with a degree in physics and their daughter married a Scot – a marriage of convenience, according to Dunthorne’s mother, which ensured at least one member of the family had citizenship.

After the war, the Merzbachers followed their son to America, where Siegfried’s final years were dogged by disappointment, obsession with what his psychiatrist called ‘impending calamity’ and, beneath it all, guilt and a fumbling for atonement. With his mother’s help, Dunthorne accesses Siegfried’s medical records. Through the prism of the doctors’ notes, his memoir looks like a confession: a ritual of expiation that begins as therapy in 1957 and ends up as two thousand typed pages that Siegfried, for his own enigmatic reasons, was still footnoting when he died in 1971. He may not have dwelled on the possibility that his work had contributed to the deaths of so many, including his own friends and family, but the thought lurked in the shadows of his mind. Not only did he assist catastrophe, in a small way, but in 1948 he helped to exonerate his former boss of war crimes. Dr Karl Quasebart may have supported his Jewish colleagues, avoided membership of the Nazi party and been labelled ‘politically unreliable’ by Himmler’s office. But he had still thrived under the regime, in general as the beneficiary of Hitler’s militarism and specifically by exploiting slave labourers.

The research that Dunthorne begins with only mild curiosity becomes, as the book progresses, something much more personal. Accepting German citizenship for himself and his children, he experiences ‘a flash of connectedness, a sense of generations spreading out behind us’. He finds himself sharing not only his great-grandfather’s bloodline and legacy, but the moral equivocation of Siegfried’s life. In 2021, he addresses the Berlin state parliament about his family’s experiences during the Third Reich. He has been invited to speak on the occasion of an exhibition that features his grandmother. It’s a ten-minute story that, burdened now by superior knowledge, he is itching to complicate. This, he feels, is his chance to make a point about the ambiguities of responsibility and victimhood, and the need to square up to the complexity of history. But he doesn’t, and so enters into a strange complicity with his cranky, gloomy, mysterious great-grandfather. ‘It would have just been rude, wouldn’t it,’ Dunthorne writes, ‘for either of us to mention the industrial production of poisonous gases.’