Have Memoir and Geiger Counter, Will Travel
Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance by Joe Dunthorne (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice
Joe Dunthorne is a novelist and poet and the great-grandson of Siegfried Merzbacher. Even if you have heard of Dunthorne (author of Submarine), you probably have not heard of Merzbacher. He was a German-Jewish chemist, who helped make Doramad, a popular radioactive toothpaste, who made gas mask filters in Germany from 1933-1935, and did a bit more than that with regard to chemical weapons, in Germany and Turkey. In his later years, he also wrote a 2,000 page memoir about his life that referenced his regrets about his relationship with the Third Reich. Children of Radium sets out to explore Merzbacher’s complicated past and legacy, but it meanders into many other topics along the way.
Children of Radium has the familiar aspects of an account of family history. Joe Dunthorne wrestles with his great-grandfather’s memoir, travels to family-related sites, talks to historians and archivists, reflects on his tough grandmother, and gets a good deal of guidance from his mother. His mother is honestly a highlight of the book, always swooping in with humor and an unmatched ability to get things done whenever he calls on her. She is on a parallel journey—getting the family naturalized as German citizens, a reversal of the citizenship revocation under the Nazis. His mother also has German speaking proficiency, which the author lacks. Written in first-person, this second person in the narrative is often very nice company.
Most people can relate to the family history side of Children of Radium. Everyone has a relative who has become enmeshed in ancestry.com. People love heritage trips, as we see in movies like A Real Pain (2024), which features Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin as cousins on a Jewish heritage tour visiting Poland in honor of their grandmother. Many people like to refer to a famous person that they consider a distant relation. On the other hand, most of us do not have Jewish great-grandparents who got out of Germany in time, but continued to help Germany produce chemical weapons.
Dunthorne goes down the rabbit hole with Siegfried Merzbacher. He discovers the work he did in Germany, which was beyond theoretical, and his connection to a chemical weapons factory. Dunthorne finds out that Siegfried did not exactly flee the Nazis in desperate haste, his German company got him out and then arranged (and partially funded) his employment in the Red Crescent in Turkey. The family took their piano. In Turkey, Siegfried kept working on gas masks and on chemical weapons and helped form the bridge between wartime Germany and Turkey. Eventually Siegfried separated from Auer, his German employer, but his work was apparently not entirely separable from the Turkish government’s use of chemical weapons in places like Dersim (which Dunthorne visits). Siegfried never played a military role and certainly did not knowingly deploy anything harmful on civilians, but the fruit of his work was applied in many unethical ways.
One aspect of Children of Radium is Dunthorne reckoning with Siegfried’s complicated past. He was a German-Jew who escaped the Third Reich, but he had some culpability for what occurred during the war and Holocaust. Children of Radium also considers the ways in which Germany itself is still reckoning with its past. There are towns like Oranienburg, which was not only an SS hub, but where the soil is still radioactive and there is a local ordnance crew for all the World War II Allied bombing leftovers. One contrast between Dunthorne’s reckoning and that of Germany is that Dunthorne’s guilt largely resolves into an awkward feeling, while some people in Germany are actively trying to address lingering problems and others are actively ignoring as much as they can. Dunthorne feels bad about what his great-grandfather did, but everyone everywhere is nice to him and expresses forgiveness. This seems to make his personal reckoning harder, not easier.
Children of Radium follows Siegfried far beyond Germany and Turkey and his scientific work for Auer. We follow him to the US and see his sad second life, suddenly much more insignificant than he was before while his son scientifically eclipsed him. Dunthorne also diverges into Siegfried’s personal life, which was very unhappy. Siegfried had a cold childhood and his later, severe depression, may have been linked not only to his guilt about his work but also his (maybe homosexual) wife who seems to have been unfaithful to him. As we go deeper into the drama, we learn more about Siegfried’s siblings, including Elisabeth—arguably the more interesting sibling according to Dunthorne’s mother. (The chapters do reveal her to be very interesting.) And we see Siegfried in his last years, close to his two sisters. After Elisabeth dies, he and Luise settle in the same care home for Jewish Germans in London.
As our guide for this memoir and first-person narrative, Dunthorne takes us many places. He purchases a Geiger counter and measures radiation in various places near and far, including his own medicine cabinet. He travels to Turkey and visits nearly forbidden spots where the government continues to repress minorities and a guide has an AK-47 tattooed across his back. Dunthorne goes to small German towns with high incidences of cancer and still mysterious factory sites. He visits many streets where the “old home” no longer exists. The writing is informative and amusing. We see everything through normal, not expert, eyes.
This is a “down the rabbit hole” experience with Siegfried and, at times, it feels like a rabbit hole experience you have on Wikipedia. Every thread is followed up, a bit. We never quite figure out how Siegfried felt about everything. We learn a little about radioactive toothpaste and products, but don’t really get into their significance. We learn that Turkey is repressing its citizens, but we do not get a very full account of Turkey’s relationship with minority populations or an explanation of the current government. We find out that Elisabeth was maybe more interesting than Siegfried and lost many friends in the Holocaust, but we move on after a few chapters. We learn that Munich did not have a new synagogue after the Third Reich until 2006, but we learn little about postwar German Jews in Germany. At the end of the book, we find out that close to Dunthorne’s home, a radioactive site was “covered up” for the London Olympics, mostly literally and a bit metaphorically. Dunthorne is neither moving nor altogether moving on. We have clicked on many connected links.
At times the book feels stretched out by the meandering or dissatisfying in its lack of conclusive takes. We have Siegfried’s lingering guilt, but also a relatively long account of Siegfried’s depression, his brief in-patient experience, and his crippling anxiety as a senior in suburban America. Should we be angry at him or feel sorry for him? Both? We learn about the long-term effects of chemical weapons production, but there is little said about disarmament—even though it was important to Siegfried in his final years. What should we do with all this information? Dunthorne is full of mixed feelings, even about the German citizenship he acquires. On the other hand, the narrative approach mirrors real life, the little bit we know about a lot of things, and the ways we sometimes sit between strong feelings without knowing exactly when and where to lean.
Children of Radium is a general audience book that combines family history, chemical weapons, a very long typewritten memoir deciphered years later, and some psychosexual speculation. Dunthorne’s writing ability and self-deprecating humor makes this work a more engaging read than many other family memoirs. The story exists at the intersection of many interesting topics and connects with the Third Reich in an uncommon way that many readers will find interesting.
Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history and assistant director of the honors program at Palm Beach Atlantic University. When she can, she reads and writes about World War I and she is the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).
