What to do when family history is radioactive? Work around stonewalling relatives

After World War II, with support from Albert Einstein, Eugen Merzbacher entered the United States from Turkey to pursue graduate studies in physics at Harvard. There, the story goes, my father lent him his quantum mechanics notes, so Merzbacher could enroll in the course midyear. In a nice irony, Merzbacher would later author the standard textbook in that field.

That a family friend survived to make this contribution was the result of an unusual confluence of luck and circumstances. In 1935, Merzbacher’s industrial chemist father relocated his German Jewish family from the outskirts of Berlin to Ankara, Turkey’s capital. “We didn’t flee. I never call us refugees. We were émigrés,” Merzbacher told me in a late-life interview, stressing the distinction. Siegfried Merzbacher, it seems, had received a well-timed job transfer just as the persecution of Jews in Germany was reaching a crescendo.

Joe Dunthorne’s discursive fourth-generation memoir, “Children of Radium,” unpacks that move, while wandering across Europe and through decades of family lore. Based in London, Dunthorne is a poet and novelist whose debut novel, “Submarine,” was adapted into a 2010 film. In the memoir, he carefully chronicles his great-grandfather’s unsavory involvement in Nazi chemical weapons research and gas mask development. In the process, he raises familiar questions about the limits of his own quasi-historical enterprise.

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The memoir displays Dunthorne’s gift for wry understatement and his doggedness as a researcher: he dug through archives, toted around a Geiger counter and even cooked food that his great-grandfather once consumed. Post-Holocaust memoirs are often quest stories, and Dunthorne juxtaposes his attempts to uncover the truth, or some approximation of it, with a fragmentary narrative of Siegfried Merzbacher’s life. But the book’s circuitous, meandering structure, including a major digression about one of Siegfried’s sisters, tests the reader’s patience. Epiphanies are sandwiched between near-irrelevancies and reportorial dead ends.

As is typical, Dunthorne confronts gaps in the historical record — documents incinerated by bombs, removed by the Allies, even discarded by unsentimental relatives. Aggravating those gaps are distortions of memory and uncooperative key sources.

Dunthorne’s grandmother (Eugen Merzbacher’s sister) essentially stonewalls him in his interview attempts. “We felt her presence in the lack of it,” he writes of her funeral, a fitting coda to her elusiveness. Even his mother, who plays an important role in his research and earns the book’s dedication, requests anonymity. Dunthorne compromises by referring to her only as “my mother.”

With the passage of decades, facts are difficult to unearth, and emotions and motivations are even more recalcitrant. To promote readability, Dunthorne admits to taking “significant liberties with the chronology” of his research and to dramatizing moments in his characters’ lives — deviations from journalistic accuracy that, however minor, underline Dunthorne’s unreliability as a narrator.

That unreliability mirrors, whether intentionally or not, that of one of his principal sources: the voluminous, virtually unreadable memoir that his great-grandfather composed. Dunthorne had access to the German original, about 1,800 typewritten pages, as well as to a translated, abridged version distributed to family members. Eugen Merzbacher, afforded a few cameos in “Children of Radium,” turns out to have been the translator, finishing the task shortly before his death in 2013 at 92.

Dunthorne’s title derives from one of Siegfried’s early professional accomplishments: the manufacture of a radioactive toothpaste that became the choice of the German army. “A branch factory in occupied Czechoslovakia ensured that the troops pushing eastward, brutalizing and murdering, burning entire villages to the ground, could do so with radiant teeth,” Dunthorne writes, combining ironic detachment with horror.

In 1926, Siegfried worked to create “activated charcoal” filters for gas masks, a task he justified as life-saving. In 1928, he was named the director of a German lab researching chemical weaponry. As late as 1935, with a Nazi named Erwin Thaler, he co-authored an article in a trade publication, The Gas Mask, about carbon-monoxide poisoning — a method used years later to kill Jews. “The relationship between their article and the gas vans was purely speculation, an invention of retrospect,” Dunthorne tells himself. In his own memoir, Siegfried had denied ever writing for the publication.

The Merzbacher family lived in Oranienburg, the eventual site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. And Siegfried’s relationship with his non-Jewish colleagues was naturally complicated by the politics of the time. Their work fueled Nazi militarism but, in some instances, they themselves lacked ideological fervor. Or maybe Siegfried’s expertise simply outweighed his Jewish background. The transfer to Turkey happened, Eugen Merzbacher told me, because his father’s bosses “saw the handwriting on the wall.” In Ankara, Siegfried became co-director of a gas mask factory, a joint Turkish-German enterprise next door to a poison gas laboratory.

“He and his family were fleeing the Nazis while remaining reliant on them, something that would only become more problematic in the years to come,” Dunthorne writes. The relocation saved the lives of Siegfried’s immediate family, at some cost to his peace of mind. “I cannot shake off the great debt on my conscience,” Siegfried later wrote.

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Dunthorne, in his wanderings, uncovers some impacts, direct and indirect, of his great-grandfather’s actions. He visits the town of Ammendorf, Germany, where a chemical manufacturing plant run by Siegfried’s bosses, since transformed into a nightclub, has left behind a toxic mess and a high incidence of cancer cases.

More chilling yet, Dunthorne finds a letter connecting Siegfried to Turkey’s purchase of chemical weapons from Germany — weapons allegedly used to massacre Armenians and Kurds in the town of Dersim. He notes, too, that the gas mask filters Siegfried helped develop allowed Jewish prisoners to clear corpses from the gas chambers.

Siegfried later emigrated to the United States with his wife, Lilli, and worked in a New Jersey paint factory. After his retirement, his lifelong anxiety and depression worsened, and he was, for a while, institutionalized. With his mother’s help, Dunthorne obtains Siegfried’s psychiatric records, an investigative coup, and uses them to reconstruct his early life.

In the end, the memoirist wrestles with both his great-grandfather’s complicity and his family’s continuing ties to Germany. Among his discoveries are editorial missives by Siegfried that preach global disarmament. “In his letters, he envisioned a safer future, and in his memoirs he invented a safer past,” Dunthorne writes, inching his way from condemnation to empathy.

Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia and the Forward’s contributing book critic.