Memories of “radium” cannot completely overcome family obstacles: revision

After the Second World War, with the support of Albert Einstein, Eugen Merzbacher entered the United States of Türkiye to pursue higher education in physics in Harvard. There, the story tells, my father lent him his notes of quantum mechanics, so that Merzbacher can register in the course of the course. In a beautiful irony, Merzbacher would later increase the standard manual in this area.

That a family friend has survived to make this contribution is the result of an unusual confluence of luck and circumstances. In 1935, the industrial chemist father of Merzbacher moved his German Jewish family on the outskirts of Berlin to Ankara, the capital of Turkey. “We have not fled. I never call us refugees. We were emigrants,” said Merzbacher in an interview at the end of life, stressing the distinction. Siegfried Merzbacher, it seems, had received a well visible employment transfer when the persecution of the Jews in Germany reached a crescendo.

The discursive memories of the fourth generation of Joe Danthorne, “Children of Radium”, unpack which move, while wandering through Europe and through decades of the family tradition. Based in London, Dunthorne is a poet and novelist whose first novel, “Submarine”, was adapted in a film of 2010. In the memories, he carefully tells the uncompromising involvement of his great-grandfather in research on Nazi chemical weapons and the development of the gas mask. In the process, he raises familiar questions about the limits of his own almost historical business.

The Memoirs displays Dunthorne's gift for ironic euphemism and his obscure as a researcher: he dug archives, total around a Geiger counter and even cooked food that his great-grandfather has consumed. The post-holocaust memories are often stories of quest, and from Danthorne juxtaposes his attempts to discover the truth, or an approximation of it, with a fragmentary story of the life of Siegfried Merzbacher. But the circuit and winding structure of the book, including a major digression on one of the sisters of Siegfried, tests the patience of the reader. Epiphanies are sandwiched between close distance and reporting dead ends.

As it is typical, Dunthorne confronts gaps in the historic file – documents incinerated by bombs, deleted by the allies, even rejected by non -sentimental parents. The distortions of memory and non -cooperative key sources are aggravated.

Dunthorn's grandmother (Eugen Merzbacher's sister) mainly does so in her interview attempts. “We felt his presence in lack,” he wrote about his funeral, a coda appropriate to his insane. Even his mother, who plays an important role in her research and wins the dedication of the book, requires anonymity. Dunthorne compromises by referring to it only as “my mother”.

With the passage of decades, the facts are difficult to find and emotions and motivations are even more recalcitrant. To promote the readability, Dunthorne admits having taken “important liberties with the chronology” of her research and to dramatize moments of the life of his characters – differences in relation to journalistic precision which, also minor, underline the lack of reliability of Duthorne as a narrator.

This lack of reliability reflects, intentionally or not, that of one of its main sources: the bulky and practically illegible memory that its composed great-grandfather. Dunthorne had access to the German original, around 1,800 typed pages, as well as an abbreviated version translated distributed to family members. Eugen Merzbacher, offered a few cameos in “Children of Radium”, turned out to have been the translator, finishing the task shortly before his death in 2013 at 92.

The title of Dunthorne derives from one of the first professional achievements of SIEGFRIED: the manufacture of a radioactive toothpaste which has become the choice of the German army. “A branch factory in occupied Czechoslovakia assured that the troops pushing east, brutalizing and murdered, burning whole villages on the ground, could do it with radiant teeth,” writes Dathorne, combining an ironic detachment with horror.

In 1926, SIEGFRIED worked to create “activated” charcoal “filters for gas masks, a task which he justified as a showcase. In 1928, he was appointed director of a German laboratory by looking for chemical weapons. Until 1935, with a Nazi named Erwin Thaler, he co -wrote an article in a commercial publication, the gas mask, on carbon monoxide poisoning – a method used years later to kill Jews. “The relationship between their article and gas vans was purely speculation, a retrospective invention,” said Dathorne. In his own memories, Siegfried had denied having written for the publication.

The Merzbacher family lived in Oranienburg, the possible site of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. And Siegfried's relationship with his non -Jewish colleagues was naturally complicated by the policy of the time. Their work fueled Nazi militarism but, in some cases, they lacked ideological fervor themselves. Or maybe Siegfried's expertise simply prevailed over his Jewish history. The transfer to Türkiye occurred, said Eugen Merzbacher to me, because his father's bosses “saw the writing on the wall”. In Ankara, Siegfried has become co-director of a gas mask factory, a joint Turkish-German company next to a poison gas laboratory.

“He and his family fled the Nazis while remaining dependent on them, which would no longer become problematic than in the years to come,” writes Dathorne. Relocation saved the life of the immediate family of Siegfried, at a price of time for its peace of mind. “I can't get rid of the big debt on my conscience,” Siegfried later.

Dunthorne, in his wanderings, discovers certain impacts, direct and indirect, actions of his great-grandfather. He visits the city of Ammendorf, in Germany, where a chemical manufacturing plant led by the Boss of Siegfried, since transformed into a nightclub, has left a toxic mess and a strong incidence of cases of cancer.

Even more scary, Dunthorne finds a letter connecting Siegfried to the purchase of Turkey from chemical weapons in Germany – weapons would have used to massacre Armenians and Kurds in the city of Dersim. He also noted that the filter gas mask that Siegfried helped develop Jewish prisoners to release corpses from gas chambers.

Siegfried then emigrated to the United States with his wife, Lilli, and worked in a New Jersey paint factory. After his retirement, his anxiety and his depression for life worsened, and he was, for a certain time, institutionalized. With the help of his mother, Dunthorne obtains the psychiatric files of Siegfried, a coup d'etat of investigation, and uses them to rebuild his first life.

In the end, the memorial is fighting with the complicity of his great-grandfather and the continuous ties of his family with Germany. Among his discoveries are editorial missives from Siegfried who preach global disarmament. “In his letters, he was considering a safer future, and in his memories, he invented a safer past,” wrote Dathorne, going from conviction to empathy.

Klein is a journalist and cultural criticism in Philadelphia and the critic of the attacker's book.