Joe Dunthorne’s Children of Radium: A Buried Inheritance is a remarkable work of literary investigation that begins with a simple desire to explore family history and morphs into something far more complex and unsettling. What starts as the author’s attempt to write about his grandmother’s heroic escape from Nazi Germany transforms into a reckoning with a darker legacy: his great-grandfather, Siegfried Merzbacher, was a Jewish chemist who developed chemical weapons for the Nazis.
The book joins a growing canon of what might be called “inherited guilt literature”—memoirs like Edmund de Waal’s The Hare with Amber Eyes or Hadley Freeman’s House of Glass—but with a twist that sets it apart. Instead of uncovering the suffering of Jewish ancestors during the Holocaust, Dunthorne discovers complicity.
The Maddening Contradictions of Real People
Dunthorne writes with a measured elegance that never overreaches, balancing dry wit with deep empathy—even when the revelations are deeply disturbing. His prose captures the disorientation of discovering that your family history is not what you imagined:
“What was harder to comprehend was how I had managed to forget most of what she actually told me, and work my way back to the story I preferred to believe in.”
The author begins with a simple object: a ring his mother gave him for his wedding, which supposedly “escaped the Nazis” in 1935. This is the launching point for an investigation that spans continents, archives, and generations, leading him to uncover the truth about his great-grandfather Siegfried, who developed radioactive toothpaste called Doramad before moving on to gas mask filters and, eventually, chemical weapons research for the Third Reich.
What makes this book exceptional is Dunthorne’s commitment to complexity. He refuses to flatten his ancestors into simple heroes or villains. His great-grandfather is both a gifted scientist and a moral coward, a loving father and a man who helps facilitate mass murder. His grandmother is both a survivor and someone so traumatized she becomes cruel in her old age, making carers cry “on their first visit.”
The Toxic Landscape of Memory
Dunthorne’s research takes him to Oranienburg, a town outside Berlin where unexploded bombs from WWII still lurk beneath the radioactive soil—a perfect metaphor for the buried dangers of his family history. With a Geiger counter in hand, he scours the earth for traces of his great-grandfather’s poisons, a quixotic gesture that captures the essence of his project: the desperate search for tangible evidence of intangible guilt.
Some of the most haunting passages come when Dunthorne visits Dersim, Turkey, where chemical weapons possibly developed with his great-grandfather’s expertise may have been used in massacres of Kurdish Alevis in 1937-38. A local activist tells him, “If your great-grandfather was involved in this massacre, this genocide—if he had any single role in this genocide—we forgive him.” The moment is devastating in its generosity.
“Children of Radium” doesn’t just confront one family’s secrets; it illuminates broader questions about how ordinary people become entangled with extraordinary evil. Siegfried’s justifications—that he was “only” researching chemical weapons, not manufacturing them; that he helped Jewish colleagues escape Germany—are the familiar evasions of those who collaborate with atrocity.
Structural Brilliance and Generational Echoes
The structure of Children of Radium is masterful, moving between Dunthorne’s present-day investigations and reconstructions of his ancestors’ lives. The book’s middle sections, where he explores his great-grandfather’s psychiatric records from 1957, reveal a man tormented not by guilt over chemical weapons, but by more mundane anxieties. This disconnect becomes yet another mystery to unravel.
What emerges is a portrait of selective memory across generations. Siegfried wrote a 2,000-page memoir that somehow managed to minimize his work on chemical weapons. Dunthorne’s grandmother refused to discuss her past. His mother throws away crucial documents, saying, “So, from your point of view, he doesn’t exist.” The inheritance is as much about forgetting as remembering.
In a particularly poignant twist, Dunthorne discovers that his great-grandfather’s sister, Elisabeth, was a remarkable humanitarian who ran a children’s home in Munich that sheltered Jewish orphans until she was forced to flee in 1939. Her colleagues who stayed behind were murdered at Auschwitz—killed using technology Siegfried had helped develop. This revelation shifts the moral center of the family story, suggesting that Dunthorne might have been writing about the wrong ancestor all along.
The Ambiguous Joy of Becoming German Again
“Children of Radium” culminates with a scene of profound ambivalence: Dunthorne and his family receiving German citizenship as descendants of victims of Nazi persecution. This moment captures the book’s central tension. How do we reconcile the contradictory truths of our inheritance? Can citizenship papers restore what was taken? Can an investigation heal a wound?
Dunthorne writes of this moment: “It was interesting, simultaneously fraudulent and profound. While no burdens were suddenly lifted, there was a flash of connectedness, a sense of generations spreading out behind and ahead of us, like when you pull apart a paper chain and suddenly see all the human-shaped figures, dangling and holding on to each other.”
Limitations and Critique
Despite its many strengths, “Children of Radium” occasionally struggles with pacing. Some sections—particularly those focused on the medical records and the detailed chemical research—might test readers’ patience. There are moments when Dunthorne’s investigation seems to spiral into minutiae, with diminishing returns in terms of insight or narrative momentum.
Additionally, while Dunthorne is admirably humble about the limits of his knowledge, occasionally this becomes a rhetorical strategy that allows him to avoid more pointed ethical judgments. Some readers might wish for a more forceful moral reckoning with Siegfried’s choices, rather than the author’s sometimes overly diffident approach.
The book also might have benefited from more exploration of the scientific context around chemical weapons and radioactive products in the early 20th century. While Dunthorne touches on the bizarre popularity of radioactive consumer goods like toothpaste and face creams, this fascinating historical backdrop sometimes recedes behind the family drama.
Final Assessment: A Triumph of Literary Nonfiction
These minor criticisms aside, Children of Radium stands as an exceptional achievement in literary nonfiction. It joins books like Philippe Sands’ East West Street in its ability to weave personal history with the broader currents of 20th-century catastrophe. Dunthorne, previously known for his novels (Submarine, Wild Abandon, The Adulterants) and poetry (O Positive), proves equally adept at navigating the ethical complexities of nonfiction.
What distinguishes this book is its refusal of easy resolution. There is no catharsis, no tidy moral, no redemptive arc. Instead, we’re left with the messy reality of how historical trauma persists across generations and how even the most intimate knowledge of our ancestors leaves crucial questions unanswered.
“…hoping to replace my comforting fantasy with something meaningful and true,” Dunthorne writes. This statement serves as both the project’s aspiration and its limitation. The truth, as this remarkable book demonstrates, is rarely comforting, often incomplete, and never as straightforward as we might wish.
Children of Radium ultimately becomes a meditation on the impossibility of fully knowing the past while acknowledging our inescapable connection to it. Like the radioactive elements in his great-grandfather’s toothpaste, this history continues to emit its particles long after the original source is gone. All we can do is detect its presence and try to understand its effects.
For readers interested in family history, Holocaust literature, or the ethical dimensions of science, this book offers a profound and unsettling journey—one that resonates long after the final page.
