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The History Podcast
Half-Life: 1. Daughter of Radium
00:29:23
Hidden on page 1692 of his great-grandfather's memoir, Joe Dunthorne finds a confession.
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- [00:00]
Joe Dunthorne
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- [01:01]
Joe Dunthorne
VGW Group Void where prohibited by law 21/ terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds Music Radio Podcasts My grandmother grew up brushing her teeth with radioactive toothpaste. According to the packaging, it charged your gums with new life energy and left your teeth blindingly white. It was called Doramad, and her father was the chemist in charge of making it. Even before it was available in shops, he brought home samples for his family. They were living in a small town outside Berlin, in an apartment so close to the factory that after cleaning her teeth at night, my grandmother fell asleep listening to the churning of the autoclave. In 1935, when she was 11 years old, they decided to leave Germany, taking tubes of Doramad with them, their suitcases gently emitting alpha particles as traveled a thousand miles east. Later she would learn that the toothpaste her Jewish father helped create had become the preferred choice of the German army. A branch factory in occupied Czechoslovakia ensured that the troops pushing eastwards, brutalizing and murdering, burning entire villages to the ground, could do so with radiant teeth. Not that she ever told me this.
- [03:02]
Dorothea Merzbacher
You should read history. Really, you know, rather than listening to me to learn this properly, you know.
- [03:20]
Joe Dunthorne
You'Re listening to Half Life. I'm Joe Dunthorne and this is Episode one Daughter of Radium what I knew about my grandmother's childhood had all come second hand, family anecdotes worn smooth from each retelling. Like on my wedding day when my mother gave me a ring which she said had escaped the Nazis, a story I've been trading on ever since. I hold up my finger, let the polished bloodstone catch the light, then describe my grandmother's escape from persecution with the unique clarity of Someone untroubled by having done any research. My grandmother, Dorothea Merzbacher, was 12 years old. In 1936, she and her family had started a new life in Turkey. Meanwhile, back in Germany, they'd left behind an attic full of letters, winter coats, their good crockery, boxes of jewelry, as well as their money, which was tied up in blocked bank accounts. I proclaim OPEN Philippe Games of Berlin it wasn't until the Summer Olympics in Berlin that they thought maybe it was safe to go back. Tourists and journalists from all over the world were descending on the German capital for what Joseph Goebbels called a festival of joy and peace. My granny and her family decided to go back to Berlin while the whole country was on its best behavior. They found a city where bunting lined the streets and each cobblestone gleamed. It was reported that mosquitoes had been completely eradicated from the athlete's village and instead the LA was now populated with 200 storks. Berlin was smiling so hard you could hear its teeth squeak. Each day Dorothea's parents withdrew the maximum daily allowance from their bank and spent it with the recklessness of knowing it would likely get confiscated at the border. She watched from the back seat as her father drove them north through the center of Berlin, past gliding yellow trams, sports fans with flags around their shoulders, past the rows of long swastika banners that led towards the stadium. The whole street turned red, like staring down a throat, at the sight of which her father's driving became suddenly self conscious. Taking each corner with elaborate care, he drove them out to their old apartment in Oranienburg on the edge of Berlin. It was a small industrial town, but had already housed one of the first concentration camps in Germany. They were relieved to find the key still turned in the lock. Stepping quietly up the staircase, they were careful not to knock against the banisters and disturb their former neighbours. An eye peering from a crack in the door. My grandmother crawled into the thick air of the attic and passed down photographs, letters. And there it was, the bloodstone ring that I now wear on my finger, tucked inside a box of jewelry, which she opened there in Oranienburg.
- [07:27]
Dorothea Merzbacher
Hang on a bit. We didn't go to. Did we go to Ornenburg? Remember? We never went to Ornenburg at all. I think that I don't remember. But we probably just did go to Lenitz, to this other place where the home was, you know. But Oranienburg. I'm not so sure that we ever went there. No.
- [07:50]
Joe Dunthorne
The only problem with my story was that when I Started to check the facts. I kept being heckled by the person whose life it was. So you didn't have any, apart from your bank account? That was the only.
- [08:04]
Dorothea Merzbacher
No, no, we didn't have anything else in Germany.
- [08:07]
Joe Dunthorne
All right. And when you crossed, was there any? Because it was the Olympic year, Was everything just. All the borders were open and everything's just fine? You can go around and do what you want?
- [08:25]
Dorothea Merzbacher
That's right.
- [08:28]
Joe Dunthorne
My grandmother gave many in depth interviews during her four hours in German with the Anne Frank Center. Another hour with a project called Gathering the Voices. Dorothea, can I begin by asking you where you were born? A BBC radio documentary about German Jews now living in Scotland.
- [08:54]
Dorothea Merzbacher
I was born in Berlin, on the Kohesten. Damn.
- [08:59]
Joe Dunthorne
And one irritable hour with me, her grandson. An interview in which I begin by forgetting to press record. Sorry, I realized I wasn't recording. Who committed suicide?
- [09:14]
Dorothea Merzbacher
The mother? My uncle's wife. Oh, God. A lot of awful stories.
- [09:29]
Joe Dunthorne
It's fair to say that particular interview never truly recovered. Her yawns became more prominent as I stumbled from question to disconnected question. And as the morning wore on, she seemed to have her mind on other things.
- [09:50]
Dorothea Merzbacher
Maybe we should. I don't know, should we not eat something? Fruit or something?
- [09:56]
Joe Dunthorne
But yes, I maybe got one or two more questions.
- [09:59]
Dorothea Merzbacher
Okay.
- [10:00]
Joe Dunthorne
One of the other reasons I wanted to interview her was because I was worried about leaving it too late, that her memory might deteriorate before I had the chance to ask the important questions. She was 88. But listening back, I realize that asking those questions is kind of irrelevant if you don't actually listen to the answers. And did you say you had the first air raid shelter?
- [10:29]
Dorothea Merzbacher
First air raid shelter in Germany. There's a picture of it somewhere where we had kids all sitting in the air raid shelter.
- [10:39]
Joe Dunthorne
How funny.
- [10:40]
Dorothea Merzbacher
I know.
- [10:44]
Joe Dunthorne
Right after I pressed stop on the recorder, we ate lunch, a Slurpee broth, and never talked about the past again. I didn't even listen back to the recorded interview because I felt it had been such a disaster. I decided to give up on my plan to write a book about my grandmother's life.
- [11:07]
Leah Dunthorne
We called her Funny Granny, didn't we? Because she was. She used to call me Milyushka. And you and Nanushka? I don't know, Jo. You weren't any shka.
- [11:17]
Joe Dunthorne
I was in Cardiff, drinking tea in my sister Anna's living room, joined by my other sister, Leah. I'm the youngest sibling. By some distance.
- [11:27]
Leah Dunthorne
You're a bit dead with towards her. She had enough grandchildren by Then.
- [11:30]
Joe Dunthorne
That's right. I was just among the lower orders. I interviewed Gran in 2012 when I had this idea that I might write about it, and the interview went quite badly. But she's, like, yawning all the way through the interview. She's asking about lunch.
- [11:49]
Leah Dunthorne
Are you gonna leave hungry? That's the.
- [11:50]
Joe Dunthorne
It was a pre lunch interview. That was a big mistake. It was an 11 o'clocker. What's the thing you most remember Granny saying?
- [11:59]
Dorothea Merzbacher
She often said shish.
- [12:00]
Joe Dunthorne
Where did she.
- [12:00]
Leah Dunthorne
Yeah, Shish kebab, she used to say. Yeah, and then a viva pause and then kebab. That was it. That was his sort of swear word, wasn't it?
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Joe Dunthorne
Shish kebab.
- [12:10]
Leah Dunthorne
You know, like you say sugar. Like sugar.
- [12:14]
Joe Dunthorne
She died in 2017 at the age of 92.
- [12:17]
Leah Dunthorne
She was extremely funny and, you know, and so I was like, funerals should be a bit joyful. But that particular one, she wasn't that joyful.
- [12:26]
Joe Dunthorne
Apart from. Because there was a sense, like, we were trying to get, like, her voice back. At her memorial, my sister and I gave a joint speech in which we tried to recreate her wit and idiosyncratic phrases. A mix of Scots and Bavarian, flashes of Turkish. Ugh.
- [12:44]
Leah Dunthorne
Leishka. It's awful nice, your face cream. I was like, which one's that, Gran? And then she showed me the container and I was like, that's my hair wax.
- [12:55]
Joe Dunthorne
And it was only halfway through the speech that we realized we had seriously misjudged.
- [13:01]
Leah Dunthorne
The tone went down like a shit sandwich.
- [13:08]
Joe Dunthorne
It did. It did.
- [13:11]
Leah Dunthorne
I was really a tinge of regret because I'm like, oh, but I think she would have. I think Gran would have enjoyed it herself if she'd been there, because she had a real sense of humour about things, didn't she? But unfortunately, she wasn't there.
- [13:22]
Joe Dunthorne
A few years after her death, I started thinking again about writing her life story. So I went sniffing around my grandmother's bedroom, which had been left unchanged since she died. The floorboards groaned. There was a mothball smell. I knew that somewhere in here was a collection of documents known as the family archive. I imagined a crumbling bundle of letters hidden beneath a loose floorboard, but found instead a drawer neatly labelled with a luggage tag. Family Archive. Lined with faded orange wallpaper, it contained war medals, diplomas, antique coins, box files of letters in handwriting that leaned almost horizontal. A recipe for radioactive toothpaste, all the recorded interviews with my grandmother, an embarrassing folder of my own poems that I'd solemnly presented to her when I was a teenager. And finally, the heaviest document of all, the memoirs of Siegfried Merzbacher, my grandmother's father, the chemist.
- [14:43]
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- [15:20]
Joe Dunthorne
Yes. So this is the memoir. It's like it weighs like a first year at university textbook. It's like maybe two yellow pages stacked on top of each other. This introduction, together with description of my ancestors and my own life that follow it, is intended to show my descendants how the exalting as well as the horrific events during my long lifetime influenced me and my views and affected my reactions. My personal story is of course subjective, but I have tried to be objective in my historical judgments. I knew this was the foundational text of our family history. In the black and white photo on the COVID he looked jolly and relaxed. A stack of documents under one arm and luxurious bags under his eyes.
- [16:17]
Dorothea Merzbacher
He was always lovely. That's my real memory of him.
- [16:21]
Joe Dunthorne
My mum and her siblings had only happy memories of their opera.
- [16:25]
Dorothea Merzbacher
He was sitting at his typewriter an awful lot. I don't know if I even asked what he was writing. He was writing all the time. When he wasn't playing score Scrabble. He was playing a lot of Scrabble as well.
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Joe Dunthorne
Standing in my grandmother's bedroom, I flicked through this unpublished and unpublishable block of A.4 pages. Renowned among my relatives for its bad prose and intimidating length. Have you read his memoir?
- [16:59]
Dorothea Merzbacher
I mean I might have read. I might have read a few pages.
- [17:04]
Joe Dunthorne
You might have read a few pages?
- [17:05]
Dorothea Merzbacher
I did struggle a bit with the 18th century nanny this. And your father read it all. He was, I think, the first person in the family to manage to read it all.
- [17:17]
Joe Dunthorne
Yeah, dad. So you are one of the select few who made it all the way through, did you?
- [17:24]
Eleanor McDowell
Well, I skim read it all the way through.
- [17:28]
Joe Dunthorne
Even my dad, the most studious person I know, a historian of the 17th century Dutch Empire, had struggled. And this was the heavily abridged English translation. A mere 519 pages, single spaced. No one still living had Got through the German original. Nearly 2,000 typewritten pages. You really get a good sense of the color. His moustache having turned the color of rust from cigarettes from 60 years of unfiltered cigarettes.
- [18:10]
Dorothea Merzbacher
He was a chain smoker.
- [18:11]
Joe Dunthorne
I knew my great grandfather had worked on this memoir for the last decade or so of his life when he lived in North Carolina, Tapping away while smoking thousands of unfiltered Chesterfields. He was still adding footnotes clarifying details about his scientific work with numerous carcinogens when he died. Surprising no. 1 of cancer. That was in 1971. For the next 40 years, the foot high pile of papers then remained in North Carolina unread and emanating low level guilt among his descendants. It was kept in the office of my great uncle Eugen, my granny's brother, a jovial quantum physics professor. But he was in production of the toothpaste, the radioactive toothpaste. Radioactive toothpaste. Dora mat. Right. Talking here to his son Charlie, a filmmaker. Was it a big. I don't think so. It wasn't until Eugen was in his 90s and living in a retirement community that he decided to start translating his father's memoir from German so that the younger English speaking generations of our family could also feel bad about not reading.
- [19:33]
Celia Merzbacher
Was something like 2000 pages or something enormous. Typed, unbound pages. Just a stack of paper. It was just sort of in a filing cabinet.
- [19:42]
Joe Dunthorne
His daughter Celia remembers her father being intimidated by the task.
- [19:47]
Celia Merzbacher
My father was like, there's no way. And my mother said, well, how many pages could you do a day? And she broke it down. He said, I don't know, 20 or something. So, okay, so then that would take this long. And if you did that much every day, you'd be done by this. And it was all of a sudden imaginable. I mean, she felt also like she had created a monster. Because he disappeared in a way. And I know that he had the will to live until he finished translating that memoir. My husband and I, Alex, were sort of helping with the last steps of getting the thing printed and getting copies shipped out. And so I think my husband took him to FedEx or the Post office to mail out copies. So it was done. And within two days or something, he had this fall and they discovered that he had this abdominal mass and he was dead within a week.
- [20:59]
Joe Dunthorne
All the people in my family who have done significant work with this memoir die within days of finishing it.
- [21:08]
Celia Merzbacher
He had gotten this editor to agree to copy edit it. I don't think she knew what she was signing up for when she agreed to do it, but she couldn't stop. And she died sort of when she finished the last pages. She was a lifelong smoker, she wasn't that old, but she died of a heart attack or something. And so we call it like the curse of this memoir. She finished her job, she dropped dead. My father finished his job. He, you know, it was like the memoir has these kind of strange associations, but everybody got their job done just in time.
- [21:48]
Joe Dunthorne
Yeah, they put the final full stop.
- [21:50]
Celia Merzbacher
Yeah, I mean, he had obviously something going on. How many symptoms he felt he had slowed down a lot. But I mean, he was certainly mentally completely with it. There was a file that he had started on his computer with just, I think, one line in it saying something like, now it's time for me to write my memoir. And that was all that was in the file. So he had plans.
- [22:20]
Joe Dunthorne
And so I held this flimsily spiral bound document in both hands, aware that it was half a century in the making, an end of life project for two generations of my family. And that may explain why I immediately put it down again. It took a few days to work up the courage. Sitting in my granny's low armchair, I started reading her father's memoir. All that week, as my nephews ran shrieking up and down the long corridor, I slowly worked my way through. There were a hundred pages of our family's ancestral history, another hundred on a beloved great aunt, the next hundred on his unhappy childhood in Munich, and so on. I was 400 pages in and had only just reached the point where my grandmother was in the womb. It was here she had her first taste, via the amniotic fluid of radioactive toothpaste. I learned that in the 1920s, you could also buy radioactive face cream, radioactive hair tonic, and an energy drink called radithor. Distilled water combined with Radium 226 and Radium 228, which was promoted as a source of perpetual sunshine. Even products that were not remotely radioactive, like lingerie made from radium silk, traded on the idea that radium was a miracle cure and the source of mysterious powers. It didn't seem to matter that many of the pioneering radiologists, after years of unprotected contact with a range of radio radioisotopes, were now dying of their research. My granny and her brother spent their whole childhood brushing their teeth day and night with irradiated calcium carbonate. As I approached the end of the memoir, I kept checking the page numbers, trying to work out how this final chapter could possibly contain a full and Satisfying account of my granny's childhood, the country's descent into totalitarianism, their experience as a Jewish family in the Third Reich, their escape to Turkey, the 1936 Olympics, not to mention the small matter of the Second World War. There was something Siegfried did not want or could not bring himself to write about. The thing he'd spent a few hundred thousand words avoiding. The memoir, it turned out, was 506 pages of him clearing his throat. Then 13 pages of saying it. He wrote, now I come to the darkest chapter of my professional life. Today I openly confess to my descendants who will read these. I have betrayed myself, my most sacred principles. That part of my past still weighs on me today. I have a great debt on my conscience that I cannot shake off. There followed a brief description of his role as a Jewish chemist in a poison gas laboratory working with the Nazis. And then the memoir ended. I put the book down and looked around. How did I not know about his work with chemical weapons? Surely someone should have mentioned it to me. And that's the weird thing. Someone had. And your father was an expert in gases. Do you remember anything about the gas masks?
- [26:42]
Dorothea Merzbacher
Poison gas.
- [26:43]
Joe Dunthorne
Poison gas, yes.
- [26:44]
Dorothea Merzbacher
Yeah, I mean, that's all quite a weird kind of story. Because he was so valuable as an expert on poison gases and that. That firm would have stuck by him, I think, if he had wanted to go back to Germany and as it was, they gave him back his pension and everything. God. Wow. I know.
- [27:09]
Joe Dunthorne
And was that company involved in the war effort?
- [27:13]
Dorothea Merzbacher
I think so. I think so. Couldn't be anything else. I'm pretty sure.
- [27:19]
Joe Dunthorne
And was that.
- [27:20]
Dorothea Merzbacher
But I can't. I mean, I can't say it for sure, but I think there are. I mean, how many firms make poison gas?
- [27:27]
Joe Dunthorne
No, exactly. My grandmother had tried to tell me when I interviewed her all those years ago, but somehow that wasn't the story I wanted to hear. Right. And like that I moved on. Well, I'm just after the good stories really, Granny. A chemical weapons laboratory on the River Havel. Regular meetings with a colonel from the army, A boss who told him he would come to like Hitler once he got to know him better. No, that wasn't the good story I was looking for. And anyway, it was nearly lunchtime. Alright, Granny, you're off the hook.
- [28:15]
Dorothea Merzbacher
Thank God. Oh boy.
- [28:18]
Joe Dunthorne
Another hour for the records. Sitting in her house three years after her death, I turned back to the memoir and again read my great grandfather's confession of how he never got over the guilt. I read and re read the few pages about his work in the chemical weapons laboratory in a small town outside Berlin. This was where for me, the story really started. And yet I kept bumping up against the two most unconvincing words in the whole the end. Half Life was written and presented by me, Joe Dunthorne, based on my book, Children of Radium. This podcast was Produced by Eleanor McDowell and mixed by Mike Woolley. The music was composed by Jeremy Walmsley, the story consultant was Sarah Geiss, and the executive producer was Alan Hall. It was a Falling tree production for BBC Radio 4 and the History podcast.
- [30:10]
Eleanor McDowell
From BBC Radio 4.
- [30:13]
Joe Dunthorne
They remind me of the beauty of the everyday.
- [30:16]
Eleanor McDowell
Illuminated is the home for creative, one of a kind documentaries that shed light on hidden worlds.
- [30:23]
Leah Dunthorne
You could hear the plants photosynthesizing, a.
- [30:26]
Eleanor McDowell
Place of audio, beauty and joy with emotion and human experience at its very heart. You can see the people walking bewildered, absolutely bewildered. Nobody really knew what to think. The programs you'll find here explore the reality of contemporary Britain and the world. It's a chance to meet voices that are not normally heard.
- [30:47]
Dorothea Merzbacher
You don't open your mouth if you.
- [30:49]
Joe Dunthorne
Tell one person, that's it.
- [30:52]
Eleanor McDowell
Illuminated from BBC Radio. All human life is here, just waiting to be discovered. Listen on BBC Sounds.
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