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The History Podcast
Half-Life: 6. Tranquility
00:28:37
Joe's great-grandfather settles in the United States where his mental health deteriorates.
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- [00:01]
Joe Dunthorne
BBC Sounds music radio podcasts. It was the spring of 1957 and my great grandfather could feel that something was wrong. He had experienced depression before, but this time was different. Whenever his wife Lily went out, even to the grocery store, he was overcome with the certainty that she would not come back alive. If his daughter in law was a few minutes late to meet him, he believed that she had been in a fatal collision. Siegfried and his wife Lily were now living in Chapel Hill, a leafy town in North Carolina. After his long career as an industrial chemist, 26 years in Germany, a decade in Turkey, another seven years in America, he had finally retired. He knew he should try to relax, spend time with his grandkids. But instead there was anxiety, listlessness, problems in the bedroom, and the more or less constant feeling that he and his loved ones were about to die. His eyes prickled forever on the edge of tears that never came. His older sister Elizabeth came to visit him, flying over from Washington D.C. with her son. They enjoyed their time together. But on the day she packed her bags to leave, Siegfried started to get agitated. It was not a physical sensation, no shortness of breath, no pain or palpitations, just an overwhelming sense of impending calamity and the knowledge that he could do nothing to stop it. He was sure his sister was going to collapse on the driveway or get sideswiped by a truck, or that a mid flight engine fire would fill the cabin with noxious smoke. He rose from his seat, walked out to the porch and started beating his head against the wall. He did this as though trying to bring the house down around him while yelling that he should, as the nurse would later write on his admissions, let himself, under the first passing automobile. I'm Joe Dunthorne and you're listening to Half Life. This is episode six, Tranquility. Well, I actually only had the phone number of this very impenetrable medical records company Corporation. That's right, with like a million phone menus. And yes, in 1957, my great grandfather was hospitalized in a psychiatric unit in America. Calling the medical records company, I was conscious that my request to track down his paperwork from almost 70 years ago was a slightly hopeful one. The guy on the phone is like, what's, what's the name? That's like Siegfried Merzberg. He's like, what's the year? The birth year? And I was like 1884. And he was. I felt like he was gonna hang up the phone the moment I said that. But yeah, he somehow did know that records existed, even though he wouldn't Give them to me. And then I set Mum on the case. Four weeks later, my mother had struck up an apparently lifelong friendship with the woman in the hospital records office. Across multiple phone calls they had formed a bond sufficient that the woman had happily descended into a distant basement, retrieved and copied the handwritten documents and a week later it all arrived by airmail free of charge at my parents house in Wales. You managed Mum to get the Hospital Records, 1957. Is this your years as a historian coming useful or is it just your charm? As soon as my mother received it, she phoned me and the first thing she said with a note of disapproval was, you're going to be very happy. From his 11 days in hospital, here were 45 pages of observations, sleep charts, medication records, Freudian analysis and an extremely comprehensive report from the admissions nurse. First thing that happened to him when he got into the hospital. It's an unbelievably detailed initial nurse's physical, which is incredibly invasive. Oh, here we go. Yeah.
- [05:26]
Dr. Rex Spears
Yes. Prostate slightly enlarged, hammer toe on left third digit penis, small testicles normal, slightly obese, normal adult male, possibly some senile change, but not severe, very anxious.
- [05:43]
Joe Dunthorne
This is stuff about his teeth as well, isn't there?
- [05:45]
Dr. Rex Spears
Well fitting plates, no teeth.
- [05:48]
Joe Dunthorne
Well fitting plates, no teeth. Yeah, that's right. I knew from his memoir that Siegfried's teeth were a long standing problem. Perhaps not surprising given his work with radioactive toothpaste. But when he finally agreed to have them taken out in 1955, it seemed to trigger a reckoning with his mortality. He felt death at his shoulder, his dentures smiling from the glass on his bedside table. I wondered if this was his past catching up with him. And the losing of his teeth had been a serious.
- [06:24]
Dr. Rex Spears
Very meaningful low to his self esteem.
- [06:27]
Joe Dunthorne
Right.
- [06:30]
Dr. Rex Spears
But lots of people lose their teeth.
- [06:33]
Joe Dunthorne
Now that I had his psychiatric notes, I felt certain that here I would find him finally coming to terms with the consequences of his chemical weapons work. He'd suggested as much in his memoir, where, although he was light on detail, he blamed his severe depressions on his guilt about developing poison gases. That part of my past still weighs on me, he wrote.
- [06:58]
Dr. Rex Spears
It says here, anxiety reaction, acute and chronic. But he always managed to sort of hold himself together at the same time and to them appeared like a nice elderly gent. Except when they really dug deep.
- [07:19]
Joe Dunthorne
Doesn't get called a nice smelling old man.
- [07:21]
Dr. Rex Spears
Oh, that must have been all the cigarettes.
- [07:27]
Joe Dunthorne
Dr. Rex Spears, a first year resident in psychiatry, had his initial visit with Siegfried and felt there wasn't much wrong with him. They got on well, discussed the news and he wrote that Siegfried laughed often and with obvious pleasure. But the good humour receded as they spent more time together and the doctor wondered if in retrospect, the patient might be quite skillful in disguising his disability. Siegfried was apparently more open with his family doctor, who was also a German Jew. She wrote that in the early morning he is grasped by such fear that he cannot contain himself, hits his head against the wall, cries that he has to kill himself, despises himself for such behavior. To him the only way seems death. She noted a moderate danger of suicide.
- [08:28]
Dr. Rex Spears
There was obviously something that was making him very anxious and depressed and he did have these turns where he kept banging his head against the wall and saying he should be dead and so on. They didn't seem to find any root cause of it. They were only looking in his early family life.
- [08:51]
Joe Dunthorne
So these are the notes, doctor's notes and I've kind of highlight append the comments that really jumped out at me. I see this patient as having been pretty much rejected by his mother. Patient has never learned how to play or relax. He is a person totally unable to express anger towards his parents. Relationship with his wife and children is quite ambivalent. With the hate component markedly repressed. His anger has been totally unconscious.
- [09:25]
Dr. Rex Spears
They never asked about his work or anything as far as I could make out that it would have had anything to do with that. There was that kind of psychiatry where they thought it was all in his childhood and its relationship with his mother and, and put it all down to that. But probably it wasn't really that.
- [09:49]
Joe Dunthorne
Reading the pages of Siegfried's Freudian analysis gave me a unique insight into his mind state. But I still didn't find the great unburdening I was hoping for. Nor was there anything about how his extended family had been torn apart by the Third Reich and World War II. While he and his family were living safely in Turkey, one of his sisters fled to London with a forged exit visa and the other to Tel Aviv. After her husband spent a month in Dachau, his cousin Alice, who remained in Germany, was deported to Theresienstadt from where she never came back. Other family members who stayed behind took their own lives rather than risk the same fate. His cousin Franz overdosed on sleeping pills. His niece gassed herself with a kitchen stove. But he told none of this to his doctors. With them he seemed more fragile, small minded, but also somehow relatable. Dwelling on his spiteful boss, his failing body, his marriage problems and envy at other people's. Success. He is materialistic and feels that accomplishments and self determination are the only worthwhile things in life. Patient considers himself one big fat failure as far as his goals in life are concerned. The thought of dying without fulfilling his ambitions is quite intolerable to him. Impotence made him feel completely like a dilapidated old house, like a wash rag.
- [11:30]
Dr. Rex Spears
I mean, I remember my mother always saying, oh, he's always depressed all the time. She used to say that when he was alive. And of course, worse after my grandmother died. He was sad about the loss of his prestigious career and he was quite envious of his son, who was very successful quantum physicists, and he felt his life had been a bit of a failure.
- [12:00]
Joe Dunthorne
Siegfried's son, Eugen had followed his father into a career in science. After studying physics at the University of Istanbul, Eugen now had a PhD from Harvard and not yet 30 years old, was working at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton alongside Albert Einstein and the Institute's director, J. Robert Oppenheimer. At the same time, Siegfried had come to America with the hope of finding similarly meaningful employment, but ended up working at a New Jersey paint factory and during those long afternoons in Newark, told to stand over a churning vat of resin, a headache grinding behind his eyeballs. The thought of his son striding across swathes of perfect lawn, discussing the collapse of dying stars with a group of Nobel laureates provoked some unfatherly feelings.
- [12:57]
Dr. Rex Spears
Well, I mean, he could see that the place was full of very important scientists, quite a lot of whom he knew, and he was not one of them and never would become one of them.
- [13:12]
Joe Dunthorne
Yeah, yes, he kind of was surrounded by people who'd achieved what he was unable to. Eugen had read, translated and abridged his father's memoir and with it the confession about his work with chemical weapons. But according to Eugen, he did not think of his father's hospitalisation as anything more than retirement depression, just the comedown from a busy career as an industrial chemistry. Perhaps Eugen was right, given that not once in the many hours Siegfried spent talking to his doctors about his life did he even mention the work that was supposed to be plaguing his conscience. In which case, I wondered if his guilt and remorse might actually be a kind of invention, a performance reserved for the memoir. Because wasn't there something flattering about the idea that he had battled for decades with a complex moral burden? Wasn't that preferable to Dr. Speer's view that he was a man overwhelmed not by remorse but by unexpressed resentment? In summation then, I See him as a fearful, hostile person who is totally unable to express this hostility. Dr. Spears eventually concluded that it is useless to attempt to let him understand his hostility. The patient's insight is lacking and apparently has been all along.
- [14:42]
Dr. Rex Spears
He wasn't well, like my own father, he didn't sit and go on about the past.
- [14:49]
Joe Dunthorne
No, he resented it.
- [14:53]
Dr. Rex Spears
He was bitter about it.
- [14:55]
Joe Dunthorne
Bitter about how his life had turned out.
- [14:56]
Dr. Rex Spears
Yeah, yeah.
- [14:58]
Joe Dunthorne
And his bitterness was not just work related. The most surprising thing we found in the medical notes was related to his wife, Lilly. Siegfried initially told Dr. Spears that their marriage was perfect in every respect. The kind of statement liable to make a psychoanalyst reach for their pen. Given more time to think about it, Siegfried admitted that there had been some periods of concern due to what he called Lilly's unhealthy attachments to women.
- [15:31]
Dr. Rex Spears
There was all the business about my, you know, about my grandmother and how she might. Was maybe not fully heterosexual or she was lesbian or whatever, and how he maybe felt inadequate as a husband. And I thought, well, okay, do you.
- [15:48]
Joe Dunthorne
Feel like they were digging for things that weren't necessarily there?
- [15:52]
Dr. Rex Spears
Well, they were digging for the things, yeah. That they wanted to find. Maybe they were there. But, you know, is that, is that the primary concern? The primary reason for him being so distressed and anxious and unhappy with himself? I don't know. I mean, I've never been to a psychiatrist myself, but. Or had counseling or anything, so I'm not the one to speak. Really.
- [16:25]
Joe Dunthorne
That explains a lot, doesn't it, mum?
- [16:26]
Dr. Rex Spears
It does.
- [16:30]
Joe Dunthorne
I learned Lilly had at least three so called unhealthy attachments. The first was with Siegfried's cousin in the 1920s, a woman to whom Siegfried himself had once proposed. The second was years later in Turkey with a fellow German expatriate and close family friend. An intense relationship which ended with Lily in, in Siegfried's words, grieving for weeks on end. After this, he was left to nurse his wife through the resulting heartbreak, A situation which he did not seem to register as troubling. Lilly's other significant attachment was with Siegfried's own sister Elisabeth. And in this case it had lasted for a period of years. Dr. Spears noted that this relationship with was definitely covertly homosexual, but apparently not overtly so. A sentence that doesn't get any clearer no matter how many times I reread it.
- [17:32]
Rachel
Well, I was going to say that before you even spoke about that, that it's a child intuition, but there was strong current between grandma and Lily that I never understood.
- [17:53]
Joe Dunthorne
I called my mum's Cousin Rachel, Elizabeth's granddaughter, to ask her if she knew anything about that relationship. It didn't seem like mere coincidence that Siegfried's hospitalization was triggered by seeing Lily say goodbye to his sister, watching the two of them embrace on the doorstep. When Rachel was growing up, her grandmother had lived in their house and she had strong memories of Elizabeth.
- [18:19]
Rachel
You call her that, but I have to call her Grammock.
- [18:22]
Joe Dunthorne
You have to call her Grammack, and you should call her Grammack, that's fine.
- [18:26]
Rachel
And my father called her Muk, which I never liked. So Grammock is what I'm comfortable with.
- [18:34]
Joe Dunthorne
In my second conversation with Rachel, I tried to dig a little deeper into the romantic subplot that I was keen to believe in, but she was less convinced.
- [18:46]
Rachel
You know, I think ultimately my grandmother had very clear personal boundaries. I don't think it necessarily had to be a full blown lesbian attachment. I think she just had very clear sense of her own space. And I imagine that Lily could have intruded on that and she would have had the strength just to say no. That makes sense to me.
- [19:19]
Joe Dunthorne
When Siegfried left hospital, the doctor gave him antidepressants, but the basic advice was keep busy, find a project. The nurse had already noted he felt best when bashing away at his typewriter. So starting work on an almost endless memoir was an ideal therapeutic treatment, a way to drown out spiralling thoughts with the clatter of keys that would maybe explain why he then wrote almost 2,000 pages. But what that meant for me was that I'd now spent four years in close analysis of a document that was arguably more a symptom of his illness than it was a trustworthy memoir or record of our family history. And in speaking to Rachel, I started to wonder what and who had been obscured by my focus on this one central document.
- [20:15]
Rachel
It took me years to learn about her earlier life and make sense of the. You know, obviously the loss would have been there anyway. But the fact that she'd lost such a powerful early life.
- [20:34]
Joe Dunthorne
Though I didn't know it from the brief paragraphs about his older sister in the memoir, Elisabeth had such an extraordinary career in Munich that she now had what her brother would have loved to have, her own Wikipedia page. Unlike Siegfried, though, she had only ever written one short and academic account of her work life. And by the time she and Rachel lived together in Washington D.C. she never spoke a word about was a strange.
- [21:04]
Rachel
Household to grow up in because no one talked about the past. So, you know, I'd go into my grandmother's room and there would be a yarzite candle burning on the desk. No one explained to me what that was or who it was for, and her persistent sense of loss and grief. I knew it was there, but it was never explained or spoken about.
- [21:39]
Joe Dunthorne
Yahtzite candles, a Jewish tradition, are burned to honor the dead.
- [21:45]
Rachel
It was like entering a different world when I went into her room. A world that seemed deeply attached to the past, but also sort of lost, you know, a lost world that she was trying to keep hold of. And, of course, the silence that surrounded it. She told no stories about the past. None that I remember. Absolutely none.
- [22:25]
Joe Dunthorne
It was strange for me to consider these two contradictory strands of my family. My great grandfather hammering away at his version of events, closing in on half a million words, while his sister remained silent about her past. And then, when these two siblings were both in their 80s, had outlived their spouses, and were, for the first time since their childhoods, living in the same city, they came together each evening to push words around a board.
- [22:59]
Rachel
Adrian, my younger brother, remembers when Siegel was living in the Roosevelt Hotel that he came to play Scrabble with my grandmother in the evenings. They made incredible scores. I mean, unbelievably high scores. And I've never been able to understand how they did it, except. But I do know that they played bilingual games, so you could use German or English in the same game, which may have helped a lot.
- [23:27]
Joe Dunthorne
I'm just thinking of the compound words in German. Maybe that really helps your Scrabble kind of go on and on and on.
- [23:34]
Rachel
Absolutely. Plus frequent possibilities for the letter Z, so.
- [23:40]
Joe Dunthorne
Oh, that's so true. That's so true. Elizabeth's health declined, so that by early 1965, her needs had gone beyond what her family could provide, and she was transferred to a hospice.
- [23:54]
Rachel
I mean, amazingly named Home for the Incurables, which no one would ever call such a place that anymore. She was always patient and uncomplaining and, you know, just this amazing strength she had, which was always there under the grief and the loss, an ability to endure. And I think that's what I felt.
- [24:27]
Joe Dunthorne
And it was there, in the home for incurables, that her memories nagged at her. Elizabeth got out all the boxes of her correspondence and laid them on the bed while her brother, my great grandfather Siegfried, was just a few streets away, already a thousand pages into his memoir. Elizabeth got out her own typewriter, but struggled to write more than a few words from her bed. In her hospice, she was trying to trace the lives of her former colleagues, women she'd last seen on a street in Munich in 1939. She had many personal letters from them in which they described their dreams, favourite poems, least favourite co workers, the lilacs blooming in the Englische Garten. But she was missing the basics. She didn't even know for certain when or where they died. So as her own health declined, Elizabeth wrote to their relatives, trying to pin down the facts, slowly putting together some simple biographies marking lives that seemed to vanish without trace.
- [25:42]
Rachel
I remember going into her room, her sitting at that table, writing letters. I didn't know what she was doing, but I know now that she was actively trying to reconnect to that past. But the only evidence that I remember of that was letter writing.
- [26:04]
Joe Dunthorne
I tracked down the short biographies she wrote, a few hundred words each and which felt to me like the opposite of the six leather bound volumes of her brother's memoir. His writing was an epic exercise in avoidance. While here, Elizabeth offered an unflinching account of the pains of her past that didn't cross a page.
- [26:26]
Rachel
In 1942, when the home was disbanded by the Nazis, the remaining 12 children were provided with a common courage to visit regularly until the deportation to herself.
- [26:37]
Joe Dunthorne
I learned that shortly before she died, Elizabeth sent these biographies to a London publisher that had put out a call for contributions to a memorial book. A way to remember those who lost their lives helping others. But Elizabeth's pages arrived too late in London and the book had already gone to print. All that remained of them now was in a digitized archive, just a few yellowing pages on my laptop.
- [27:08]
Rachel
30 children found their home.
- [27:10]
Joe Dunthorne
I found myself wanting to finish the project she started. After all those years of looking at my great grandfather Siegfried's decisions and his unwillingness to accept the consequences, I needed to find someone in my family who was willing to look plainly at the past. Half Life was written and presented by me, Joe Dunthorne. It 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. It.