Digging for trauma in Nazi Germany

When Joe Dunthorne's mother gave him a ring for his wedding, she told him that the ring had "escaped the Nazis in 1935".

- SNEHA PATHAK

With a history like that, it isn't surprising that Dunthorne, whose debut novel Submarine was adapted into a film, decided to dig deeper into his family's history and write about the life of his grandmother, who had fled Germany with her parents and siblings in 1935. The only problem? His grandmother's unwillingness to talk to him because she felt he wasn't ready. When Dunthorne decided to look into his grandmother's "family archive" after her death, he found that the heaviest document in the collection was the memoir of Siegfried Merzbacher, his great-grandfather, running to 2,000 pages.

When he started reading the document, he realised his point of focus wasn't going to be his grandmother but her father. The reason: Merzbacher's role in World War II, primarily in the Nazi regime's chemical warfare campaign.

As Dunthorne read and researched more, he realised that his great-grandfather was more than the image that had been passed down through family history — a Jewish refugee who had invented radioactive toothpaste that became all the rage in Germany. Before he immigrated to Turkey with his family, Merzbacher's expertise had also been used in developing new chemical weapons, and he was made the director of the facility dedicated to researching them.