Dunthorne is a novelist and a poet, whose first novel, “Submarine” (2008), is a larky bildungsroman, and his comic tone infuses this short, unconventional history with joy and pathos.
After the war, Siegfried and his wife, Lilli, followed their son, Eugen, to America, where Siegfried spent the rest of his life working on his 2,000-page memoir. “It wasn’t until Eugen was in his 90s and living in a retirement community,” Dunthorne writes, “that he decided to start translating the memoir so that the younger, English-speaking generations could also feel bad about not reading it.” That memoir is Dunthorne’s window into his great-grandfather’s epic emotional and factual evasions, as well as his scientific discoveries.
In 1926, he learns, following Doramad’s commercial success, Siegfried was promoted by the chemicals company Auer to its “protection department,” a euphemism for gas-mask technology that, by the mid-1930s, would see Siegfried and the Auer laboratories working under defense contracts with the German government.
The paper trail is secondary to what seems, at first, like Dunthorne’s eccentric decision to visit the various towns, factories and chemical dumps where the fruit of Siegfried’s research did the most damage. According to family lore, the Merzbachers fled Germany for Turkey in 1935, returning a year later to undertake a daring raid on their requisitioned house to rescue letters and heirlooms.
As Dunthorne investigates, this version of events falls apart, and he discovers not only that his family traveled from Munich to Istanbul on the Orient Express, but that for several years after relocating — indeed, until the Nazis revoked their German citizenship — Siegfried continued to work for Auer, which valued him so highly that it paid to ship the family’s grand piano to Turkey.