Podcast traces novelist’s quest to understand his ancestors’ departure from Nazi Germany

A new podcast follows one novelist’s quest to uncover the truth behind his German-Jewish ancestors’ departure from Nazi Germany, and reveals disturbing secrets he unearths in the process.

BBC Radio 4’s Half-Life finds the Welsh writer Joe Dunthorne trekking from Germany — where his grandfather, Siegfried, was employed in a secret chemical weapons laboratory — to Turkey, where thousands of Kurds were murdered at Dersim in 1937, possibly by means of a gas created under Siegfried’s supervision.

Featuring “darkly atmospheric” sound design and Dunthorne’s “clear ear for melodrama,” Half-Life gets at “the subjective nature of truth,” the Financial Times wrote, and “how the stories passed down through family generations are not always to be trusted.”