Half-Life: Trailer

Joe Dunthorne investigates the hidden history of his great-grandfather, a German-Jewish chemist, through an unpublished 1,858-page memoir stored at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. The narrative centers on a specific confession found on page 1692 regarding the nature of the chemist's work during the 1930s, a subject he had otherwise avoided for hundreds of thousands of words. This investigation reveals that the written confession only scratches the surface of a much more complex and unsettling story. The memoir carries a perceived family curse, as relatives associate its completion with the sudden deaths of those who worked on it. This eight-part series examines how traumatic pasts and suppressed family secrets continue to influence subsequent generations, suggesting that historical "bombs" inevitably detonate regardless of attempts to ignore them.