Editor’s note: This article contains spoilers related to the new movie Eden.
Key Takeaways:
- The new movie Eden is based on the true story of a group of Europeans who attempted to inhabit one of the Galapagos Islands in the late 1920s and ’30s.
- German physician Friedrich Ritter led the charge to create an idealistic refuge on Floreana Island.
- By the mid-1930s, three of original settlers were dead under suspicious circumstances.
Friedrich Ritter sought to create an isolated Eden in the Galapagos Islands, in accordance with the philosophy of Friedrich Neitzsche. What occurred instead validated a different philosopher’s sentiment: Jean-Paul Sartre’s assertion that “hell is other people.”
The new Ron Howard movie Eden tells the true story of what transpired on Floreana Island between Friedrich Ritter and the people who followed him. Sydney Sweeney, one of the film’s stars, reportedly couldn’t believe what she was reading when the got the script. “You read all these crazy characters, there’s no way that they all are real, and they all come together and they have all these experiences,” she told The Wrap during an interview with her and co-star Ana de Armas. “But then I went and I read Dora [Strauch’s] book, and I read Margret [Wittmer’s] book, and I found all the newspaper clippings of all their stories and it’s the most wild account of people just put together.”
If the Galapagos affair seemed like fiction to Sweeney, that’s perhaps because it was works of fiction, mixed with philosophy, that made Friedrich Ritter first set out for the islands. Little did he know the scandal and death that lay ahead.
Friedrich Ritter’s Literary Dreams
“Among the books which made the strongest impression on my imagination were Robinson Crusoe and [James Fenimore] Cooper’s Leatherstocking tales,” Ritter wrote in an October 1931 article published in The Atlantic (then The Atlantic Monthly). This was the first of three such articles he wrote, intended to document the formerly Berlin-based physician’s survival efforts on Floreana as well as to outline his very rigid philosophy.
This latter part is crucial, because though it might seem from the outset that Ritter was simply endeavoring to be like Robinson Crusoe, his stated ambitions were more high-minded. He intended to use the isolation to write his philosophical treatise, his magnum opus. According to Waldo Schmitt, whose collected papers in the Smithsonian Institution Archives detail his encounters with Ritter and others when he took part in the Hancock Pacific-Galapagos Expeditions of 1933-1935, Ritter’s philosophical influences went beyond Nietzsche.
He was also a theosophist, a member of a philosophical and religious movement popular at the turn of the century. That Ritter’s treatise would have to blend the “interconnected nature of all things” spiritualism of theosophy with the rugged individualist Übermensch ideas of Nietzsche might be why Schmitt described Ritter’s writing as “the type of theosophical writing that no one cares to read after seeing the first page or two.”
Ritter set off for Floreana Island in 1929, and he wasn’t alone. At “Eden,” his Adam was accompanied by an Eve, Dore Strauch. She would often go by Dore Ritter on the island, but the two weren’t actually married. In fact, both were married to different people in Germany and abandoned their spouses to run off together. They instructed the wife and husband they left behind to “take care of each other.”
Strauch did love Ritter, as she would chronicle in her 1935 book Satan Came to Eden, but Ritter’s adherence to the Nietzschean idea that compassion hinders a “will to power” made their efforts to endure the island’s hardships challenging. “I often called for help to Frederick,” Strauch wrote. “He ignored me. I pleaded with him to let me stop awhile, to let me go back altogether; he never even turned his head.”
Strauch’s pleas didn’t just come from some distaste for the rigors of island life; before they had departed for the Galapagos, she had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. That’s how she met Ritter in the first place: He was the physician tending to her when she received her diagnosis. Then, he had won her heart away from her husband. But in their would-be paradise, she found him, in her words, “the most cold-blooded, harsh and brutal tormentor who had ever lured a woman to her slow destruction, and left her to her fate.”
The Wittmers and the Baroness
Between Ritter’s essays and the myriad of human interest stories about Ritter and Strauch’s retreat from society featured in the German press, it was inevitable that someone, at some point, would be to inspired to set out for the island after them. A German couple, Heinz and Margret Wittmer, did just that in 1932 along with their young son, Harry, with the intention of staying on the island for four years.
“I thought that it would be a pleasant change to have a woman to talk to,” Strauch wrote of the prospect of new neighbors on the island. Although the Wittmers originally claimed to have come simply to avoid the economic decline in Germany and after they were inspired by Ritter’s writing, it seemed that perhaps it was his medical prowess they truly had sought out. Young Harry was suffering from what the documentary The Galapagos Affair posits was likely “rheumatic heart disease.” Margret was also pregnant.
Strauch summarized the tension that arose after the Wittmers’ need for medical aide became clear:
“Frederick was anything but pleased. He thought it both inconsiderate and impertinent of these utter strangers to saddle us with the moral responsibility for their having come so far, and then to bank so casually upon the conscience of a medical man, and place him in a position where he could not refuse his services. As all these things came out, we were highly resentful of the Wittmers, and would gladly have put them on the next boat bound for Guayaquil.”
Beyond this dynamic, other conflicts brewed. The Wittmers were a more traditional, family-minded group, with hopes of being the “Swiss Family Robinson of the Galapagos.” That vision clashed explosively with Ritter’s new-age philosophy. The Wittmers wanted to dance, Ritter wanted to hold court and lecture on theosophy. But these competing ideas of Eden were merely the precursor for the next fulminant arrival.
Later in 1932, the island received another arrival: Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet. If Ritter wanted to be a philosopher, and the Wittmers the Swiss Family Robinson, this new arrival made her desired new role in life clear from the jump, branding herself the “Baroness of Floreana.” And the Baroness arrived in style, riding on a donkey, per Strauch’s book, and accompanied by two men who were, it seemed, both lover and servant: Robert Phillipson and Rudolf Lorenz.
“We learned that she was going to build a handsome hotel on Floreana,” Strauch wrote of the Baroness’ intentions, “... turning our island into a sort of Miami.” Her eccentricities drew too much attention for the island’s other residents (or, perhaps in the case of Ritter, drew too much attention away from him), and they all tried to keep their distance from her.
However, one of her escorts couldn’t keep his distance from the Ritters or Wittmers—at the Baroness’s doing.
Eden Unravels
The Baroness was emotionally manipulative to her two suitors in a manner William Albert Robinson described as “a festering sex complex culminating in a series of brawls.” When the smaller and weaker of the two men, Lorenz, ultimately lost these brawls, he was reduced “to a sort of ‘super-scullion’—a slave to the other two.” The slave comparison was made by several observers, including Strauch. “If the Baroness were a slave-driver,” she wrote, “... she could not be more ruthless and inhuman than she was to him.”
Lorenz sought out the other residents, looking for help. Strauch felt empathy for the man but recognized he didn’t seem entirely stable. Every time he visited, he grew more and more gaunt and more and more frantic.
Then, one day in March 1934, around noon, Ritter and Strauch heard an unmistakable and horrifying scream. Stepping out to investigate, they couldn’t find the source and intended to ask the Wittmers about it the following day. Instead, the following day brought them another visit from Lorenz, though this time, he appeared far calmer than he had been in quite some time.
Strauch recounted their exchange:
“‘Have you made it up with the Baroness?’ I asked.
‘Not this time,’ he answered.
‘Oh, then you’re staying at the Wittmers’?’
‘Yes, I am.’
‘Doesn’t she mind?’ was my next question, for I knew the Baroness well enough to know that she would lose no time in going to the Wittmers’ and demanding Lorenz back.
‘Mind!’ said Lorenz. ‘I’ve told her once and for all where she gets off!’
‘Will she remember it?’ said I.
‘I think she will,’ Lorenz answered.
This astonished us very much. He must have seen the almost incredulous question in our eyes, for suddenly he went red and began to talk very fast about all kinds of things—but incoherently, as though, realizing that he had been caught saying something he should not have said, he was trying to cover it up with irrelevant chatter, and cause us to forget what we had heard.”
On March 27, the Baroness and Robert Phillipson were found to have seemingly vanished without a trace. The Wittmers would claim that the Baroness and her preferred paramour had departed on a passing yacht headed for Tahiti, but no such ship has ever been identified. Strauch was more blunt in her assessment of what had likely occurred: “The Baroness had been murdered. Phillipson had been murdered. Four other people on the island knew it, as it was known to every ghost and spirit that went about upon that haunted ground.”
We do know that Lorenz actually did escape the island thanks to a passing ship. Shortly after the Baroness’s disappearance, he fled Floreana aboard the ship of a Norwegian fisherman and headed for San Cristóbal Island. Fate instead somehow brought them off course. They landed on Marchena Island, where their starved and mummified corpses were discovered months later.
But if the matter of the Baroness, Philippson, and Lorenz might have involved some foul play, it isn’t the only story’s conclusion to have an air of suspicion around it.
Ritter died shortly after the whole affair, seemingly from food poisoning he had contracted from eating chicken that had gone bad. But in much the same manner as Strauch’s book suggesting perhaps the Wittmers had played some part in covering up the true fate of the Baroness (perhaps at the hands of Lorenz), Margret Wittmer was suspicious of Strauch around the time of Ritter’s death.
Although Wittmer’s own book, What Happened On Galápagos?, never directly accuses Strauch of playing a part in Ritter’s death, it certainly suggests Strauch was in no hurry to seek the Wittmers’ help in tending to the ailing Ritter. Margret also claims there was absolute bitterness between the two lovers in their final moments, such as Ritter writing “In my last moment, I curse you!” to Strauch.
Shortly after Ritter’s death, Strauch returned to Germany and wrote her book. The Wittmers remained and became instrumental in establishing the Galapagos as the tourist destination it is today. Margret stayed on Floreana until her death 2000. She was the last of the early settlers still alive. Any hope of further details on what transpired in Eden went with her to the grave.
See Eden in Theaters Now
Eden released in theaters nationwide on Friday, August 22. The movie stars Jude Law as Friedrich Ritter, Vanessa Kirby as Dora Strauch, Ana de Armas as The Baroness, Daniel Brühl as Heinz Wittmer, and Sydney Sweeney as Margret Wittmer.
Michale Natale is a News Editor for the Hearst Enthusiast Group. As a writer and researcher, he has produced written and audio-visual content for more than fifteen years, spanning historical periods from the dawn of early man to the Golden Age of Hollywood. His stories for the Enthusiast Group have involved coordinating with organizations like the National Parks Service and the Secret Service, and travelling to notable historical sites and archaeological digs, from excavations of America’ earliest colonies to the former homes of Edgar Allan Poe.
