With its glamorous A-list stars rolling around in the sand of a desert island or jealously plotting to kill each other at every turn, Eden had all the makings of a classic Hollywood movie.
Ron Howard’s latest blockbuster stars Jude Law (who appears fully naked in some scenes), Ana de Armas (ex-Bond Girl and now Tom Cruise’s girlfriend), Vanessa Kirby (Princess Margaret in Netflix series The Crown) and Sydney Sweeney.
Sweeney, currently riding the storm over her American Eagle jeans commercial – criticized by the left for promoting Aryan supremacy and eugenics with its assertion that she has ‘great jeans’ – could hardly have hoped for a more perfect next project.
Eden’s plot, after all, follows the descent into hell of a group of white Europeans after they try to carve out their own utopia in paradise.
It’s a survival thriller based on an improbable true story of decidedly oddball German and Austrian ex-pats who settled on the otherwise uninhabited Galapagos island of Floreana in the 1930s.
Delayed for nearly a year, it limped out in theatres on August 22, the summer graveyard for unloved movies.
A trailer featuring de Armas locked in a passionate embrace with two men caused online excitement earlier this month, however, most critics panned the movie at its 2024 Toronto International Film Festival premiere. Many blamed the screenwriter, Noah Pink.
Howard, the Happy Days star turned director, has had his share of flops in a long career but how he managed to mangle such a compelling tale – replete with sex, mayhem and even murder – is a mystery to those who know what really happened nearly a century ago on the volcanic island of Floreana.
The saga started in the summer of 1929 when a young German couple named Friedrich Ritter (played by Law) and Dore Strauch (Kirby) left Weimar-era Berlin just before the Wall Street Crash and sailed for South America.
The pair had already flouted convention by falling in love while married to other people. Astonishingly, Dore solved the problem by persuading Friedrich’s wife to move in with her husband instead.
Friedrich, an arrogant and eccentric doctor, met Dore when she was being treated in hospital for multiple sclerosis at the age of 26. A devoted follower of the philosopher Nietzsche and his ‘Superman’ idea, he believed that overcoming adversity led to personal growth and resilience (a philosophy often paraphrased as ‘whatever doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger’).
As a zealous vegetarian and nudist, Friedrich, who insisted that he could live to 150, certainly meant to overcome adversity.
Convinced that civilization was irredeemably terrible – and doomed, with the prospect of the world-destroying bombs that his friend Albert Einstein warned were to come – he urged his lover to join him on an uninhabited island where they could live cut off from all human society but their own.
They would build a home, grow food and throw off their clothes to live in perfect nakedness.
True to the spirit of Nietzsche, Friedrich and Dore wanted to test themselves. They chose the rocky, arid and generally inhospitable islands of the Galapagos, 575 miles off the western coast of South America.
Dore, besotted with Fredrich and regarding him as a genius, didn’t need much persuasion.
Friedrich, meanwhile, was so serious about the endeavor that, aware they wouldn’t be able to find a dentist out there, had all his teeth replaced by steel dentures, which he would later clean with wire wool.
It showed not only a cold ruthlessness but also a potentially unhinged temperament that Dore must have noticed on other occasions, such as when he took out a pistol and shot dead his nephew’s two dachshunds in disgust. Friedrich’s dark side, it’s thought, was rooted in an ordeal during the First World War when he was gassed and left for dead in a trench filled with corpses.
Arriving in the Galapagos later in 1929, the pair had sailed past bigger, populated islands to settle on the small and uninhabited Floreana, a former penal colony that was once home to a notoriously ruthless pirate. The 67-square-mile expanse of sun-beaten, lava-encrusted rock was hardly the South Sea paradise that many later colonists had in mind when they arrived.
Friedrich insisted that he and Dore toil naked except for their boots as they built a shelter in the jungle and tried to cultivate the seeds they had brought. He was ingenious in finding ways to survive but Dore rapidly found that his belief in the power of positive thinking only went so far in their tough new existence.
She complained in letters home that, far from finding an idyllic place to rest, their day-to-day existence was back-breakingly hard – especially for someone with multiple sclerosis – and that nothing she could do was ever right in the eyes of her exacting and emotionless lover.
For all Friedrich’s proud claims of self-sufficiency, the vegetarians struggled to produce food on an island racked by droughts and were saved only by the arrival of a passing yacht, owned by American millionaire Eugene McDonald, who showered them with supplies.
McDonald took a photo of the couple which he shared with the press in Europe. That and the news in their letters back home soon – and much to their horror – inspired other would-be colonists to join them.
The first to arrive, in 1931, were fellow Germans Heinz and Margret Wittmer (played in Eden by Daniel Bruhl and Sydney Sweeney) along with Heinz’s sickly son, Henry. As with Friedrich and Dore, they had both left their respective spouses to come to Floreana.
But that, as far as their new neighbors were concerned, was where the similarities ended. The homespun Wittmers were far too bourgeois for Nietzsche-spouting intellectuals such as Dore and Friederich, who deeply resented them.
They encouraged the Wittmers to set up home a long way from them in three old pirate caves. In the film, the family’s suffering even arouses Friedrich and Dore sexually.
When Margret, five months pregnant, made clear she hoped that Friedrich would attend the birth, he angrily refused, saying he no longer practiced medicine. He eventually relented when the birth went wildly awry, Margret was facing death, and he had to operate without anesthetic.
But the two couples’ differences paled beside the issues they would have with the next people on the island. Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet (de Armas) claimed descent from the Hapsburgs – and certainly behaved like it.
A vivacious and bohemian adventuress with a reputation for being irresistible to men (even if, as friends admitted, she was not conventionally beautiful), she was charismatic and charming but could turn violent if crossed.
Married to a French war hero, she instead arrived on Floreana in late 1932 with two lovers, Robert Phillipson and Rudolph Lorenz – one 13 years her junior, the other eight.
The trio brought three dogs, a hive of bees, a vast array of cases and trunks, and an Ecuadorean laborer. The Baroness immediately announced her intention of building a hotel that would attract the millionaires who occasionally sailed by in their yachts. She further antagonized the other islanders by declaring herself Floreana’s ’empress’.
Her ambitions were as far-fetched as her account of her backstory was wildly embellished. She was, in fact, an ex-cabaret dancer not a Hapsburg, albeit one who married a rich man.
Striding around in breeches and riding boots, a pearl-encrusted revolver in one hand and a whip in the other, she made it crystal clear that she wouldn’t think twice about using violence against any neighbor who opposed her.
She demanded that both boyfriends share her bed, but she and Phillipson often beat Lorenz black and blue. He would flee to the Wittmers’ home but meekly returned whenever the Baroness summoned him.
The other islanders put up with her high-handed behavior – from stealing the tinned milk that Margret had ordered from Ecuador for her baby to writing nasty things about them in articles sent back to the press.
‘It may be that in a wild place like Floreana the primitive character in each person comes out so that everybody shows his own true face – a rare sight in this world and rather disconcerting,’ Dore observed in her memoir, Satan Came to Eden, published in 1935.
And so it appeared to prove when the island was subjected to an oppressive months-long drought in early 1934 that set tempers on edge.
‘There is an atmosphere of gathering evil closing in on the island,’ Dore wrote.
One March day, she and Friedrich heard a long and chilling shriek – just about recognizable as that of a woman – ring out. Two days later, Margret came to see them. ‘She told us the strangest story – it sounded almost to have been rehearsed,’ said Dore.
She related how the Baroness had turned up at the Wittmers’ home a few days earlier to say that friends had arrived on a yacht and were bound for Tahiti. The Baroness had decided to join them, thinking she had more chance of starting a luxury hotel there than with the corrugated iron shack, Hacienda Paradiso, she had built on Floreana. She was taking Phillipson but leaving Lorenz to look after her property.
Dore and Friedrich were convinced that no yacht had arrived and their suspicions grew when Lorenz coolly offered to sell them the Baroness’s luxurious possessions, including a treasured copy of Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a lucky talisman that Dore knew she would never willingly abandon.
Neither the Baroness nor Phillipson made it to Tahiti and they were never seen again. Dore and Friedrich, who feared they might be murdered next, were convinced that Margret knew more than she was letting on.
Dore observed that Heinz, ordinarily a quiet and contained man, had recently been speaking furiously about the Baroness, once telling Lorenz that they had to ‘do something’ about her. She also suspected that Lorenz had been driven beyond endurance by the Baroness’s abuse.
Lorenz soon left Floreana after begging a Norwegian fisherman to give him a lift to a nearby island so he could make his way back to Europe.
Several months later, the mummified bodies of both men were discovered washed ashore in a dinghy on another island far off course. Lorenz, who may well have murdered his two bed mates, had died of hunger and thirst.
Only weeks earlier in November 1934, the island had claimed another victim. Friedrich died of food poisoning after eating spoiled meat when drought left them short of vegetables. He soon became nauseous and was racked by agonizing pains.
Accounts, again, differed sharply. Dore claimed in her memoir that she and Friedrich had been getting along better and that he had died peacefully, stretching his arms out lovingly to her just before he expired.
Margret said the opposite was the case: Friedrich appeared to have been beating Dore, she had poisoned the food intentionally, never ate it herself and then waited a suspiciously long time before ‘rushing’ to them for help.
She said that Dore had leaned towards her lover’s pain-racked face and said: ‘Die in a manner worthy of your name.’ His surname, Ritter, means ‘knight’ in German. It was a wonderfully Nietzschean farewell but Friedrich wasn’t finished, said Margret.
Unable to speak because his tongue was so swollen, he reached for a pencil and – ‘his eyes gleaming with hate’ as he stared at Dore – he wrote: ‘I curse you with my dying breath.’
By then, the adult settlers who had died in strange circumstances outnumbered those who had survived.
After five eventful years, Dore immediately returned to Europe. Heinz and Margret remained – and today their children run a hotel on Floreana.
The island’s connection with lunatic Germans and Austrians was so strong that the US Army sent a unit of soldiers to search it in 1945 on rumors that Adolf Hitler was hiding there.
But one suspects that even the Nazis could not have done a better job of wiping out their neighbors than the friendly folks of Floreana managed to do.
Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II (Crown, $19), by Abbott Kahler, is available in paperback now.
Ron Howard’s film Eden is set for theatrical release in the US on Friday, August 22, through Vertical Entertainment.