The idea of running away to an island and beginning anew has a strong allure. And in the early 1930s, a group of eight Europeans did just that in pursuit of utopia.
Eden, directed by Ron Howard, is a drama inspired by real people who fled Europe during the rise of fascism and tried to start over on the Galapagos island of Floreana, off the coast of Ecuador. The group, made up of a doctor and his patient, a couple and their son, and a baroness and her two lovers, lived on Floreana from 1929 to 1935. Life there was not exactly paradise, and over six years, the residents often butted heads in a small community where everyone was out for themselves. In 1934, two residents abruptly disappeared, and their whereabouts remain a mystery today.
Howard thinks viewers will find modern parallels in this century-old experiment. “This romantic idea that you could be your best self if you could just get away from modern society is something that we share to this day,” he tells TIME in a Zoom interview. “Yet the problem is we drag society with us because we are society.”
TIME talked to Howard and screenwriter Noah Pink about the characters in the movie that are based on real people, as well as Abbott Kahler, author of the 2024 book on the subject Eden Undone. (Kahler did not work on the film and had not seen the movie prior to its theatrical release.)
Why people moved to the Galapagos Island of Floreana
While people had tried—and failed—to live on Floreana before, the settlers who inspired Eden came after a German doctor named Friedrich Ritter (Jude Law in the film) and his partner Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby) moved there in 1929. Dore had multiple sclerosis and had been Friedrich’s patient before becoming his lover.
They left Germany in a time of upheaval, as the Weimar Republic government ended, Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler rose to power, and the Wall Street stock market crash of 1929 upended the global economy, creating fear and uncertainty.
Ritter suffered from nerve damage and post-traumatic stress disorder after fighting in World War I. He wanted to build a utopia on the island and spent his days writing about his ideas for a new world order. Throughout the movie, he writes pithy lines like “God is dead” and “in pain we find truth.” He said he came to Floreana to be alone, but that didn’t mean he wanted to remain unknown. “He wanted fame,” Kahler says.
Broadcaster Eugene McDonald, who had arrived at the Floreana as part of his own personal oceanic exploration endeavor, met Friedrich and Dore, and told the Associated Press about them immediately upon arriving back in America. The story of Friedrich and Dore’s experiment made international news, and they were compared to Adam and Eve living in their own personal Eden—hence the name of the 2025 film.
As the movie shows, a German couple, Heinz (Daniel Brühl) and Margret Wittmer (Sydney Sweeney), heard about Friedrich and Dore’s lifestyle and decided to join them in early 1932. Their idea of a utopia was a better life for their sickly son Harry (Jonathan Tittel), and they hoped he would fare better in a tropical climate. Like Friedrich, Heinz was traumatized by fighting in World War I, and his fingers would shake. He was also a high-ranking member of the Weimar Republic, and as enemies of that government assumed power, he feared political persecution.
Later in 1932, a baroness, Antonia Wagner von Wehrborn Bosquet, (Ana de Armas) arrived with two lovers, Rudolf Lorenz (Felix Kammerer) and Robert Philippson (Toby Wallace). There were rumors that she had actually killed somebody in Paris and had to leave. She was married to a French war hero, and it was also said that her mother-in-law paid her to leave because she despised her so much. What is known for sure is that the baroness was determined to build her utopia as well—a luxury hotel on the island.
What living on Floreana was really like
In preparation for life on an island without dentists, Friedrich had all of his teeth removed, and wore a pair of stainless-steel dentures. Friedrich and Dore brought seeds with them, so they could live off the food they planted in their garden, as well as the eggs from the chickens that had been on the island already. They became quite acclimated to their new surroundings: Dore was particularly attached to a donkey that she found on the island and kept as her pet. Dore and Friedrich would walk around naked at home, and one time, Dore stepped on a colony of sand fleas, and Friedrich had to remove 32 insects from the bottom of her foot.
The Wittmers hunted animals on the island for their food. They kept a garden and had to watch it constantly to make sure cattle didn’t trample it. As the movie shows, when Harry and Heinz were out hunting late one night, Wittmer gave birth to a baby boy all alone on their property, surrounded by wild animals. Howard and his team visited the exact cave where the baby was born so they could recreate it.
To keep in touch with family back home, the Wittmers and Friedrich and Dore wrote letters and put them in a barrel in an area of the island where passing vessels could stop and pick them up. Some of these letters were published in newspapers, and Friedrich even wrote articles for Atlantic Monthly. These writings attracted visitors to the island, curious to see how these settlers lived, and Friedrich gladly took any gifts they brought.
“I would say he’s a hypocrite because he wanted to prove that he could be self-sufficient, but the more these American explorers would show up and bring them seeds, food stuff and weapons, the more he came to depend on them,” Kahler argues.
The baroness had the most trouble assimilating to a rustic lifestyle and also engaged in strange behavior. As TIME reported in 1934, she liked to wound animals and then nurse them back to health. She carried around Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray as a sort of talisman, though it’s unclear why. In the movie, she says it’s because of its themes about staying young forever. TIME wrote back then that she was known for flashing her silk panties and pearl-studded revolver.
Kahler says the baroness was known for seducing tourists, however, she did not seduce the explorer George Allan Hancock (Richard Roxburgh) as the movie shows. However, Kahler did find a quote from one of Hancock’s companions, who talked about how she invited Hancock and a member of the crew back to her living quarters, and he exclaimed afterwards, “What a girl!”
Overall, the three houses—the Wittmers, the Baroness, and Friedrich and Dore—did not get along. As the movie shows, the Wittmers thought that Friedrich and Dore would be more neighborly, but not so.
“I think the problems start to arise because once you have different versions of utopia all in one place, nobody’s going to be able to achieve their specific utopia,” Kahler says.
The baroness’s mysterious disappearance
Friedrich and Heinz Wittmer were united in their intense dislike for the baroness, and they were trying to get her off the island—but not the way it goes down in Eden.
To this day, no one knows exactly why the baroness and her lover Philippson disappeared, but the mysterious circumstances of her disappearance remain fodder for imaginative Hollywood filmmakers.
In real life, Ritter wrote a letter blaming their deaths on the Wittmers, but that is not true. Kahler’s personal theory is that the baroness’s other lover Rudolf—who frequently alleged that he was being mistreated by the baroness—killed the two, with the help of Friedrich.
“I think once Dore realized that Fredrich was involved, she became incredibly afraid of him and started plotting her own way to get away,” Kahler argues.
Friedrich died at the end of 1934 after eating tainted chicken meat. Howard and Pink thought that was suspicious for a doctor. “The idea that he did it by mistake just always felt false to both Ron and I,” says Pink. “So if that’s the case, then what happened?”
While Dore did not poison his food, “once she realized what had happened, she took her sweet old time going to get any help,” Kahler says. “She just let him linger there for a day-and-a-half to the point where he was near-death before she said, ‘Oh, I better put it on the record that I reached out to somebody for help.’”
What happened to the settlers and lessons for today
The movie ends with Dore leaving and asking Margret if she is sure that she doesn’t want to come with her. Margret says no, “this is home.”
Dore left in 1935 and went back to Germany. She wrote a memoir of life in Floreana, Satan Came to Eden: A Survivor’s Account of the “Galapagos Affair.” Satan referred to the baroness, and she believed that Lorenz killed the baroness and Philippson and burned their bodies.
Rudolf tried to leave Floreana on a Norwegian fisherman’s boat, but was found dead on the Galapagos island of Marchena in 1934.
Margret wrote a memoir in 1959, Floreana: A Woman’s Pilgrimage to the Galapagos. The Wittmers ended up being the ones who survived on Floreana, and their descendants run a hotel on the island that is still in existence today. She lived until 2000, when she died at the age of 95. Howard and his team met with Wittmer’s daughter and people on the island who knew Margret while they were doing their research. “There are people on the island who had met her when she was alive, and everyone has at least four stories about the Wittmer family,” says Pink.
The story of people fleeing to a remote island will resonate with an audience that lived through the COVID-19 lockdowns, and in an era when right-wing political leaders are on the rise.
As Pink sums up the takeaway viewers should have from the movie, “In a time of rising fascism, how do we make our society a better place?” The movie and the history that inspired it are ‘very much a story about where we are.”
Howard adds: “There’s this attraction to getting the hell out. There’s uncertainty. It’s destabilizing. And there’s allure there. Here are some people who tried it. It’s a case study. Turns out to be pretty juicy, and I think, very entertaining. It is a cautionary tale because it ain’t that easy. Instead of running from it, we’re better off recognizing who we are and what we can do and facing society.”
The post The True Story Behind the Search for Utopia in Eden appeared first on TIME.
