A Story of Germans Behaving Badly in the 1930s
Film Review: ‘Eden’ (2024)
Eden is based on what is called “the Galapagos Affair” in Germany, a strange episode in the early 1930s when eight idealistic Germans gathered on one of the idyllic Ecuadorian islands made famous by Charles Darwin and descended into a slightly mysterious abyss.
The film introduces us to Friedrich Ritter (played by Jude Law), a doctor turned philosopher, who went out to the Galapagos Islands, specifically Floreana Island, in 1931, intending to isolate himself from the influence of the modern world, which he sees as on the brink of collapse, to write a manifesto that will allow humanity’s renewal. Ritter blends this apocalypticism with Nietzscheanism, vegetarianism, and a commitment to “true democracy”. He is, in short, a dreadful man. He has, however, acquired a devotee, Dore Strauch (Vanessa Kirby), who is certainly not his wife—marriage, like all other bourgeois values and institutions, having been declared repressive by Ritter’s philosophy—though she fulfils many of the same functions. Between urging Ritter to finish the manifesto she views as cosmically significant, Strauch tries to cure her multiple sclerosis via meditation.
Ritter’s antics have, unknown to him, become a media sensation in Germany, where the impact of the Great Depression, and the growing popularity of and street violence between the Nazis and Communists, have made his apocalyptic ravings seem less absurd. Heinz Wittmer (played by Daniel Brühl), a 41-year-old Great War veteran,1 is among those inspired by reading about Ritter in the newspapers, and resolves to move to the island with his new wife, Margret (Sydney Sweeney), who is a bit younger than him (28), and his 12-year-old son, Harry (Jonathan Tittel), from a previous marriage. Heinz shares in Ritter’s sense that modernity is to be escaped and admires what Ritter has done, in making a new beginning and becoming (apparently) self-sufficient. But Heinz does not share Ritter’s ideology: the Wittmers remain devoutly Christian and deeply practical people. Heinz, for instance, believes the Galapagos environment will be healthier for Harry, who suffers with several chronic conditions.
Ritter is displeased at having his solitude interrupted by the Wittmers, but believes they will soon succumb to the hardships of island life and leave. Unfortunately for him, the Wittmers prove to be unexpectedly capable settlers—and then things get much worse. Two months after the Wittmers’ arrival, a ship anchors off the beach, a record player set upon the sand blaring stirring music, and a woman is carried ashore on the shoulders of two men. After this theatrical entrance, the woman, announcing herself as “Baroness” Eloise Wehrborn de Wagner-Bosquet (Ana de Armas), declares she will soon build a massive hotel called “Hacienda Paradiso”, and proceeds to have sex in the sea with the two men who had carried her, Robert Philippson (Toby Wallace) and Rudolf or “Rudy” Lorenz (Felix Kammerer).
The Baroness is in some ways more ideologically aligned with Ritter, being a libertine individualist who rejects bourgeois morality (she has a dog named “Marquis de Sade”) and seeing the island as a place of real freedom. But she resembles Heinz Wittmer in having been drawn to the island by Ritter’s “celebrity”, while having rather different ideals. The Baroness’s hope is to exploit the island’s fame to enhance her own status and leverage that to transform the island into a lucrative tourist trap. Whatever irritation Ritter felt at the Wittmers’ conventionalism is soon eclipsed by the carry-on from the new trio, the ostentatious polyamory being the least of it.
Carnage begins immediately as the Baroness clashes directly with the other settlers and tries to set them against each other. The Baroness, a complete sociopath, rather than taking any care for her own survival, intrudes on the others, bathing in their drinking water and stealing from their scarce food supplies. She then produces a document she says is from the Governor of the Galapagos Islands, giving her ownership of thousands of acres on the island, and starts acting as if she is the ruler.2 The Baroness’s party have brought firearms, which are used to enforce her writ, and the introduction of violence starts to spiral. The overarching narrative is the escalating war between the three “families”, but the Baroness sows chaos within them, too. In her own camp, Lorenz is increasingly bullied and marginalised, and Ritter’s choices in responding to the Baroness’s encroachments trespass his own ideals and lead to Strauch becoming disillusioned with him. The denouement in 1934 brings these trendlines together with lethal consequences.
Unlike Colonia Dignidad in Chile, where the fascination is the lurid details of how badly a group of German colonists in Latin America behaved, the fascination surrounding the Floreana imbroglio is precisely that all this time later the exact details of what happened are elusive. This is necessarily so because there were few witnesses at the key moments and those who survived had every incentive to shade their testimony to avoid murder charges. The Ecuadorian police records and journalistic investigations are shaped by this factor, as are the most important sources, the competing memoirs, which sold well over subsequent decades and embedded the Galapagos Affair in Germany’s popular culture. The scriptwriters for Eden have clearly immersed themselves in this material and produced a narrative that, as well as being very entertaining—part gritty survival drama, part psychological thriller—is, with one notable exception, a highly plausible rendering of the real-life evidence.
NOTES
It is unmentioned in the film, but Heinz’s job back in Cologne was as a clerk in the office of the Mayor, Konrad Adenauer, the man appointed fifteen years later to lead Germany out of Nazism after the demolition of the Third Reich.
In real life, the Baroness declared herself “Queen” of the island.