Abbott Kahler on EDEN UNDONE
"The stranger-than-fiction true story of a group of Europeans who tried to find utopia on a remote Galápagos island in the 1930s."
Welcome back to SOURCE NOTES. I usually do these things over the phone or Zoom or Google Meet, but Abbott Kahler and I had been trying to nail down plans for a drink anyway, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone. Our conversation is brought to you by P.J. Clarke's On The Hudson, where the Prosecco, fries, and tuna tartare don’t disappoint. You should read Abbott’s new book, EDEN UNDONE: A TRUE STORY OF SEX, MURDER, AND UTOPIA AT THE DAWN OF WORLD WAR II, before seeing the forthcoming Ron Howard movie on the same subject starring Jude Law and Ana de Armas (whenever it ends up hitting theaters). What a wild ride…
Let’s start with an overview.
It’s the stranger-than-fiction true story of a group of Europeans who tried to find utopia on a remote Galápagos island in the 1930s, and it turned into a real-life Agatha Christie murder mystery.
And you just happened to stumble upon a newspaper article about this eleven years ago?
I was looking up another case and I came upon, I think it was a San Francisco Examiner article from 1941. And the headline was this really fantastic tabloid passage that talked about a doctor with steel dentures, a baroness who was also known as “Crazy Panties” and her various love slaves—she drove one to his death and she was driving the other to ruin—and what was going on in this Galápagos Island. It was sort of a record-scratch moment where I went back and read it and started down a rabbit hole of research.
What was the other case you were researching at the time?
I was researching a murder during World War II, which I can't even remember the specifics of now. I should probably dig that back up because I don't know what I'm doing next!
Aside from that initial newspaper article what else were you able to find about the story at the outset?
There was a lot on this woman who showed up with two lovers on this island, declared herself the empress and the owner of the island, and basically just started wreaking havoc and death and destruction. There were a lot of stories about her in the newspapers. Then there were these two memoirs that came up. There was stuff from Europe, articles from various German sources. I started doing a deep dive into Google Books and various other foreign language sources were coming up. And then I started seeing that there were American explorers who had looked into this and that they had archives: Waldo Schmitt at the Smithsonian and George Allan Hancock at the University of Southern California, those are the two big ones.
Those memoirs were actually published?
They had been out of print for a long time. Original copies existed at USC.
And these were written by some of the actual participants in the doomed utopia?
Yeah. Friedrich Ritter, the doctor, also had a memoir, but it was in German, and I had to hire somebody to translate the entire thing for me. I hired about four or five people to translate various languages for this.
Which languages aside from German?
Spanish, French, and Norwegian. At some point the whole world was hearing about this story.
And the other primary source materials were the archives of the explorers.
Boxes and boxes. Letters, hundreds of photographs, film. I mean, one of the really eerie things about this story is that there's film footage of these people. It really brought them to life. I usually don't get that with my nonfiction history books.
How did you view the film? Were you in a small room watching some old reel with the footage?
No, they’d digitized it. So I had links to all the films and that helped me construct scenes. I actually saw what the people were doing, how they were moving, their expressions.
Tell me more about the memoirs.
What people choose to lie about and what they omit is often as interesting, and as telling, and as important to the story, as the truth. Margret and Dore, two of the main female characters aside from the Baroness, they had a lot of conflicting stories in the memoirs, from the mundane all the way to, like, oh, you murdered this person. No, you murdered this person. Their accounts would get more divergent as time went on.
Did most of the narrative reconstruction come from those?
Not all of it. The memoirs really gave access to emotions. Everybody's behaving badly in this book, but when you hear in their own words how absolutely treacherous and difficult and insanely grueling it was to live on this island in the 1930s, with absolutely no modern conveniences or anything, and in Dore's case with multiple sclerosis, and in Margret's case being pregnant and giving birth there. It just sort of allows the characters to be sympathetic in a way I don't think they would otherwise be. Because all of them are so petty—and eventually murderers.
As far as you can tell, are you the first person who’s done a major work drawing on some of this stuff?
Yes.
It was all just sitting there in plain sight.
And there was actually a new archive donated to USC in 2020 by a man named Lorenzo DeStefano, who's really great. He was a playwright who was hoping to do a screenplay in the 1970s, and he conducted interviews with a lot of the explorers, and they were very old. So he conducted some of the last interviews with these people and only donated them in 2020.
What other sources did you use to put the story together?
A lot of genealogy. I spent a lot of time going into the Baroness' background because nobody believed she was a baroness. I'm like, I'm going to get to the bottom of whether she actually was a baroness. And it turns out, she was a baroness. I had somebody in Europe and she was able to trace all of her lineage. She was from an aristocratic family. Part of her family's from the same dynasty as Princes William and Harry. I also talked to Friedrich Ritter's great grandnephew, who is in his eighties now. He was a very interesting character.
Did you cross paths with Ron Howard's people at any point?
From what I've read, their main source material was the two memoirs. And since they were fictionalizing it, they didn't really have to do the research I did.
You also went to the Galapagos.
Oh yeah. It's wild. It takes two full days to get there. Planes, trains, automobiles, ferries, the whole thing. A guide took me through every place on the island where these people lived, where they worked, where they walked, where they slept, grave sites, Post Office Bay, which is this very famous wooden barrel that was erected down on the beach back in the 19th Century, where people would leave letters, and if there was a ship going in the right direction, they’d deliver them. It still functions that way today, but it gives you an idea of how slow mail was delivered back then because you had to be at the mercy of ships. I saw the Baroness’ “motel.” It was like a shack with a corrugated iron roof, and she would bring in rugs and hang them on the wall. She tried to make it look like this sort of boudoir, draped with silks and everything.
The people on the island today, they're very aware of the history?
Yes. There's only about one hundred fifty people on Floreana today, and it's still difficult to live there. There's a place called the Hotel Wittmer run by the descendants of the Wittmers, Margret and Heinz. I met their daughter. She's now eighty-nine, I think. She still lives there. She has two children of her own who run hotels, and in one of their hotels, the ground floor has kind of a museum with artifacts, like the guns that they used, the record player, their trunks, their books, a lot of photographs, everything that they’d had on the island. It was pretty cool.
So eleven years ago, you found this story and started researching, but editors didn't want the book.
I put it aside. I wrote other books. I wrote my Civil War spy book. I wrote THE GHOSTS OF EDEN PARK. I had a two-book deal with Crown for GHOSTS and another book, and I was like, this is my second book. But they said no again. I finally took David Drake, the publisher—we went out for drinks, and I was just like, David, this is a great story. It's not an American story, it’s not a European story, it's a human story. Who among us hasn't wanted to ditch everything and run off to a remote island and abandon our lives and start over? And he got that.
And what about your next project?
I have no idea what I’m doing. I've loved this story so much and for so long that I don't know what's going to top it for me.
Just purchased the book. I’m so excited for this!