Having had our curiosity piqued by Ron Howard's Eden (2024) we quickly turned to 2013's The Galapagos Affair: Satan Came to Eden, the documentary which borrowed part of its title from Dore Strauch's seemingly rather self-serving first hand account of said 'affair'.
At the same time I have acquired a copy of Margret Wittmer's response to it, Floreana, described rather less luridly as a 'pilgrimage'. Following publication, Wittmer's only further comment on the matter up to her death in 2000 aged 95 was 'a closed mouth catches no flies'. (More on this later, I suppose.)
You may recall that I had noted that the accents on display in Eden were as unique and startling as one might expect of the Galapagos (though obviously non-endemic). In the documentary there is one, for Strauch's own words, which seemed immediately even more outrageous, yet I had assumed the film-makers had employed native German voiceover artists (and in the main they did), and it wasn't until the end credits that I learned that this particularly arch and thespy narration of the Krouty kind had been provided by Cate Blanchett.
It becomes clear early on here that the 'Baroness' was a French woman, something which was absolutely not at all evident in Anna de Armas's performance, and I think both films missed the chance to suggest that the underlying conflict of worldviews might have been fed by an existing continental European divergence.
And neither do either of the movies examine in any depth why it was that Germans in particular were drawn to these Islands in the late twenties. Historians have long been aware that many of the strange compulsions which would lead to the rise of Adolf were widely present in the population at the beginning of the twentieth century even amongst those who would claim to be steadfastly 'anti-fascist' before WWII.
Goldfine and Geller's documentary has some zingers in terms of insights into how the bad blood started to flow, but is ultimately undermined in the second half by bagginess, inconclusiveness and a largely superfluous cast of spare Germanic migrants who were inhabiting a separate island.
At the start one of the talking heads paraphrases Göethe’s sentiment that 'We are our own demons, we expel ourselves from our paradise.' and then again at the end, another two long term Galapagos inmates conclude that 'paradise is not a place', one having already expressed the hope that if there really is a paradise, that 'it is nicer than this'.
This aspect of the thematic material is handled well. I have often noted here in this region that 'paradise' is an umbrella term used by various kinds of outsider, specifically those who come to make and those who come to take, both perhaps slightly antithetical to the basic concept.
This region is not however one of those to which individuals flee as a way to leave civilisation behind. It's more like an environment you turn to once you have somewhat outgrown civilisation...or it has somewhat outgrown you.
The documentary does hint at tensions in the little community on Floreana which Noah Pink and Ron Howard must have consciously passed over in their screenplay: occasionally intense jealousy between the three women, a spark of Romantic interest perhaps between Wittmer and Strauch and a curious love-hate dynamic between Ritter and the Baroness.
In spite of all this it does seem that the most likely candidate for the murderer of the Baroness and Phillipson was the other member of this triangle, Lorenz who, in the later fictionalised account, is excluded entirely from the deadly confrontation, which requires the invention of a 'spark' — the death of Burro — to explain it.
It is also interesting how the boatload of dilettante scientists made more repeated and eventful interventions on the island.
I cannot quite grasp why Eden chose to hide the fact that tge doctor’s last meal was also his last meal as a vegetarian.
Beyond the fact, as noted by one descendant, that people who leave their own native environments are often natively and notably anti-social, some of the agitations which played out here resemble what I witnessed amongst certain fresher cliques of undergrads at Girton. They had paired up almost immediately after matriculation, yet almost within the first term the 'cross border migrations' had begun and by the end of the year many of them had fallen out definitely and the little pack disbanded.
The silent movie element of the story is beguiling and worth including in complete form even though it adds to the length of the documentary.
I was rather struck by the self-styled Baronness's resemblance to 2025 Australian Open winner Madison Keys.
