Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II

“Fascinating and well-written, Eden Undone expertly weaves together this complex tale of a doomed utopian vision. It’s compelling and unsettling and hard to put down.”

What could possibly go wrong?

An autocratic, domineering, and very cranky Berlin physician whose wife is only too willing to let him go off with his young mistress to a remote island in the Galapagos. His idealistic mistress who realizes too late that he’s extremely stubborn and self-centered. The odd followers who, reading about the couple, decide they, too, want to get away from it all.

Wild animals. Scarring lava fields. A baroness with two lovers. A traumatized World War I vet. A pregnant woman.

All in the middle of nowhere with their only outside contact a small barrel serving as a post box for passing fishermen and traders.

Yes, indeed. What could possibly go wrong?

Just about everything.

Author Abbott Kahler, an exhaustive researcher and wonderful storyteller, who formerly wrote under the name of Karen Abbott and is the author of Sin in the Second City and The Ghosts of Eden Park, has unearthed archival material that’s never been published before to bring us this true story.  

“The wire reports traveled 3000 miles across the Pacific Ocean and described a gruesome scene: On marchesa Marchena Island, bleak and barren speck of land in the northern part of the Galapagos, passing fishermen found two bodies,” writes Abbott in the prologue to her book. “Over the course of several months the tropical sun had mummified the corpses and eroded their features. Both lay on their backs. The larger one measured about 6 feet and had a tuft of brown hair sprouting from the skull. . . . the other, presumed to be a woman was a foot shorter and dressed in torn scraps of clothing. Hundreds of burnt matches in a pristine pile of wood suggested they had failed to start a fire.”

Dore Strauch Koerwin, diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, had just turned 26 when she began a round of treatments at the Hydrotherapeutic Institute in Berlin. One of the doctors there, Friedrich Ritter, a devout believer in the benefits of raw food and a man with dreams of creating a utopian community, told her she wasn’t ill.

Koerwin argued back that she was.

“You are not ill,” he insisted, “but you deserve to be ill.” Then he walked away.

If only that had been the beginning and end of their relationship. But soon Koerwin was in thrall to the doctor and planned on leaving her husband to move to Floreana, one of the more isolated of the Galapagos off the coast of Ecuador and once the home of a murderous pirate. That past alone should have been a warning. There were other red flags, but the couple were idealists and sure that they had found the answer to their dreams.

And so, after a long and tedious sea journey, they disembarked at Post Office Bay, so-called because of the wooden barrel where people could leave messages. Thus, was communication with the outside world back in 1929.

Also nearby was home, painted brown with white trimmings and white doors and a broad veranda. When no one responded to their knocking, they entered. The house was furnished and even wired for electric lights. The remainders of a last meal and a diary entry indicated that someone had been there just weeks before. But no one was there now, nor would they return.

The couple wanted to settle in another section of the island. To get to their new home site meant a horrid trek across sharp lave fields that cut into their shoes and scarred their legs. It was just one of many trials that they endured.

But despite being so completely off the grid, they had visitors. Wealthy men with yachts and a penchant for adventure stopped by and soon people were writing about the couple and their exploits, and it brought others to the island, all with dreams but little sense of reality.

And that’s when it really started going all wrong.

Fascinating and well-written, Eden Undone expertly weaves together this complex tale of a doomed utopian vision. It’s compelling and unsettling and hard to put down.