April 14, 2026 • 12 mins
Curiosity can come in all shapes and sizes, from massive nations to tiny islands.
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
What does it mean for a piece of writing to
be dangerous? Writers love to say that ideas are powerful things.
But does an idea itself have power? Or does the
power come from the context in which the idea exists.
Of course, that's an impossible question to answer, an even
more abstract version of which came first the chicken or
the egg? But for an idea to be truly danmed Injurius,
(01:00):
it first has to be treated like a threat to
the status quo, even within something as seemingly trivial as
escapist fiction. In the early nineteen tens, China was undergoing
a massive upheaval. The imperial rule of the country came
to an end after two thousand years, with the Republic
of China taking its place. The end of the Qing
(01:22):
dynasty was in some ways a culmination of China's growth
into a world of global collaboration. Foreign relations had taken
off in the late nineteenth century, and cultural imports like
cinema began to reshape how the people of China expressed
and entertained themselves. In the process, some relics of the
old world fell away, and others found themselves reborn. In
(01:44):
the twentieth century. Now, this Republican period saw a boom
in what would later be called the Mandarin, Duck and
Butterfly genre of fiction. These were lurid romance, stories of
forbidden love and high drama, a uniquely Chinese equivalent to puliction.
But of course the popularity of this sort of low
art did not go unnoticed by those in power. The
(02:06):
new government soon deemed that they needed to conduct an
audit of the sorts of popular writing that was read
by the common people. On July eighteenth of nineteen fifteen,
they established a council for conducting such a review under
the Ministry of Education. The Fiction Committee would rank publications
into three categories. Upper rank fiction we should try to promote,
(02:29):
middle rank work that can be allowed, and lower rank
works that we should try to restrict or ban. Of
the sixteen literary magazines that they reviewed. Two made the
upper rank, eleven were deemed middle rank, and three were
unfortunate enough to get the label of lower rank. And
of the bottom three, only one received a recommendation for banning.
(02:50):
It was titled may You or Eyebrown Talk, a relatively
new magazine. May You was edited by a woman named
Gao Gianhua and her husband. Its first edition had hit
shelves on November seventeenth of nineteen fourteen, and it ran
for almost a year without incident. The material within its
pages was provocative but popular. It featured stories from women authors,
(03:15):
often romances, interspersed with artwork and photographs. Some of these
were related to the stories, others were included purely for
marketing purposes to sell more copies, and it was these
images that drew the government's eye, as many of them
were nudes or otherwise suggestive. Realizing that her magazine was
gaining negative attention from the government, Gou decided to cease
(03:37):
publication of Mayu after eighteen issues. The final issue of
Mayu was published on April sixteenth of nineteen sixteen. It
was officially banned that September. The committee's decision reads in
part this association, in examining a magazine called May You,
has found that its language and topics seemed specifically aimed
(03:59):
at destroying moral barriers and harming social standards. Among all
fiction magazines, its errors are the gravest. If this sort
of fashion were to spread, it would do considerable harm
to social morality. Now you have to understand that in
nineteen sixteen China there was no contesting such a ban.
Life had to move on. Gao did not revive May You,
(04:22):
but she and her husband continued to edit and publish
other magazines for decades to come. None of these, though,
were as enduring as the eighteen months they'd spent publishing
May You. In the many decades since the magazine's censorship,
the content of the magazine was obscured by controversy, with
many critics dismissing the content of the magazine itself. It's
(04:42):
no coincidence that the term Mandarin duck and butterfly was
itself a pejorative term, an implicit critique of the stories
that it described. History, however, has a funny way of
applying hindsight to stories like these. Although a minor blip
in the history Chinese literature, May You struck an important milestone.
(05:04):
It was the first fiction magazine published in the country
that was primarily edited and written by women, with stories
marketed toward female readers. Rather than do considerable harm to
social morality, as they said, what the magazine actually did
was provide a brief but crucial outlet for authors who
had no other avenue for being published. They practiced their craft,
(05:26):
and one hundred years later, their work is still being studied.
We could only hope that our own words will last
half that long. Many of us wish that we could
(05:49):
escape the confines of civilization and go live in paradise.
But in nineteen twenty nine, doctor Friedrich Ritter and his
former patient and lover Dore Strauch did just that. They
left their native Germany to live alone together on Floriana Island.
This island is a small speck of land in the Galopagos,
a cluster of islands west of Ecuador in the Pacific.
(06:12):
It's a beautiful place with incredibly diverse wildlife. There are seals, iguanas, tortoises,
wild pigs, and exotic birds like herons and flamingos. But
living outside of civilization is hard, regardless of the scenery.
Dore and Friedrich had no running water, plumbing, or electricity.
Food was scarce. Friedrich was a strict vegetarian and expected
(06:35):
Dora to live the same way, and this made things
even more difficult. And it should go without saying that
paradise is a relative term, especially depending on who you're
sharing it with. Right. Friedrich was a strange, controlling man
who believed in a very strict way of life. He
had a lot of bizarre ideas about the body. For example,
(06:56):
he had all of his teeth removed because he wanted
to make his gums strung. It didn't work, and so
he had to use a pair of steel dentures while
living in the galopagus. He also thought that Dora's sclerosis
could be cured with willpower alone, and he chastened her
when she used a cane. In reality, he was a
cult leader of a cult of two. Doray was trapped
(07:18):
under his influence. So imagine Friedrich's fury when his isolated
fiefdom was abruptly invaded by Heinz and Margaret Whitmer and
their thirteen year old son. Margaret was pregnant with their
second child and they wanted to have a child there
in paradise, living like Friedrich and Dore, Friedrich didn't see
them as potential new accolytes, though they were rivals. They
(07:40):
were more working class than Friedrich and Dora, who came
from sophisticated backgrounds. They were also quickly proved to be
more hard working and adept at living in nature than
Friedrich and Dora had. The Whitmers quickly found a cave
and used it for shelter while tending to a successful garden,
hunting for food, and holding a stone house. Friedrich and
(08:02):
Dore lived in a mostly wooden, open air home that
was shabby by comparison. Oh And when it came time
for Margaret to give birth to her new baby, Friedrich
begrudgingly helped her deliver, and while he was already near
his limit, another new neighbor arrived, Eloise Bosque de Wagner Verhorn,
a wealthy Austrian woman who wanted to build a hotel
(08:24):
for rich travelers on the island. She arrived with two assistants,
both of whom were her lovers, Alfred and Robert, and
they helped her set up camp on the island, and
Aloise quickly proved to be the most irritating neighbor of
all for Friedrich. She constantly fought with her lovers and
their arguments could be heard all over the small island.
They randomly fired off pistols just because Eloise liked to
(08:47):
shoot animals and then nurse them back to health, and
she also shot at passing sailors if they got too
close to her patch of the land. And to top
it all off, she began to steal food from the
other two groups when her so applies ran low. She
was no farmer or hunter. She mostly relied on deliveries
from Ecuador. When one of her lovers, Alfred, fell out
(09:08):
of her favor, he started showing up at the other camps,
telling his neighbors about his troubled love life and how
difficult Eloise was. And then one day in March of
nineteen thirty four, Eloise and her other lover, Robert, disappeared
from the island. Alfred claimed that they had left on
a passing yacht, but no one saw any ships that day.
(09:28):
Dora thought that she remembered hearing a gunshot and a
scream during the night, and when she went to visit
the Whitmers, she found that their house had a new
tin roof, one that used to belong to Eloise. She
began to wonder if they had helped Alfred kill Eloise
and Robert and then cover it up. But of course,
Friedrich had just as much reason to want Eloise gone
(09:50):
as anyone else. She was the most obnoxious intruder to
his personal island kingdom, and Doray had become increasingly disillusioned
with the island and with Friedrich, and perhaps he thought
that Eloise's wilful personality was a bad influence. Curiously, just
a few months later, in November of nineteen thirty four,
(10:10):
Friedrich came down with a terrible case of food poisoning.
Dora's story was that he ran out of fruits and
vegetables and had to resort to eating some dead chickens
despite their vegetarianism. On the other hand, Margaret Whitmer found
it suspicious that Dora was perfectly fine. Then again, she
had just as much motive to poison Friedrich herself and
(10:31):
framed Dora. By this point, the two groups absolutely hated
each other. Friedrich died from his illness. Dora left the
island after that, returning to Germany. Alfred Eloise's remaining lover
died after the boat he took to get off the
island crashed and stranded him on a smaller piece of land.
Only the Whitmers remained. Their descendants still live on the
(10:53):
island today. It was they and not Eloise, who eventually
built a hotel there on the island. And looking back,
perhaps it's not too strange that the one group to
survive were also the hardest workers with the best survival skills.
But as to whether or not they murdered any of
their neighbors along the way, well, we'll just have to
(11:13):
remain a bit curious. I hope you enjoyed today's guided
tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created
by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched
and written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced
by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the
(11:34):
people who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities.
You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of
Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well
as ebook and audiobook, and if you're looking for an
ad free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's all the
same stories, but without the interruption, for a small monthly fee.
(11:55):
Learn more and sign up over at patreon dot com.
Slash Grimandmile, and until next time, stay curious.
Welcome to Aaron Manke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of
iHeartRadio and Grimm and Mild. Our world is full of
the unexplainable, and if history is an open book, all
of these amazing tales are right there on display, just
waiting for us to explore. Welcome to the Cabinet of Curiosities.
(00:36):
What does it mean for a piece of writing to
be dangerous? Writers love to say that ideas are powerful things.
But does an idea itself have power? Or does the
power come from the context in which the idea exists.
Of course, that's an impossible question to answer, an even
more abstract version of which came first the chicken or
the egg? But for an idea to be truly danmed Injurius,
(01:00):
it first has to be treated like a threat to
the status quo, even within something as seemingly trivial as
escapist fiction. In the early nineteen tens, China was undergoing
a massive upheaval. The imperial rule of the country came
to an end after two thousand years, with the Republic
of China taking its place. The end of the Qing
(01:22):
dynasty was in some ways a culmination of China's growth
into a world of global collaboration. Foreign relations had taken
off in the late nineteenth century, and cultural imports like
cinema began to reshape how the people of China expressed
and entertained themselves. In the process, some relics of the
old world fell away, and others found themselves reborn. In
(01:44):
the twentieth century. Now, this Republican period saw a boom
in what would later be called the Mandarin, Duck and
Butterfly genre of fiction. These were lurid romance, stories of
forbidden love and high drama, a uniquely Chinese equivalent to puliction.
But of course the popularity of this sort of low
art did not go unnoticed by those in power. The
(02:06):
new government soon deemed that they needed to conduct an
audit of the sorts of popular writing that was read
by the common people. On July eighteenth of nineteen fifteen,
they established a council for conducting such a review under
the Ministry of Education. The Fiction Committee would rank publications
into three categories. Upper rank fiction we should try to promote,
(02:29):
middle rank work that can be allowed, and lower rank
works that we should try to restrict or ban. Of
the sixteen literary magazines that they reviewed. Two made the
upper rank, eleven were deemed middle rank, and three were
unfortunate enough to get the label of lower rank. And
of the bottom three, only one received a recommendation for banning.
(02:50):
It was titled may You or Eyebrown Talk, a relatively
new magazine. May You was edited by a woman named
Gao Gianhua and her husband. Its first edition had hit
shelves on November seventeenth of nineteen fourteen, and it ran
for almost a year without incident. The material within its
pages was provocative but popular. It featured stories from women authors,
(03:15):
often romances, interspersed with artwork and photographs. Some of these
were related to the stories, others were included purely for
marketing purposes to sell more copies, and it was these
images that drew the government's eye, as many of them
were nudes or otherwise suggestive. Realizing that her magazine was
gaining negative attention from the government, Gou decided to cease
(03:37):
publication of Mayu after eighteen issues. The final issue of
Mayu was published on April sixteenth of nineteen sixteen. It
was officially banned that September. The committee's decision reads in
part this association, in examining a magazine called May You,
has found that its language and topics seemed specifically aimed
(03:59):
at destroying moral barriers and harming social standards. Among all
fiction magazines, its errors are the gravest. If this sort
of fashion were to spread, it would do considerable harm
to social morality. Now you have to understand that in
nineteen sixteen China there was no contesting such a ban.
Life had to move on. Gao did not revive May You,
(04:22):
but she and her husband continued to edit and publish
other magazines for decades to come. None of these, though,
were as enduring as the eighteen months they'd spent publishing
May You. In the many decades since the magazine's censorship,
the content of the magazine was obscured by controversy, with
many critics dismissing the content of the magazine itself. It's
(04:42):
no coincidence that the term Mandarin duck and butterfly was
itself a pejorative term, an implicit critique of the stories
that it described. History, however, has a funny way of
applying hindsight to stories like these. Although a minor blip
in the history Chinese literature, May You struck an important milestone.
(05:04):
It was the first fiction magazine published in the country
that was primarily edited and written by women, with stories
marketed toward female readers. Rather than do considerable harm to
social morality, as they said, what the magazine actually did
was provide a brief but crucial outlet for authors who
had no other avenue for being published. They practiced their craft,
(05:26):
and one hundred years later, their work is still being studied.
We could only hope that our own words will last
half that long. Many of us wish that we could
(05:49):
escape the confines of civilization and go live in paradise.
But in nineteen twenty nine, doctor Friedrich Ritter and his
former patient and lover Dore Strauch did just that. They
left their native Germany to live alone together on Floriana Island.
This island is a small speck of land in the Galopagos,
a cluster of islands west of Ecuador in the Pacific.
(06:12):
It's a beautiful place with incredibly diverse wildlife. There are seals, iguanas, tortoises,
wild pigs, and exotic birds like herons and flamingos. But
living outside of civilization is hard, regardless of the scenery.
Dore and Friedrich had no running water, plumbing, or electricity.
Food was scarce. Friedrich was a strict vegetarian and expected
(06:35):
Dora to live the same way, and this made things
even more difficult. And it should go without saying that
paradise is a relative term, especially depending on who you're
sharing it with. Right. Friedrich was a strange, controlling man
who believed in a very strict way of life. He
had a lot of bizarre ideas about the body. For example,
(06:56):
he had all of his teeth removed because he wanted
to make his gums strung. It didn't work, and so
he had to use a pair of steel dentures while
living in the galopagus. He also thought that Dora's sclerosis
could be cured with willpower alone, and he chastened her
when she used a cane. In reality, he was a
cult leader of a cult of two. Doray was trapped
(07:18):
under his influence. So imagine Friedrich's fury when his isolated
fiefdom was abruptly invaded by Heinz and Margaret Whitmer and
their thirteen year old son. Margaret was pregnant with their
second child and they wanted to have a child there
in paradise, living like Friedrich and Dore, Friedrich didn't see
them as potential new accolytes, though they were rivals. They
(07:40):
were more working class than Friedrich and Dora, who came
from sophisticated backgrounds. They were also quickly proved to be
more hard working and adept at living in nature than
Friedrich and Dora had. The Whitmers quickly found a cave
and used it for shelter while tending to a successful garden,
hunting for food, and holding a stone house. Friedrich and
(08:02):
Dore lived in a mostly wooden, open air home that
was shabby by comparison. Oh And when it came time
for Margaret to give birth to her new baby, Friedrich
begrudgingly helped her deliver, and while he was already near
his limit, another new neighbor arrived, Eloise Bosque de Wagner Verhorn,
a wealthy Austrian woman who wanted to build a hotel
(08:24):
for rich travelers on the island. She arrived with two assistants,
both of whom were her lovers, Alfred and Robert, and
they helped her set up camp on the island, and
Aloise quickly proved to be the most irritating neighbor of
all for Friedrich. She constantly fought with her lovers and
their arguments could be heard all over the small island.
They randomly fired off pistols just because Eloise liked to
(08:47):
shoot animals and then nurse them back to health, and
she also shot at passing sailors if they got too
close to her patch of the land. And to top
it all off, she began to steal food from the
other two groups when her so applies ran low. She
was no farmer or hunter. She mostly relied on deliveries
from Ecuador. When one of her lovers, Alfred, fell out
(09:08):
of her favor, he started showing up at the other camps,
telling his neighbors about his troubled love life and how
difficult Eloise was. And then one day in March of
nineteen thirty four, Eloise and her other lover, Robert, disappeared
from the island. Alfred claimed that they had left on
a passing yacht, but no one saw any ships that day.
(09:28):
Dora thought that she remembered hearing a gunshot and a
scream during the night, and when she went to visit
the Whitmers, she found that their house had a new
tin roof, one that used to belong to Eloise. She
began to wonder if they had helped Alfred kill Eloise
and Robert and then cover it up. But of course,
Friedrich had just as much reason to want Eloise gone
(09:50):
as anyone else. She was the most obnoxious intruder to
his personal island kingdom, and Doray had become increasingly disillusioned
with the island and with Friedrich, and perhaps he thought
that Eloise's wilful personality was a bad influence. Curiously, just
a few months later, in November of nineteen thirty four,
(10:10):
Friedrich came down with a terrible case of food poisoning.
Dora's story was that he ran out of fruits and
vegetables and had to resort to eating some dead chickens
despite their vegetarianism. On the other hand, Margaret Whitmer found
it suspicious that Dora was perfectly fine. Then again, she
had just as much motive to poison Friedrich herself and
(10:31):
framed Dora. By this point, the two groups absolutely hated
each other. Friedrich died from his illness. Dora left the
island after that, returning to Germany. Alfred Eloise's remaining lover
died after the boat he took to get off the
island crashed and stranded him on a smaller piece of land.
Only the Whitmers remained. Their descendants still live on the
(10:53):
island today. It was they and not Eloise, who eventually
built a hotel there on the island. And looking back,
perhaps it's not too strange that the one group to
survive were also the hardest workers with the best survival skills.
But as to whether or not they murdered any of
their neighbors along the way, well, we'll just have to
(11:13):
remain a bit curious. I hope you enjoyed today's guided
tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created
by me Aaron Mankey in partnership with iHeart Podcasts, researched
and written by the Grim and Mild team, and produced
by Jesse Funk. Learn more about the show and the
(11:34):
people who make it over at Grimandmild dot com slash Curiosities.
You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of
Curiosity's hardcover book, available in bookstores and online, as well
as ebook and audiobook, and if you're looking for an
ad free option, consider joining our Patreon. It's all the
same stories, but without the interruption, for a small monthly fee.
(11:55):
Learn more and sign up over at patreon dot com.
Slash Grimandmile, and until next time, stay curious.
Aaron Mahnke's Cabinet of Curiosities News
Host
Aaron Mahnke
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