Loading summary
Transcript6 lines
- [00:00]
A
This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this ad for your morning commute to wake you up, which could help your driving. Science says that stimulating the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many months have 28 days? What gets wetter as it dries? What has keys but can't open locks? If you don't want to hear the answers, turn off this Liberty mutual ad now. 12 months. A towel piano. Enjoy being fully alert.
- [00:31]
B
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Welcome to Erin Menke's Cabinet of Curiosities, a production of iHeartRadio and Grim 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. 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 dangerous, 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 1910s, China was undergoing a massive upheaval. The imperial rule of the country came to an end after 2,000 years, with the Republic of China taking its place. The end of the Qing 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 19th 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 the 20th cent. 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 pulp fiction. But of course, the popularity of this sort of low art did not go unnoticed by those in power. The 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 18th of 1915, they established a council for conducting such a review under the Ministry of Education. The Fiction Committee would rank publications into three upper rank fiction. We should try to promote middle rank work that can be allowed and lower rank works that we should try to restrict or ban. Of the 16 literary magazines that they reviewed, two made the upper rank, 11 were deemed middle rank, and three were unfortunate enough to get the label of lower rank rank. And of the bottom three, only one received a recommendation for banning. It was titled Mei youi, or Eyebrow Talk. A relatively new magazine, Mei Yu was edited by a woman named Gao Guianhua and her husband. Its first edition had hit shelves on November 17th of 1914, and it ran for almost a year without incident. The material within its pages was provocative but popular. It featured stories from women authors, 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, Gao decided to cease publication of Meiyou after 18 issues. The final issue of Mayu was published on April 16th of 1916. It was officially banned that September. The committee's decision reads in this association, in examining a magazine called Mayou, has found that its language and topics seem specifically aimed at destroying moral barriers and harming social standards. Among all fiction magazines, its errors are the gravestones. If this sort of fashion were to spread, it would do considerable harm to social morality. Now you have to understand that in 1916 China there was no contesting such a ban. Life had to move on. Gao did not revive Mei Yu, 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 18 months they spent publishing Mei. Yes, 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 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 of Chinese literature, may you struck an important milestone. 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, and 100 years later, their work is still being studied. We could only hope that our own words will last half that long.
- [06:16]
A
Liberty Mutual customizes your car and home insurance. And now we're customizing this ad for your morning commute to wake you up, which could help your driving. Science says that stimulating the brain increases alertness. So here's a pop quiz. How many months have 28 days? What gets wetter as it dries? What has keys but can't open Locks? If you don't want to hear the answers, turn off this Liberty mutual ad now. 12 months. A towel Piano. Enjoy being fully alert.
- [06:43]
B
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Many of us wish that we could escape the confines of civilization and go live in Paradise. But in 1929, Dr. 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 Galapagos, a cluster of islands west of Ecuador in the Pacific. 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 Dore 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, he had all of his teeth removed because he wanted to make his gums stronger. It didn't work and so he had to use a pair of steel dentures while living in the Galapagos. He also thought that Dore'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. Dore was trapped under his influence. So imagine Friedrich's fury when his isolated fiefdom was abruptly invaded by Heinz and Margaret witmer and their 13 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 acolytes. Though they were rivals. They were more working class than Friedrich and Dore, who came from sophisticated backgrounds. They were also quickly proved to be more hardworking and adept at living in nature than Friedrich and Dore had. The Witmers quickly found a cave and used it for shelter while tending to a successful garden, hunting for Food and building a stone house. Friedrich and 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 limits, another new neighbor arrived. Heloise Bosquet de Wagner Verhorn, a wealthy Austrian woman who wanted to build a hotel 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. And their arguments could be heard all over the small island. They randomly fired off pistols just because Eloise liked to 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 supplies ran low. She was no farmer or hunter. She mostly relied on deliveries from Ecuador. When one of her lovers, Alfred, fell out of her favor, he started showing up at the other camps, telling his neighbors about troubled love life and how difficult Eloise was. And then one day In March of 1934, 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. Dory 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 as anyone else. She was the most obnoxious intruder to his personal island kingdom. And Dore had become increasingly disillusioned with the island and with Friedrich. And perhaps he thought that Eloise's willful personality was a bad influence. Curiously, just a few months later, In November of 1934, Friedrich came down with a terrible case of food poisoning. Dorr'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 Dore was perfectly fine. Then again, she had just as much motive to poison Friedrich herself and frame Dore. By this point, the two groups absolutely hated each other. Friedrich died from his illness. Dore 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 Witmers remained. Their descendants still live on the island today. It was they and not Eloise who 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 remain a bit curious. I hope you enjoyed today's guided tour through the Cabinet of Curiosities. This show was created by me, Aaron Manke, 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 people who make it over@grimandmild.com curiosities. You'll also find a link to the official Cabinet of Curiosities 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. Learn more and sign up over at patreon.com grimandmild. And until next time, stay curious.
- [13:11]
A
This is an iHeart podcast.
- [13:14]
B
Guaranteed Human.