How an Eccentric Doctor Began His Quest For Utopia in Weimar Berlin

At first the doctor terrified Dore.

It wasn’t his stature that provoked this reaction; he was short and slender, with narrow shoulders and wiry muscles, wormy veins twitching beneath his skin. Nor was it his face, framed by untidy brown curls and anchored by striking blue eyes, with a wide mouth that parted, in moments of contemplation or amusement, to expose the tip of his tongue.

Rather, it was the combination of it all. What seemed prosaic—and even charming—separately fused into a disquieting whole. His body’s lithe movements suggested a predator’s gait; his gaze was one of harsh and final judgment; and his general disposition seemed strangely absent of any amiability or compassion, all the more unsettling given his chosen profession. She stopped just short of calling him brutal, and hoped he would never lay his hands on her.

Dore Strauch Koerwin, newly twenty-six years old in that spring of 1927, received treatment at the Hydrotherapeutic Institute in Berlin, which pioneered research on the healing powers of water. She had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis three years prior during a long hospital stay that included a hysterectomy, but this relapse brought an odd benefit.

Any time spent in the hospital meant a respite from the drudgery of life with her husband, and this savage-looking doctor, despite his demeanor, piqued her interest as he roamed throughout the ward. Her fellow patients were equally intrigued. “He is fanatic on raw food,” one confided. Another said, “When he once commences to speak of raw food and vegetarianism he never stops.” It was inevitable, she supposed, that as he prowled from room to room and bed to bed, he would one day stop at hers.

The doctor introduced himself as Friedrich Ritter and gave her a thorough examination.

“You are not ill,” he told her.

“But the professors said I am,” she countered. “They said I could never get my health back again.”

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

“He can look through myself,” she thought, and blushed, feeling strangely exposed. She arranged to see the doctor during his private consultation hour and confessed to all that “pressed” her soul, with one exception: she didn’t mention her marriage. Yet when she finished, Friedrich delivered this acute assessment: “You are not happy in your matrimony…let us try to change the base of your illness.”

He insisted she “need not submit to illness” if she could retrain her brain to mend her body. He did not like sick people, he admitted, and whenever he encountered a patient who resisted the “will to mend,” he gave up rather than waste his energy. He recommended books about the malleability and mysteries of the mind, including the works of Prentice Mulford, an American humorist and philosopher who wrote that “to say a thing must be, is the very power that makes it.” Conversely, to say a thing isn’t is the very power that vanquishes it. Friedrich understood the mental stress behind her physical pain, and their daily conversations became her medicine, unburdening her mind of its darkest thoughts.

Dore had enjoyed a happy childhood in Berlin, with a schoolmaster father whose strictness in his work never affected his home, and a mother whose “instinctive understanding” enabled her to sense Dore’s wishes and fears. Dore preferred animals to people, and found that creatures who growled and snapped at others would come sit quietly at her side. A part of her believed that she was not like other children, a conviction that deepened as she matured. “There was some task which I was born to fulfill,” she later wrote, “although I had no notion what it could be, I only knew that it was something great, and in a way I cannot describe I was always looking for it.”

She tried to find it in the German Revolution of 1918 by aligning herself with “the poor and poorest,” as she put it, and revolting against the elite. Upset by the proliferation of alcoholism and venereal diseases among the men she’d tried to help, she decried “low instincts and passions,” finding inspiration in Friedrich Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra and concluding that the only true path for the development of humanity was through individual dedication to this pursuit. “If each one first would fulfill the good he demands of others,” she wrote, “our earth would soon be a paradise.”

When the revolution ended, she turned her energy inward, training to be a doctor. After working all day as a bank teller, she attended night school to prepare for the university entrance exam, a grueling schedule made even more challenging by her unconventional diet. “I might have stood the strain of all this better,” Dore admitted, “had I not chosen that time for confining my diet exclusively to figs”—a decision based on her reading of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, who, while not a confirmed vegetarian, railed against the destruction of one life to sustain another. During moments of reflection, she acknowledged that her spirit, too, had weakened. “My soul was starving,” she wrote, and she began searching for something to feed it.

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The difficulty of this regimen led Dore to abandon her studies, but she soon found another project: Hermann Koerwin, nineteen years her senior, a family friend and high school principal whose ingrained routine and staunch convictions presented an intriguing challenge. With sufficient dedication, Dore believed she could coax him away from his fusty old habits and “thaw him out with sunshine.” After they married, she realized the folly of this idea.

Hermann was excessively frugal, insisting the couple live in rented rooms instead of their own apartment. When they had sex, she found it offensive and repellent, especially when her illness set in and destroyed any chance of bearing her own child. In the end Hermann proved equally determined to change her; he wanted, in Dore’s estimation, a standard housewife whose goals and opinions stayed within the confines of his own. When her illness flared again, necessitating an extended stay at the Hydrotherapeutic Institute, she viewed it as an opportunity to reevaluate her life. And now here came this peculiar little doctor, inviting her to experience his carefully curated world.

After ten days under Friedrich’s care, she felt well enough to be discharged, but still craved his company. Throughout 1927 and the following year, she walked him to work every morning through the Tiergarten as Germany stood on the precipice of drastic and devastating change. European newspapers warned of a nationalist uprising. In southern Bavaria, fascists met with members of Der Stahlhelm, or “Steel Helmet,” an organization for veterans of the Great War, which served as a paramilitary wing for the conservative German National People’s Party. They protested against the Weimar Republic and the international order instituted by the Treaty of Versailles. Motor Transport and Motorcycle Unions conducted mysterious military exercises, and fascists in Austria began to organize. In Berlin, the Sturmabteilung, or SA, the newly formed paramilitary wing of the rising Nazi Party, attacked communist citizens at the city’s dance halls and ice cream shops and the Lichterfelde Ost train station.

This violence stood in stark contrast to the raucous pleasures and excesses of Weimar culture. On Kalckreuthstrasse in the West End, the location of Friedrich’s private practice, stood Eldorado, a popular “transvestite venue,” where Berlin high society and adventurous tourists reveled alongside writers and artists and the actress Marlene Dietrich, on the cusp of international fame. Occasionally the two worlds intersected, as when Ernst Röhm—co-founder of the SA, close friend of Adolf Hitler’s, and openly gay man—visited Eldorado with a British journalist. The cross-dressing hostess greeted Röhm and sat down to chat with him. The journalist assumed the two had a “business relationship,” but Röhm sharply corrected him: “I’m not his client.  He’s one of my storm troopers.”

It was the strangest of times, and Friedrich Ritter, as Dore learned, was the strangest of men: forty-one years old, a scholar of physics and philosophy, a fervent believer in excessive mastication. He wanted to test his theory that gums would become “horny” enough to substitute for teeth. He also sought to map the human brain. Friends and neighbors thought him a “fantastic crank.” His former professor called him “someone who takes his own path, a man in whom love of people and hatred of people unite equally; a physician for whom no step is too bold to prove his method to himself, an eccentric who achieves eccentric things.”

He intended to live for at least 150 years and argued that a carnivorous diet incited a nervous condition that would hasten the end of European culture. He lived in a cheap, tiny one-bedroom apartment and sowed his own oats in a window box so he could make his primary food, porridge. He never wore clothes at home. He did not trust manufactured clothing and made his own garments from coarse linen. He especially did not trust the “civilized shoe” and braided his own leather sandals. In fact, he trusted nothing civilization had to offer, and had long been desperate to flee it.

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From Eden Undone: A True Story of Sex, Murder, and Utopia at the Dawn of World War II by Abbott Kahler. Copyright © 2024. Published by Crown, an imprint of Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.