In Frank Wedekind’s Lulu cycle, the first play adapted for Pandora’s Box is Earth Spirit.
Earth Spirit is the common English title of Erdgeist, a play first published in 1895. It introduces Lulu and establishes the pattern of attraction, social manipulation, and destructive desire that continues in Wedekind’s second Lulu play, Die Büchse der Pandora. Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film combines material from both works.
Wedekind’s Lulu dramas were controversial because they challenged conventional ideas about sexuality, marriage, respectability, and female independence. Lulu is not presented as a simple moral allegory; she is a complex dramatic figure whose presence reveals the hypocrisy and vulnerability of the people around her.
The title can be confused with The Awakening of Spring, another major Wedekind play. That work is also associated with sexual and social controversy, but it is not the first Lulu play and is not the principal source for Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.