Frank Wedekind wrote the drama Pandora’s Box that helped inspire Pabst’s 1929 film.
Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box is a 1904 play and forms the second part of a dramatic sequence about Lulu. The earlier play is Earth Spirit, first performed in 1895. Together, the works follow Lulu’s relationships, social position, and destructive effect on the people around her. Pabst’s film adapts both plays rather than retelling Hesiod’s ancient account directly.
Wedekind was a German playwright whose work often challenged bourgeois morality and conventional theatrical forms. His Lulu character became especially influential in later opera, theatre, and cinema. Alban Berg’s opera Lulu, completed posthumously in 1935, also draws on Wedekind’s Lulu plays. Thus, the title connects a modern literary tradition to the much older Greek expression.