Frank Wedekind wrote Die Büchse der Pandora, adapted into the 1929 film Pandora’s Box.
Frank Wedekind was a German playwright whose Lulu character appears in the dramas Erdgeist and Die Büchse der Pandora. The second title literally means “Pandora’s Box” in German. Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film combines material from both plays and presents Lulu as a powerful, controversial figure whose relationships produce escalating consequences.
Wedekind’s Lulu dramas challenged conventional morality and theatrical expectations. They were written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth-century period, before Pabst brought the character to international audiences through cinema. The film is therefore connected to the Pandora myth through its title and metaphor, but its immediate literary source is Wedekind’s modern stage drama. Brecht, Schnitzler, and Hauptmann were also important German-language writers, but they did not write the Lulu plays used for this film.