Frank Wedekind created Lulu, the character in the plays that inspired Pandora’s Box. His dramatic cycle includes Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, which together form the source for Pabst’s 1929 film.
Wedekind was a German playwright whose work often challenged social conventions surrounding sexuality, morality, and bourgeois respectability. Lulu is presented as a powerful, unsettling figure whose relationships expose the hypocrisy and instability of the society around her.
The 1929 film does not reproduce the plays word for word. G. W. Pabst adapted their central character and tragic atmosphere for silent cinema, with Louise Brooks giving the best-known screen performance as Lulu. The film’s title comes directly from Wedekind’s play Pandora’s Box, while its character and plot also draw on Earth Spirit.
Wedekind is sometimes confused with other German-language dramatists of the same period, including Bertolt Brecht and Gerhart Hauptmann. His specific connection to Pandora’s Box is as the creator of Lulu and the author of the source plays.