Which German playwright wrote both plays adapted for the 1929 film Pandora’s Box?

Frank Wedekind wrote both plays adapted for the 1929 film Pandora’s Box.

The film combines material from Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Both works center on Lulu, a controversial and sexually independent character whose relationships expose the hypocrisy and instability of the society around her. Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 movie reshaped this stage material for silent cinema.

Wedekind was a German playwright and poet whose work often challenged conventional morality and censorship. His Lulu plays were especially influential because they made a woman’s sexuality and social power central to the drama rather than treating her as a secondary character.

The connection to the ancient myth is therefore indirect. Wedekind’s title invokes Pandora as a cultural symbol of unleashed consequences, but the play and film are not translations of Hesiod’s narrative. The character Lulu belongs to modern European theater and film.