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

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

The film, directed by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, draws on Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Together, those dramas provide the source material for the character Lulu and the story of her relationships, social power, and eventual downfall. The film compresses and reshapes the theatrical material for silent cinema while retaining Lulu as its central figure.

Wedekind was a German playwright whose work often challenged conventional attitudes toward sexuality, authority, and bourgeois respectability. His Lulu plays were controversial because they presented a powerful, morally uncontained female character and exposed the hypocrisy surrounding her.

The title can mislead readers into assuming the film is a direct retelling of Hesiod’s Greek myth. Instead, Wedekind’s Pandora’s Box is a modern literary drama, and Pabst’s film is an adaptation of that drama. Its connection to the myth is primarily thematic and titular.