Which German playwright wrote the plays adapted for Pabst’s Pandora’s Box?

Frank Wedekind wrote the plays adapted for Pabst’s Pandora’s Box.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 film draws on Wedekind’s dramas Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Both plays center on Lulu, a provocative figure whose relationships expose the sexual double standards and moral anxieties of late nineteenth-century European society.

Wedekind wrote Earth Spirit in 1895 and Pandora’s Box in 1904. The plays were controversial because of their frank treatment of sexuality, violence, social hypocrisy, and the limited choices available to women. Their Lulu cycle later became an important source for theater, opera, and cinema.

Pabst’s film reshaped the material for the silent screen and made Louise Brooks’s performance internationally famous. The connection to the Greek Pandora myth is therefore indirect: Wedekind uses Pandora’s name and imagery symbolically, while the film follows Lulu’s modern tragic story rather than Hesiod’s narrative.