Which playwright’s Lulu dramas inspired the 1929 film Pandora’s Box?

Frank Wedekind’s Lulu dramas inspired the 1929 film Pandora’s Box.

The film draws primarily on Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, which together form the Lulu dramatic cycle. The character is presented as a socially disruptive and sexually independent woman whose relationships expose hypocrisy and instability around her.

Wedekind wrote the plays in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their frank treatment of sexuality and social convention made them controversial, while also establishing Lulu as one of European drama’s most enduring characters.

Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s film changes and condenses the source material for cinema. It is therefore an adaptation of Wedekind’s plays, not a literal retelling of the ancient Greek Pandora story. The shared title connects the works through the idea of an apparently irresistible figure associated with danger and disorder.