Who wrote the Lulu plays adapted into G. W. Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box?

Frank Wedekind wrote the Lulu plays adapted into G. W. Pabst’s 1929 film Pandora’s Box. The film draws mainly on Wedekind’s dramas Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, which center on the character Lulu.

Wedekind’s Lulu works were written for the stage and explore sexuality, social control, desire, violence, and the instability of bourgeois respectability. Pabst reshaped that material for cinema, combining the two plays into a silent film structured around Lulu’s relationships and downfall.

The film’s title can suggest a direct adaptation of the Greek myth, but its immediate literary source is Wedekind’s modern drama. The connection is thematic: Lulu is treated as a figure whose presence unleashes destructive consequences, echoing the metaphorical meaning of “opening Pandora’s box.”

Wedekind was a German playwright associated with the transition between nineteenth-century naturalism and modern drama. His Lulu character later inspired other adaptations, including Alban Berg’s unfinished opera Lulu.