Who wrote the two German plays adapted for the 1929 film Pandora’s Box?

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

The film directed by G. W. Pabst draws on Wedekind’s plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box. Together they tell the story of Lulu, a socially transgressive woman whose relationships and behavior provoke intense consequences. The film reshaped the material for cinema but retained its central character and provocative atmosphere.

Wedekind was a German playwright associated with works that challenged conventional morality and social respectability. His Lulu dramas were first performed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and became important sources for later theatre, opera, and film adaptations.

The ancient Pandora myth and Wedekind’s Lulu are not the same narrative. Wedekind borrows the Pandora association as a symbolic framework rather than retelling Hesiod’s account. This is why questions about the film require distinguishing its literary source from the Greek myth’s author, Hesiod.