Die Büchse der Pandora; Pandora’s Box

[This page by Michael Navratil]

Die Büchse der Pandora; Pandora’s Box (first published in 1902; first performed in 1904)

Die Büchse der Pandora; Pandora’s Box is the second of the two Lulu-plays by Frank Wedekind, the first being Erdgeist; Earth Spirit. In 1913, Wedekind combined these two works in his play Lulu (on which, all in all, he worked for 21 years). Its eponymous heroine is the most popular character in Wedekind’s œuvre.

At the end of Erdgeist; Earth Spirit Lulu had been arrested because of murdering her husband Dr Schön. At the beginning of Die Büchse der Pandora; Pandora’s Box Lulu is freed from prison by the lesbian Countess Geschwitz who is in love with her. Lulu and a number of accompanying characters flee to Paris. There Lulu marries Alwa Schön, the son and rich heir of her former husband Dr Schön, and lives in luxury. However, being blackmailed by her former lovers she and her followers are forced to leave the city. They escape to London where Lulu tries to make a living through prostitution. At the end of the play, both Lulu and the Countess Geschwitz fall into the hands of Jack the Ripper and are brutally murdered.

The play’s title hints at the box Pandora carries in Greek mythology and which contains all evils in the world. In Wedekind’s play, Pandora’s box is associated with the female sexual organs, thus suggesting that it is female sexuality that brings evil into the world (a view widely held in the Christian tradition). While suggesting this interpretation in the title, many aspects of Wedekind’s actual play undermine such a reading. Men are depicted as corrupt and cruel, abhorring women to the extent that, in the case of Jack the Ripper, they actually cut out women’s sexual organs and thereby physically extinguish the possibility of female sexuality; on the other hand, the most devoted and unfailing love in the play is that of a lesbian. When the Countess Geschwitz dies with the words ‘O verflucht!’ (‘Oh damn it!’) on her lips – the words which also end the play – this final malediction is not directed against female sexuality but rather against a world of brutal misogyny.

The Lulu character has invited a great number of interpretations, ranging from Lulu as the beautiful beast through Lulu as the paradigmatic representative of unrestrained female sexuality to Lulu as a mere projection screen of (male) sexual fantasies; she has been interpreted as both femme fatale and as a victim of society who is subjected to abuse; Wedekind’s plays have been considered as both misogynist and highly emancipatory. – It is undoubtedly the riddling openness of their protagonist that gives the Lulu-plays their continuing appeal.

A number of films draw on the Lulu-plays, with Leopold Jessner, Georg Wilhelm Papst, Paul Auster and Jonathan Demme among the directors. Alban Berg based his second, unfinished opera Lulu on Wedekind’s plays.

Further Reading in English

Elizabeth Boa, The Sexual Circus: Wedekind’s Theatre of Subversion (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987), Chapters 4 and 5

Rolf Kieser, ‘The Opening of Pandora’s Box: Frank Wedekind, Nietzsche, Freud, and Others’, in Rolf Kieser and Reinhold Grimm (eds.), Frank Wedekind Yearbook 1991, 1-16

Karin Littau, ‘Refractions of the Feminine: The Monstrous Transformations of Lulu’, Modern Language Notes 110:4 (1995), 888-912

Further Reading in German

Johannes G. Pankau, Sexualität und Modernität; Studien zum deutschen Drama des Fin de Siècle (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2005), Chapter 4

Hartmut Vinçon, Frank Wedekind (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), pp. 188-204

Erhard Weidl, ‘Philologische Spurensicherung zur Erschließung der “Lulu”-Tragödie Frank Wedekinds’, Wirkendes Wort 35 (1985), 99-119