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The Lulu Plays and Other Sex Tragedies
English, German (translation)
281 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1980
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About the author
Frank Wedekind
346 books77 followersFrank Wedekind was a German dramatist whose bold, unconventional plays reshaped modern theatre by challenging social norms and exposing the hypocrisies of bourgeois morality, especially around sexuality. Raised between Germany and Switzerland and drawn early to travel, performance, and satire, he lived an eclectic life that included work in advertising, time with a circus, and a celebrated stint as a cabaret performer with the influential troupe Die elf Scharfrichter. His fearlessness as both writer and performer made him a central figure in the artistic circles of Munich, where his sharp wit and provocative themes influenced a new generation of socially critical satirists. His early play Spring Awakening caused an uproar for its frank depictions of adolescent sexuality, repression, and violence, while his two-part “Lulu” cycle introduced a character whose rise and fall exposed society’s fascination with desire and destruction. These works challenged censorship, pushed theatrical boundaries, and later inspired films, operas, and adaptations across decades. Wedekind’s personal life was intense and often turbulent, marked by complicated relationships, creative restlessness, and brushes with authority, including a prison sentence for lèse-majesté after publishing satirical poems. His marriage to the actress Tilly Newes brought both devotion and strain, reflected in the emotional swings of his later years. Even near the end of his life, recovering from surgery, he returned to the stage too soon, driven by the same energy that fueled his art. His influence extended well beyond his death, resonating through the Weimar era and shaping the development of expressionism and later epic theatre. Many of his works were translated, staged, or adapted by major artists, ensuring that his confrontational spirit and fearless exploration of human desire would remain part of the theatrical canon.
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April 21, 2023
The Origins of Lulu
I can trace my own lifelong fascination with cinema to a couple of early milestones: There was a big coffee table book of famous Hollywood monsters I got when I was 12 (with a mesmerizing photo of Lon Cheney Sr. in “London After Midnight,” the subject of another book I’m reading now). Another milestone came when I arrived at the University of Michigan in 1973 and first saw G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box” (1929) at a film cooperative on campus. I wound up doubling my major at UofM to include film studies and, over the years, as a journalist I have reported on film and have reviewed films for various publications.
Recently a Goodreads friend spotted a paperback copy of Frank Wedekind’s original plays, which were the origin of the century-long Lulu mythology that also flowered in Pabst’s film. I ordered a used copy of that same Wedekind paperback and was fascinated to read these original plays. I’m giving this book 5 stars because, if you’re fascinated by the cultural heritage and legacies of Lulu, then these plays represent Ground Zero. It is almost impossible to “rate” this book on its original stand-alone merits because, for 100 years, it has not been an isolated theatrical experience. Lulu is now larger than life and facets of that myth will continue to be explored by future writers and artists.
So, let’s focus on the book itself. What did I find so fascinating?
First, I had not realized that Wedekind wrote what later became Pabst’s storyline as two plays, separated by nearly a decade. First, he wrote “Earth Spirit,” which caused such a controversial response in 1895 that he followed up with the sequel “Pandora’s Box” in 1904. Taken together, the plays mirror Pabst’s film with some significant differences. Then, the image and idea of Lulu attracted such an international following that other artists explored the tale, including the widely celebrated opera “Lulu” by Alban Berg. The cascading references to Lulu are so numerous that I won’t even try to catalog all of them, except to say we even see her influence in a character in the Final Fantasy game franchise and other films and performances today.
Second, in this book we learn that Wedekind himself, like Lulu, was a restless artist who rebelled against the oppressive moralistic culture into which he was born in 1864. He was a child of privilege, yet when he began writing plays, he was eager to shock audiences with explorations of human sexuality they had not seen in mainstream theaters. As this book points out, the Lulu plays were not his first controversial productions. In the book’s introduction, we read a good deal about his 1891 production of “Spring Awakening,” which portrayed the emerging awareness of sexual relationships in a repressed family. Wedekind was on a personal mission to unearth “secrets” of gender and sexuality that the rest of society wanted to conceal. That mission wasn’t limited to his plays. On a personal level, he dove into sexual exploration to such an extreme that he tore apart his own family. Among other fascinating insights, I’m intrigued that Wedekind’s own “persona” or “voice” in his two Lulu plays is female. Gender fluidity was an unfolding reality in his own life.
Writers on film, culture and gender today are divided about Wedekind’s plays. One way to “read” these plays, as the creators of this volume for the “Tulane Drama Review Series” suggest, is that these are early iconoclastic appeals to honesty about both sexual desire and gender roles. In the course of the two Lulu plays, various characters unveil their desires and occasionally their gender fluidity. In this process of liberation, Lulu can be celebrated as a woman who refuses to be dominated by anyone. The original Lulu is not a predator as she is sometimes depicted. In all of her gender mystery, she is a fact of nature, an “Earth Spirit.” She’s a fiercely independent person whose allure is so potent that other less-independent companions wind up destroying themselves when they become a part of her inner circle. This process of emergence, today we might say “coming out,” may have lots of complex baggage and can be dangerous business. That’s why the pioneering silent film actress, Louise Brooks, titled her landmark autobiography “Lulu in Hollywood,” a 1982 book that revolutionized film writers’ understanding of the silent era.
However, in addition to favorable appreciation of the Lulu myth, there are also lots of critiques of that myth, starting with the fact that Wedekind himself could never conquer his own love-hate relationship with the moralism he inherited. He never fully emerged himself. At the end of his second play, it’s not a “spoiler” to point out that he famously destroys Lulu at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Anyone familiar with the Lulu tale knows the Ripper is lurking at the end. Writers about Lulu question that grim ending: Does this reduce the Lulu myth to a pedantic tale of moral depravity deserving its own cruel punishment? Or is this ending more an example of realism about the dangers a Lulu-type of character risks? I favor the latter “reading.”
Then, I’ll turn to: What’s especially intriguing in this particular book?
First, as I’ve already said, I’m now fascinated to learn that Lulu springs from what amounts to three plays: First, that early play about sexuality in which she does not appear and then the two plays in which she takes center stage. That context of three plays points us further toward questioning the twists and turns of Wedekind’s own life, which he was driven to put onto the stage repeatedly.
Second, I now realize that Wedekind himself created the prologue that appears in the Berg opera (but not in the Pabst film) and that also reminds me of the framing of the “Cabaret” musical. Wedekind created this little prologue as a direct poke in the eyes of theatergoers as if they are gawking like a crowd at a sideshow. In effect, the prologue makes “us” all complicit in our responses to Lulu. Wedekind’s original staging called for a circus side-show tent from which Lulu would emerge, carried aloft in a snake-like posture and clad in a Pierrot costume. By the time we see Liza Minnelli’s Lulu figure in the movie version of “Cabaret,” we have moved from a circus to a nightclub. Of course, “Cabaret” springs from different source material originally by Christopher Isherwood concerning Weimar Germany. Nevertheless, Isherwood’s experiences and the evolution of “Cabaret” are reflective of earlier works, including Wedekind.
Third, there are a lot of other fascinating historical insights in this book. For example, why did Wedekind end his first play at the middle point of what became Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box”? Why did he initially stop writing after what we think of as “half the story”? The answer is that Wedekind thought his first play had reached its appropriate end point. He thought European culture was at a turning point. He was fascinated by a milestone in French history that, today, most Americans have never even heard about in our historical reading: the French Revolution of 1848. Within his first play, Wedekind’s characters repeatedly reference this revolution as if the playwright is calling everyone on stage, and his audience as well, to rise up and join in this revolution. That was the crescendo of the first play. That also explains a lot about the grim ending of the second play, when Lulu eventually encounters Jack the Ripper. By that time, Wedekind had lost faith in that revolution and was fatalistically resigned to the power of what he considered bourgeois moralism. He could see that that power would inevitably crush any fiercely independent women like Lulu, so his second play confronts the audience, or “us,” with the hard truth of how such powerful women could be treated in that era. In fact, it’s a reminder of how pioneering women are treated today in many cases.
As a stand-alone experience of reading scripts, this collection is obviously dated and would seem puzzling. However, I am giving this edition 5 stars, because it is such a valuable “source” for understanding the cultural family tree of this Lulu mythology. It’s Ground Zero of this tale.
I can trace my own lifelong fascination with cinema to a couple of early milestones: There was a big coffee table book of famous Hollywood monsters I got when I was 12 (with a mesmerizing photo of Lon Cheney Sr. in “London After Midnight,” the subject of another book I’m reading now). Another milestone came when I arrived at the University of Michigan in 1973 and first saw G.W. Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box” (1929) at a film cooperative on campus. I wound up doubling my major at UofM to include film studies and, over the years, as a journalist I have reported on film and have reviewed films for various publications.
Recently a Goodreads friend spotted a paperback copy of Frank Wedekind’s original plays, which were the origin of the century-long Lulu mythology that also flowered in Pabst’s film. I ordered a used copy of that same Wedekind paperback and was fascinated to read these original plays. I’m giving this book 5 stars because, if you’re fascinated by the cultural heritage and legacies of Lulu, then these plays represent Ground Zero. It is almost impossible to “rate” this book on its original stand-alone merits because, for 100 years, it has not been an isolated theatrical experience. Lulu is now larger than life and facets of that myth will continue to be explored by future writers and artists.
So, let’s focus on the book itself. What did I find so fascinating?
First, I had not realized that Wedekind wrote what later became Pabst’s storyline as two plays, separated by nearly a decade. First, he wrote “Earth Spirit,” which caused such a controversial response in 1895 that he followed up with the sequel “Pandora’s Box” in 1904. Taken together, the plays mirror Pabst’s film with some significant differences. Then, the image and idea of Lulu attracted such an international following that other artists explored the tale, including the widely celebrated opera “Lulu” by Alban Berg. The cascading references to Lulu are so numerous that I won’t even try to catalog all of them, except to say we even see her influence in a character in the Final Fantasy game franchise and other films and performances today.
Second, in this book we learn that Wedekind himself, like Lulu, was a restless artist who rebelled against the oppressive moralistic culture into which he was born in 1864. He was a child of privilege, yet when he began writing plays, he was eager to shock audiences with explorations of human sexuality they had not seen in mainstream theaters. As this book points out, the Lulu plays were not his first controversial productions. In the book’s introduction, we read a good deal about his 1891 production of “Spring Awakening,” which portrayed the emerging awareness of sexual relationships in a repressed family. Wedekind was on a personal mission to unearth “secrets” of gender and sexuality that the rest of society wanted to conceal. That mission wasn’t limited to his plays. On a personal level, he dove into sexual exploration to such an extreme that he tore apart his own family. Among other fascinating insights, I’m intrigued that Wedekind’s own “persona” or “voice” in his two Lulu plays is female. Gender fluidity was an unfolding reality in his own life.
Writers on film, culture and gender today are divided about Wedekind’s plays. One way to “read” these plays, as the creators of this volume for the “Tulane Drama Review Series” suggest, is that these are early iconoclastic appeals to honesty about both sexual desire and gender roles. In the course of the two Lulu plays, various characters unveil their desires and occasionally their gender fluidity. In this process of liberation, Lulu can be celebrated as a woman who refuses to be dominated by anyone. The original Lulu is not a predator as she is sometimes depicted. In all of her gender mystery, she is a fact of nature, an “Earth Spirit.” She’s a fiercely independent person whose allure is so potent that other less-independent companions wind up destroying themselves when they become a part of her inner circle. This process of emergence, today we might say “coming out,” may have lots of complex baggage and can be dangerous business. That’s why the pioneering silent film actress, Louise Brooks, titled her landmark autobiography “Lulu in Hollywood,” a 1982 book that revolutionized film writers’ understanding of the silent era.
However, in addition to favorable appreciation of the Lulu myth, there are also lots of critiques of that myth, starting with the fact that Wedekind himself could never conquer his own love-hate relationship with the moralism he inherited. He never fully emerged himself. At the end of his second play, it’s not a “spoiler” to point out that he famously destroys Lulu at the hands of Jack the Ripper. Anyone familiar with the Lulu tale knows the Ripper is lurking at the end. Writers about Lulu question that grim ending: Does this reduce the Lulu myth to a pedantic tale of moral depravity deserving its own cruel punishment? Or is this ending more an example of realism about the dangers a Lulu-type of character risks? I favor the latter “reading.”
Then, I’ll turn to: What’s especially intriguing in this particular book?
First, as I’ve already said, I’m now fascinated to learn that Lulu springs from what amounts to three plays: First, that early play about sexuality in which she does not appear and then the two plays in which she takes center stage. That context of three plays points us further toward questioning the twists and turns of Wedekind’s own life, which he was driven to put onto the stage repeatedly.
Second, I now realize that Wedekind himself created the prologue that appears in the Berg opera (but not in the Pabst film) and that also reminds me of the framing of the “Cabaret” musical. Wedekind created this little prologue as a direct poke in the eyes of theatergoers as if they are gawking like a crowd at a sideshow. In effect, the prologue makes “us” all complicit in our responses to Lulu. Wedekind’s original staging called for a circus side-show tent from which Lulu would emerge, carried aloft in a snake-like posture and clad in a Pierrot costume. By the time we see Liza Minnelli’s Lulu figure in the movie version of “Cabaret,” we have moved from a circus to a nightclub. Of course, “Cabaret” springs from different source material originally by Christopher Isherwood concerning Weimar Germany. Nevertheless, Isherwood’s experiences and the evolution of “Cabaret” are reflective of earlier works, including Wedekind.
Third, there are a lot of other fascinating historical insights in this book. For example, why did Wedekind end his first play at the middle point of what became Pabst’s “Pandora’s Box”? Why did he initially stop writing after what we think of as “half the story”? The answer is that Wedekind thought his first play had reached its appropriate end point. He thought European culture was at a turning point. He was fascinated by a milestone in French history that, today, most Americans have never even heard about in our historical reading: the French Revolution of 1848. Within his first play, Wedekind’s characters repeatedly reference this revolution as if the playwright is calling everyone on stage, and his audience as well, to rise up and join in this revolution. That was the crescendo of the first play. That also explains a lot about the grim ending of the second play, when Lulu eventually encounters Jack the Ripper. By that time, Wedekind had lost faith in that revolution and was fatalistically resigned to the power of what he considered bourgeois moralism. He could see that that power would inevitably crush any fiercely independent women like Lulu, so his second play confronts the audience, or “us,” with the hard truth of how such powerful women could be treated in that era. In fact, it’s a reminder of how pioneering women are treated today in many cases.
As a stand-alone experience of reading scripts, this collection is obviously dated and would seem puzzling. However, I am giving this edition 5 stars, because it is such a valuable “source” for understanding the cultural family tree of this Lulu mythology. It’s Ground Zero of this tale.
February 15, 2021
Featured in my Jan 2021 Wrap Up
These plays (from 1911) are unappealing and ignored because they are too vulgar for an audience wide enough to fund the shows. But I think they are of monumental historical importance, and that people have overlooked this because of their vulgarity. Here are the main observations I've made:
1. In The Lulu Plays (Earthbound and Pandora's Box), Lulu might be the first ever femme fatale. Many men die for a woman in plays (and vice-versa), but this is the first time it seems very explicitly related to Lulu rather than general misfortune.
2. In Pandora's Box, we might have the first ever character that explicitly identifies as 'queer', and the first explicit f/f relationship on stage.
3. In Death & The Devil (another play in this edition), we have the first description of a class war in feminism that oppresses sex workers. Very explicitly, this play has one man tell a women's rights advocate that feminists oppress other women by shaming sex work, which is in the interest of the bourgeois to lower the demand (and therefore the price) of sex work which disempowers women from using one of their biological advantages over men (allure) to help them in an already patriarchal capitalist society. Needless to say, this extremely short play fails to be appealing in being so explicit, controversial, and detailed on Marxist feminist theory with basically no action or character development. But it's somewhat visionary that in 1911 a male playwright could predict the intrafeminist wars of third wave feminism surrounding sex work, long before the second wave feminism grew in France during the war?
These plays (from 1911) are unappealing and ignored because they are too vulgar for an audience wide enough to fund the shows. But I think they are of monumental historical importance, and that people have overlooked this because of their vulgarity. Here are the main observations I've made:
1. In The Lulu Plays (Earthbound and Pandora's Box), Lulu might be the first ever femme fatale. Many men die for a woman in plays (and vice-versa), but this is the first time it seems very explicitly related to Lulu rather than general misfortune.
2. In Pandora's Box, we might have the first ever character that explicitly identifies as 'queer', and the first explicit f/f relationship on stage.
3. In Death & The Devil (another play in this edition), we have the first description of a class war in feminism that oppresses sex workers. Very explicitly, this play has one man tell a women's rights advocate that feminists oppress other women by shaming sex work, which is in the interest of the bourgeois to lower the demand (and therefore the price) of sex work which disempowers women from using one of their biological advantages over men (allure) to help them in an already patriarchal capitalist society. Needless to say, this extremely short play fails to be appealing in being so explicit, controversial, and detailed on Marxist feminist theory with basically no action or character development. But it's somewhat visionary that in 1911 a male playwright could predict the intrafeminist wars of third wave feminism surrounding sex work, long before the second wave feminism grew in France during the war?
September 30, 2017
Unsettling, groundbreaking plays.
September 30, 2017
Good but not great. Indeed a great idea. The climax, with suicidal lesbian tripping over Jack the Ripper, is inspired.
December 1, 2015
I have to admit I don’t know what to make these two plays (Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box). Other than always being unhappy with what they have, the characters are unpredictable and erratic. I was unable to identify any core features that drove their actions. Perhaps that’s the point, but it then becomes a rambling unfolding of one damn thing after another. And there isn’t a sympathetic character in the play. I wanted to sympathize with Lulu, but her motivations and actions were too capricious for me to understand.
The dialogue is also particularly annoying. The characters are constantly speaking past each other. The scenes unfolds in a stilted manner – one character speaks a full sentence. The other character speaks a full sentence, and so on for long stretches. (It’s similar to characters speaking alternating full lines of verse -- stichomythia.) There’s little rhythmic variety so it becomes rather grating.
And the overall theme …. When I picked up the book I thought it would be about a sexually liberated woman challenging the norms of fin de siè·cle** Europe. I was wrong.
Wedekind, in fact, opposed women’s equality. Instead he presents a rather horrid tale on the destructiveness of sex and, in particular, female sexuality. (This is interesting for a man who was a noted libertine.)
Lulu is presented as child-like in everything: love, sex, relationships, money, etc. But it’s her sexuality that is a destructive force to everyone around her (and eventually her). Half the characters spend their time hating Lulu, while the other half spend the time sacrificing everything for her (but Lulu cannot limit her love to one person). It appears that characters love Lulu until they possess her, then they hate her.
So is this a feminist or a misogynist work? I have to go with the latter. Lulu’s childlike presentation and her lack of empowerment seems to build on the cliché of the “feminine wiles” that ruin men. In fact, despite the presence of sex throughout, the play almost seems almost hysterically anti-sex and anti-feminine (with a strange leering quality).
** Every article I read about this play included the word “fin de siè cle” so I felt contractually obligated to use that term. :) I guess "turn-of–the-century" is just too bourgeois.
The dialogue is also particularly annoying. The characters are constantly speaking past each other. The scenes unfolds in a stilted manner – one character speaks a full sentence. The other character speaks a full sentence, and so on for long stretches. (It’s similar to characters speaking alternating full lines of verse -- stichomythia.) There’s little rhythmic variety so it becomes rather grating.
And the overall theme …. When I picked up the book I thought it would be about a sexually liberated woman challenging the norms of fin de siè·cle** Europe. I was wrong.
Wedekind, in fact, opposed women’s equality. Instead he presents a rather horrid tale on the destructiveness of sex and, in particular, female sexuality. (This is interesting for a man who was a noted libertine.)
Lulu is presented as child-like in everything: love, sex, relationships, money, etc. But it’s her sexuality that is a destructive force to everyone around her (and eventually her). Half the characters spend their time hating Lulu, while the other half spend the time sacrificing everything for her (but Lulu cannot limit her love to one person). It appears that characters love Lulu until they possess her, then they hate her.
So is this a feminist or a misogynist work? I have to go with the latter. Lulu’s childlike presentation and her lack of empowerment seems to build on the cliché of the “feminine wiles” that ruin men. In fact, despite the presence of sex throughout, the play almost seems almost hysterically anti-sex and anti-feminine (with a strange leering quality).
** Every article I read about this play included the word “fin de siè cle” so I felt contractually obligated to use that term. :) I guess "turn-of–the-century" is just too bourgeois.
January 20, 2022
These plays are kind of hard to get through, but seem radical for their time. Published in the 1890s and early 1900s, there is explicit dialogue (which takes up a large portion of the plays, not siphoned off to the sidelines) about classism within feminism, the shortcomings of feminism that does not ally itself to sex workers, the cruelty of men who believe themselves charming but still fail to see women as whole beings, and queer women. As in, there is a main character who is a queer woman and acts on her love for another woman.
I'm kind of surprised I didn't know more about these plays before happening to pick up this collection - I imagine they're overlooked because they were underproduced, given their "vulgarity." They're not perfect - still carry some shortcomings of the time, are often meandering and disjointed, but I think they're worth reading.
I'm kind of surprised I didn't know more about these plays before happening to pick up this collection - I imagine they're overlooked because they were underproduced, given their "vulgarity." They're not perfect - still carry some shortcomings of the time, are often meandering and disjointed, but I think they're worth reading.
March 24, 2025
german people were wild
July 23, 2012
Two masterpieces of modernist theatre and a collection of Wedekind b-sides.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews