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Georg Wilhelm Pabst’s 1929 classic ‘Diary of a Lost Girl’ was largely ignored on its initial release, but has since been reappraised as a suitably ‘lost’ classic ever since the film was lovingly restored to its original vision in the 60’s. It is now hailed as a superior example of the late-silent period and exists as document of a critical phase in German filmmaking and general history. I would like here to consider how the films thematic elements reflect the social, cultural, and political climate of the highly volatile and ever-changing state of Germany at the time.
Alongside Italy, England, and America, Germany was one of the few true pioneers of the cinematic medium in the pre-Hollywood days and its industrious dedication to the moving image brought about not only many technological advances but was also credited with influencing the later popularity of the star system. However perhaps the most pervasive influence that early German cinema had on film history was the development of Expressionist film. This much written-about film style was born out of the instability of film funding available in the country's particularly unstable political climate. Directors would compensate on smaller budgets by building exaggerated non-realistic sets and painting shadows straight onto them, resulting in abstract, almost hallucinatory classics such as ‘Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’ (1920) and Murnau’s ‘Nosferatu’ (1922). This style of filmmaking was a pre-cursor not only to underground avant-garde cinema but also the hugely popular American film noirs of the 40’s. However as is often the case in the various early histories of visual art, what followed was a complete reaction against the Expressionist style, one borne out of political frustration and changing social situations. The mid-20s saw the rise of the ‘new objectivity’ in German cinema; where expressionism was abstract, dreamlike, and indebted to the fantastic, the ‘new objectivity’ films returned to stylistic realism and explored often scandalous socially concerned themes such as prostitution, homosexuality, abortion, and addiction.
‘Diary of a Lost Girl’ falls categorically into this camp. It tells the story of Thymian (Louise Brooks), the daughter of a wealthy pharmacist. She is innocent and unprepossessing so it’s only a matter of time before the conniving Meinert (Fritz Rasp), a pharmacy employee, takes advantage of her. Following the opening scenes of her confirmation at which she is presented with the diary of the title, the unscrupulous Meinert rapes the fragile young girl. Thymian has a baby by Meinert but refuses to marry him against her father’s wishes so her baby is given to an orphanage while she is sent to a strict reformatory school. The school is purgatorial and oppressive, run like a prison by a fearsome headmistress and a terrifying unnamed bald man. Close ups of these two characters faces fill the screen as they sadistically enjoy picking the girls out for random punishments. Thymian is forced into labour along with the rest of the girls who eventually all start to resemble each other in their drab mediocrity. Even Louise Brooks’ trademark highly modern helmet-like bob haircut is swept back into a non-style that resembles the rest of the autonomous downtrodden girls. Her only escape comes through two stereotypically feminine tropes; Thymian regularly writes her private thoughts in the eponymous diary, questioning what she has done to deserve such a punishment and the girls are also seen applying make-up in an attempt to retain feminine beauty and individualise themselves. However, this is confiscated by the bald man and in an almost transgressive scene that must have shocked audiences at the time, we see him privately applying the lipstick to his own lips.
During her unhappy stay in the school Thymian regularly writes to Count Osdorff (Andre Roanne), a bumbling but well-meaning character who unsuccessfully proposed to Thymian before Meinert took advantage of her. Osdorff visits Thymian and plans to help her escape. Following their emotional reunion, the wicked headmistress attempts to take away Thymian’s last facet of individualism, her diary. This leads to a scene of rebellious solidarity amongst the girls as they overpower their oppressors in a chaotic bedroom struggle. Their triumphant victory may only be fleeting but it provides enough time for Thymian to escape and meet Osdorff outside. Being free she immediately asks to see her baby and so is taken to the orphanage, but the nanny there coldly informs Thymian that her baby has died, thus delivering another crushing blow to the poor blameless heroine’s life. Effectively on the run and penniless, Thymian and Osdorff take solace with friends in a bar-come-brothel. The well-meaning elder ladies give her a new dress and Thymian’s bob returns, thus re-establishing the modern feminine sexuality that made Louise Brooks such a durable star of the silent film period. The return to sexualised femininity here is ironic though as Thymian is, in keeping with the dour social realism of the film so far, put into prostitution. She is again taken advantage of by many men but eventually subsumes herself to this life as she is given another escape in the form of dancing in a bar and giving dance lessons. However, it is at this location that Thymian bumps into her father. Meinert is taking him and his new wife, the housekeeper who was also previously mean to Thymian, out to see the “seamy side of the city”, a phrase that represents the vast class divide between his life and his daughter’s current situation. Seated at the table he suddenly sees his Thymian cavorting around with less respectable men. The two make eye contact in a heartbreaking scene that confirms how far Thymian’s life has descended into tragedy following rejection from her strict parents. Disgusted, her father leaves the bar before informing her that “now you truly are a lost girl”.
Three years then pass in an instant and Thymian is informed that her father has died leaving his pharmacist fortune to her, but the scheming Meinert makes a move for the business and Thymian receives a payout that she selflessly gives to her father’s widow in order to allow her child to have an upbringing hopefully happier than her own. When the ever-attentive Osdorff finds out there is no payout money he cowardly kills himself. However, Osdorff’s kindly father takes Thymian in thus offering one last shred of hope. The two return to the dreaded reformatory school where a final confrontation takes place, leaving Osdorff with the film’s final prophetic words, “a little more love and no one would be lost in this world”. This expression offers hope for the future but sadly it seems too late for Thymian who has already seen so much tragedy.
The plot just described appears episodic and fragmented, reflecting that the film is very much a product of the early development of the Griffiths inspired feature length narrative cinema, and so may seem initially slapdash for modern audiences. Thymian and her father’s wife’s pregnancies are played out entirely in the space of a single cut, and other large developments are largely ignored in favour of scenes showing key confrontations. However, this was still early in the development of the timeline of classical Hollywood continuity that mainstream cinema goers now take for granted. The films key areas of interest then for a modern viewer may be the social and political elements that are presented in a frank and realistic way. The story plays with the morality and social mores of historical pre-World War Two Germany with a particular emphasis on gender roles. Most of the men in the film are greedy, lascivious, and scheming; it is indeed Meinert’s rape that begins Thymian’s descent into tragedy, and her father is presented as a heartless serial womaniser while the bald school worker is the epitome of oppressive sadistic evil. The only male characters that are well-meaning towards Thymian are largely ineffectual, such as Osdorff who is kind but ultimately powerless and penniless, his abandonment through suicide his final act of useless cowardice. The female characters meanwhile are routinely taken advantage of by their male counterpoints, but the film offers encouragement through their any examples of female solidarity and rebelliousness. It is the other imprisoned girls that help Thymian escape her purgatorial entrapment at the school and the prostitutes who take her in as one of their own, however unsavoury their environment may be. The other big social and cultural divide the film makes explicit is that between the wealthy classes and the poor. Thymian’s initial family life, although built upon a profitable business, is unstable and untrusting, while the supposed seamy side of life is shown as supportive and warm. The speed and ease at which Thymian, through no fault of her own, descends into the denigrated underclass recalls Ken Loach’s films of the 60’s that similarly explored such stark realities from a female perspective, only in an English context.
The temptation with academic discourse is to look back on such early examples of film with the benefit of much teleological historical knowledge gained since the initial release. However, in this case it does not seem churlish to examine the film as a document forewarning the encroachment of Nazism on Weimar Germany. It is echoed in the harsh, almost perverse authoritarian rule of the reformatory school and the uncaring attitudes of the higher classes towards supposed weakness.
Due to the frank depiction of such hard-hitting realities the film was initially cut by censors. This coupled with the attraction of the new synchronised sound films, or ‘talkies’, being produced in America at the time meant that the film sank without a trace on release. However, the film and many others of its type (including Pabst’s and Brooke’s remarkably similar previous collaboration ‘Pandora’s Box’ (1929)) were outlawed completely when Weimar Germany finally fell, and the Nazis instigated World War two. Ironically, the Nazis deemed such films as degenerate as they presented the ills of German society that they were trying to eradicate and ignore. The Nazi propaganda machine quickly took over film production and the German cinema industry has arguably never fully recaptured the pioneering spirit and relentless creativity that defined it as a driving force of the mediums early development as the 20th century’s last great art form.
However, the film was lovingly restored to its original running time in the 60’s when a huge re-examination of the country’s key directors took place. Now the film is free to be enjoyed in its entirety and aside from the already discussed social, political, and cultural insights the film offers many more pleasures. Of course, for the unaccustomed modern viewer, silent cinema will almost always take some readjustment to be fully enjoyed and a basic knowledge of the technological context will always be helpful in an appraisal of such an early example of cinematic form. With this in mind then the film should be enjoyed for its basic pleasures; the luminosity and sheer fascination with moving images that audiences in the pre-TV days found so fascinating, and on these terms, despite the excusable narrative fragmentation mentioned earlier the film is a technical tour de force, a classic of the late silent period. One of the other principle appeals of the film not yet mentioned is of course the performance of the great American actress Louise Brooks which displays a rare depth, innocence, modern sexuality and robust strength that other silent female film stars struggled to achieve. At the time, her refusal to take part in the USA’s experimentation with ‘talkies’ in favour of continuing her silent work in Germany was seen as career suicide, but the insightful, provocative, and powerful films she produced there, including ‘Diary of a Lost Girl’, cemented her as an unforgettable and rightfully celebrated screen icon.
Country: Germany
Budget:
Length: 129mins
Filmography:
'The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari’, 1920, Robert Wiene, Decla-Bioscop AG
‘Nosferatu’, 1922, F.W. Murnau, Jofa-Atelier Berlin-Johannisthal
‘Pandora’s Box’, 1929, Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Nero-Film AG
Pub/2008
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