G. W. Pabst | Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl) / 1929

sweet sixteeen

by Douglas Messerli

 

Rudolf Leonhard (screenplay, based on the fiction by Margarete Böhme), G. W. Pabst (director) Tagebuch einer Verlorenen (Diary of a Lost Girl) / 1929

 

The second of two cinematic collaborations between actor Louise Brooks and German director G. W. Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl was released the same year as the previous film, the masterpiece Pandora’s Box. Superficially, the works seem to cover similar territory, since both portray the difficulties of a woman in Weimar Republic Berlin who works as a prostitute and aspires to financial independence through the help of wealthy men.

       Yet the two films couldn’t be more different. While in Pandora’s Box Lulu is utterly manipulative and is always out for pleasure, enjoying and sharing in a world of bisexual sex, Brooks’ Thymian Henning is a sixteen-year-old innocent who remains passive even after she bares a child, is tortured in a home for wayward girls, works as a prostitute, and marries a count. Lulu makes terrible things happen to others and herself, while Thymian is the one to whom bad things happen until, with the help of an inheritance from her cowardly father Robert (Josef Rovenský)  and the later guidance of her dead husband’s father, the elder Count Osdorff (Arnold Korff), she takes control of her own life, promoting love instead of the hypocritical bourgeoise notions of moral value practiced by her own family and so many others of the Berlin world into which she is born.

      The film itself begins with a seemingly inexplicable event, particularly to a young girl just turning 16, the day in which family and would-be admirers—actually men like Meinert, her father’s assistant, and the family friend Count Nicolas Osdorff frothing at the mouth to take sexual advantage of the young woman coming of age—have gathered to celebrate her birthday. As if out of nowhere, a family housekeeper, Elisabeth (Sybille Schmitz) appears with bags packed about to leave. Thymian is astonished by the event and tries to get her father and the elderly aunt to explain, but to no avail.

      Celebrations continue nonetheless as she is presented with a diary and other gifts. Count Nicolas gifts her with a necklace, the family crown hanging from it, while Meinert surreptitiously scribbling in the pristine pages of what is meant contain a young girls life story a time that evening for Thymian to meet him downstairs in the pharmacy where he works for her father.

      As if those events—the sudden departure of the only female friend of the house, the desecration of her personal book of life, along with the adult refusals to explain events—were not enough, a gurney suddenly appears in the house containing Elisabeth’s now dead body. As the young girl races upstairs to get an explanation about what has happened to her beloved friend, she discovers her own father with his arm around the neck of the new housekeeper Meta (Franziska Kinz) who has just arrived to replace Elisabeth. We understand why the young girl suddenly faints and is taken off to bed.

      She shows up, nonetheless, to the nefarious downstairs meeting with Meinert more out of curiosity than anything else since he has promised that he explain all these events than any other purpose; surely she cannot conceive that he will take advantage of her own innocence and her feverish condition to basically rape her.

      As adults we can piece the facts together. Elisabeth has become pregnant with Robert Henning’s child and has been, accordingly, forced out of the home to prevent shame. She, in turn, has committed suicide by jumping into the river. Hypocritical letch that he is, Henning has lost no time in courting the new servant. 

       And suddenly in the next frame, Thymian herself now pregnant, has just borne Meinert’s child. The family, perfect bourgeoise judges, have gathered to resolve the situation. Despite the girl’s refusal to name the father, they break open her diary to discover the truth, insisting that Meinert must now marry the girl, a demand to which he might have acquiesced but she refuses, stating simply that she does not love him.

      The family decision is harsh and unthinkable for any civilized society which they pretend to represent: the child is sent away to a midwife and the girl to what is basically a reformatory school where she is put under the militaristic strictures of the head matron (Valeska Gert) and her brutal male assistant (Andrews Engelmann). The faces of the individual characters upon which Pabst’s camera focuses with horrific fascination, particularly the males, might have been stolen from the pages of the great Weimar photographer August Sander’s People of the 20th Century.

      Censored, released, recalled, and censored again before its final 1929 Berlin release, Pabst’s film even today is not perceived to be entirely the one he originally made. So we will never know whether or not the original had included more openly sexual scenes. But we still can observe subtle references to LGBTQ behavior, particularly in the reformatory school where, for example, as Thymian first sits at the dinner table where the girls are forced to sip their thin broth in unison, the rhythms tapped out by the matron with a pointing stick, as the girl next to her rubs her leg up again Thymian’s and when the girl turns to her in response she gives a sexually-sly wink.

   As the girls ready for bed soon after—again after being marched into the dormitory—the matron with a gong and mallet begins a steady beat as the girls, having pulled off their dresses, are forced into a regimen of exercises in their underwear, the gong beating ever faster and faster, demanding as Pabst’s camera moves in closer to her face expressing what appears to be an ecstatic orgasm.

      These scenes, along with the ever-watchful eyes of the male assistant focused on his pubescent charges, creates an eerie world of perverted sexual desire.

       Horrified by her experiences, Thymian thinks about writing to her father but instead writes to the Count for help in escaping her situation. What she cannot know is that Count has been  disowned by his father for his complete incompetence in any line of employment his father has arranged for him. And when the Count visits the Henning family, he discovers that Thymian’s father has now married the manipulative Meta, who herself is expecting a baby. The aunt leaves with a picture of Thymian she has stolen from the family’s photo collection, a picture not even missed by Henning or his new wife. Thymian has been forgotten at home. Absence is throughout this work a major theme from Elisabeth’s sudden departure from the house and from life, to Thymian’s absence of virginity and soon after homelife, to the Count’s later absenting himself from existence.

         The young Count does visit Thymian, granted only a few moments to confer with her, but enough time to receive his promise to meet up later that night.

        When the lights have been turned out, Thymian’s schoolmate Erika (Edith Meinhard), the girl with the previous inviting wink, visits Thymian’s bed with the intent to escape with her. When the matron, spying on the girls enters, all the girls, sitting in one another’s bed rush to their own; she catches Erika however and attempts to confiscate Thymian’s diary, which she refuses to give up. A pitch battle ensures, with the diary being tossed among the girls with the matron grabbing for it in various locations. Thymian escapes to a nearby window, desperately attempting to open it without success, but meanwhile the girls toss the diary back to her, the matron following with Erika grabbing at her to keep the elder woman away from her friend. As she pulls the evil woman closer to the floor, the other girls join in, finally the male assistant entering in an attempt to end the tumult. Yet he too is pummeled by the girls as Erik pulls off a key among the many strapped to the matron’s waist. The girls escape to join up with the Count.

    Having escaped their jailers, Erika reports that she has a place to go, inviting Thymian to join her. But Thymian is determined to find her baby, the count and her friend moving off in the other direction, but not before Erika writes down the address to where she can be found in her friend’s precious diary.

     As Thymian makes her way to the midwife’s apartment, we see a small coffin being brought down the same stairs which Thymian climbs to knock on the midwife’s door. She is told, as he might have imagined, that the child has just died, its body taken away. Thymian rushes to follow the coffin, but finds the bearer has escaped into the crowds. Completely despondent, hungry, tired, and dizzied by the series of recent events, the girl falls into a near faint beside a hot dog vendor. The vendor’s woman customers spot Thymian and ask after her health, the girl coming to enough to show them the address Erika has written down in her diary. The vendor is only too happy to take her to the location.

      Erika’s safe haven turns out to be a low-class house of prostitution, overseen by a protective and fairly loving overweight woman; the count seems to have already established permanent residence in the place, and Erika is now decked out in a proper dress, a glass of champagne in her hand, her other arm around a man’s neck.

      Thymian and the hot dog vendor are both greeted graciously. Obviously the vendor is a regular, while the girl is immediately brought into their midst, handed a glass of champagne, and soon after awarded a beautiful new dress by the Madame in charge.

      Before the night is over, tizzy from the champagne, Thymian has been bedded with a man who by the next morning she has forgotten. Again her innocence seems overwhelmingly present, as she refuses even the payment that the Madame offers her. It does not take much or even a long time for the women of the house and their loving protector to insinuate themselves into Thymian’s life and make her feel at home as a prostitute.

      Here again, it appears that the scenes the censors must have cut were not only the obvious heterosexual encounters, inherent in the story and visual images that remain, but the now subtly signaled lesbian relationships, left in fragments by a couple of women dancing among the groups of men and women, and at one point, Pabst’s obvious suggestion of lesbian behavior through a glimpse of two heeled women with the flounces of their dresses showing obviously engaged in dance. Had he simply shown two women dancing, we might have explained it away as it given the fact that there not enough men in the room; but by framing this cut away from their bodies, the film points to the act instead of merely representing it as something commonplace.

      Throughout, the Count appears to be perceived less as a customer—after all he has no money—than as the house eunuch, beloved by all the women whose company he sometimes shares in the bed, but also—without specific indication—perhaps the house homosexual for customers on the search for such refined activities.

     But unlike the increasingly dangerous and finally deadly experiences of Lulu, Thymian’s experiences with prostitution appear to be basically uneventful and benign. Two major incidents stand out it what otherwise appears to be a newfound home that, providing love, gives these girls a better life than the reformatory school trying through hate to redeem them.

      At one grand evening, when another of the house’s regulars, Dr. Vitalis (Kurt Gerron) feels down and out, Thymian suggests a raffle to cheer him up. Offering up their own names (and services) the girls sell wrapped envelopes to the customers of restaurant where everyone seems to be celebrating, including Thymian’s father, his wife Meta, and the now owner of the pharmacy Meinert, the trio out of their once-in-a-year visit to the high-life of the city.

       After some partying, Thymian spot them just as they do her, the girl unable to push her way through the crowds to greet them as Meta attempts to hurry her husband away, she realizing, perhaps, that she has been bought like a prostitute by Robert just as Thymian is offering herself to other men. Yet Meta is convinced, like so many women of her world, that she represents moral righteousness, while they all see women like Thymian as wanton whores. The distance between them is, as Pabst shows us, in reality only a few feet, but is miles away in the manner in which the other kind of woman hides away in a house like the Henning home, convincing their “customers” that they have made a moral decision to marry them.

      Observing the encounter Vitalis suggests that now they are both forever “lost,” providing the title of this work.

      Soon after, Thymian’s father Henning dies, and a letter requests the young girl to attend the reading of the will since she has been named the sole heir. We know that Meinert now controls Henning’s finances, but he is evidently willing to pay a large sum for the house and apothecary which will go to Thymian.

      Her friends imagine for themselves new lives, and suggest that having come into wealth, Thymian should now present herself as a new woman, marrying her off to the Count, who after all, long ago promised the girl his heart through the necklace she still wears. He is now planning for a completely new life involving, it appears, a reconceiving of the brothel in which they now live, since his plans seem to involve a source of future income as well.

       At being handed her new fortune, however, Thymian discovers that her much hated step-mother and her half-sisters are now being sent to the street by Meinert, who has plans of his own for the house, perhaps even, he might imagine, involving Thymian who is now dressed as a stylish society woman.

      She will have nothing to do with him, and seeing what is about to happen to the children who are tangentially of her own blood, she hands the money over the little girl and her mother Meta, the woman she has so long hated. Her act resonates; and act of loving kindness within a film that has shown hardly any other figure of being capable.

      Her news upon her return to her friends, amazes them, but even more greatly shocks her now husband Count Osdorff who in a moment when the others are turned away simply leaps through open window to his death. In witnessing this brilliant scene of sudden absence, one cannot but be reminded of a similar scene in Paweł Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida and the real life event when dancer Freddie Herko leapt through a Greenwich Village window before friends.

 

     At the Count’s funeral, the father who had disowned the son stands at a distance noting Thymian’s gentle toss of a flower upon his casket. Meeting her, he begs for the opportunity to correct the error of his ways, offering her his own protection as a father-in-law.

      So, it appears, Thymian’s life is truly redeemed as we see her vacationing at a beach with Count Osdorff, the elder. There he encounters his two elderly female cousins to whom he introduces his daughter-in-law, who they immediately take up as friend, putting her in charge of one of their pet projects, the support of a school for wayward girls—inevitably the same place where her family had installed her a few years previous.

       She attends the meeting at the institution, the male assistant immediately recognizing her, as she listens to the prattle of the well-meaning but desperately misled women who make up the board. When they bring in Erika, who they have now caught, demanding that she be punished for escaping as a lesson to the other girls, the former innocent finally speaks out, appalled by Osdorff’s cousin’s assertions that this is a well-meaning institution, while taking Erika in arm and pulling her away from the place, the elderly Count expressing the film’s final message as he follows: "A little more love and no-one would be lost in this world!"

       Pabst’s film was not well-received in Germany, a film so thoroughly censored only a few months before the increased pressures of Hitler’s rule. Critics found Margarete Böhme’s cautious outrage to be outdated and Brook’s acting to be underwhelming. Sound films were appearing simultaneously, and perhaps Pabst’s work seemed outdated for that very reason. The movie was not shown in the US until the 1950s and only then with further censorious cuts.

      Only now can we recognize this work, along with Pandora’s Box, as representing one of the great moments of silent film history. Numerous images and scenes from this film are among motion picture history’s very best.

 

Los Angeles, June 22, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2022).