Abstract
Reviewed by: Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen) Peter Jelavich Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen). G. W. Pabst, dir. Starring Louise Brooks, with a new piano score by Javier Pérez de Aspeitia. Eureka!, 2007 (1929). 1 DVD + 39-page booklet. $24.99; £15.99. Tagebuch einer Verlorenen—which premiered in Vienna on 27 September 1929, and in Berlin on 14 October—has gone down in history as G. W. Pabst’s second and less successful film with Louise Brooks, after Pandora’s Box. Its relative failure is often attributed to its opening just as sound films were hitting the German screens. That is not, however, fully accurate, since there were not enough talkies in Germany in the fall of 1929 to make such a difference. Rather, it seems that the film suffered both from a problematic script and from censorship. Based on the best-selling novel of 1905 by Margarete Böhme, Pabst’s work is updated visually to a late-1920s setting, but otherwise it touts the novel’s defense of the lifestyle of a prostitute against the aspersions of bourgeois hypocrites. But what was sensational in 1905 was hardly so twenty-five years later. Nevertheless, it was problematic enough to induce the German censorship board to require cuts in many of the overtly sexual and socially critical scenes, even before its first screening in Berlin; and after numerous morality and youth-protection leagues—one of the main targets of the film—protested against even that truncated version, it was banned entirely on appeal on 5 December 1930. The version we see on this DVD is based on materials from several archives and comes close to being a “director’s cut”—i.e. it never was screened in such a complete version in any German cinema. We first meet Thymian (Louise Brooks) on the day of her confirmation, and we are immediately cued in to her unsavory environs. Her father, a pharmacist (Josef Rovensky), dismisses the housekeeper after having impregnated her; soon her corpse is discovered by the police, obviously a suicide. That the pharmacist is a known serial seducer is confirmed when Meta (Franziska Kinz), the young replacement housekeeper, is introduced to the family members assembled for Thymian’s confirmation: they all exchange knowing looks. Meta has schemes of her own, however, and soon will force the pharmacist to marry her. Meanwhile, Meinert (Fritz Rasp), the pharmacist’s store manager, has his eyes on Thymian (when he is not ogling postcards of nude women), [End Page 651] and he succeeds in seducing her on the night of her confirmation. After Thymian gives birth, an assembly of family members decide that the baby must be given away and Thymian sent to a reformatory. After Thymian reluctantly parts from her child, Meta hands it over to a woman who bills herself as a “midwife” but who really is what Germans call an Engelmacherin (angel-maker). That point is underscored when Meta slips her a wad of cash along with a long stare that clearly says: “kill the little bastard.” These initial scenes of the film could have sunk into caricature and melodrama, but instead, they are an apogee of silent filmmaking, inasmuch as desires and tensions are conveyed through lingering looks, exchanged glances, and subtle hand gestures. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Louise Brooks as Thymian Henning in Diary of a Lost Girl. There is nothing subtle about the next segment of the film, set in a home for “fallen girls,” but it is saved by the over-the-top performance of Valeska Gert, who plays the headmistress. Far from dampening lusts, the institution is rife with sexual energy. As soon as she sits down to the communal dinner table, Thymian feels her leg stroked by the foot of the adjacent girl; and at night, the young wards jump into bed with each other. But the hottest number is Gert herself, a sadomasochistic disciplinarian. We first see her at the meal, where the girls have to spoon up their undrinkable soup in time with the stick that she beats against the table. But it is at night that she really...
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