Diary of a Lost Girl: The Endurance of Women through the Filter of Honorable Men
Note: This is the hundred-and-fifty-third in a series of historical/critical essays examining the best in film from each year. Essentially, I am watching films from the beginning of cinematic history that interest me and/or hold some critical or cultural impact. My personal, living list of favorites is being created at Mubi, showcasing five films per year. All this being explained, what follows is an examination of my third favorite 1929 film, DIARY OF A LOST GIRL, directed by G.W. Pabst.
The second and final collaboration between American actress Louise Brooks and Austrian director Georg Wilhelm Pabst, DIARY OF A LOST GIRL was a German production based on the controversial 1905 novel of the same name by Margarete Böhme. G.W. Pabst’s version, the third film adaptation, was no stranger to controversy either. Nearly censored to death (the film did not enjoy box office or contemporary critical success), Pabst’s ultimate version of DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is not totally put together today, although a 112-minute reconstructed version comes close. In any event, in this shape, Pabst still makes a powerful and lucidly constructed point with his final silent film. As with PANDORA’S BOX (1929), Brooks and Pabst’s previous film, the pair deconstruct the fallen woman story past its tropes and cliches, depicting the victims our patriarchal society makes of women (and girls) while making Brooks’ Thymian an agent of her own destiny. That her agency must still come by way of the rare honorable man may seem a reductive angle, but it actually makes the regrettable point all the more convincing.
Pabst, a proponent of New Objectivity in film, nevertheless tells the story of Thymian with a poetic grace. Somehow, his and Brooks’ inclination to the art movement (the latter is often described as “not acting at all,” in a good way) comes all the way through to an impressionistic mode. It’s far more potent than a “fictionalized documentary,” as DIARY OF A LOST GIRL and its source material have been called. Thymian is an incredibly sympathetic character, the victim of sexual abuse quite literally in the home (although from outside the family), forced to give birth to her rapist’s child yet separated from the kid at her birth. Thymian is sent to a harshly managed “home for wayward girls,” which she escapes from with the help of a more “streetwise” friend. This friend leads her to a brothel, where Thymian feels compelled to join the business in short order.
This may be the time to mention the failings of the men around Thymian. First, and most obvious, is Meinert (Fritz Rasp), an employee of Thymian’s father (Josef Rovenský), a pharmacist. Meinert is Thymian’s rapist, and Thymian’s father fails in his duty to protect or seek retribution. He goes along with the decision to oust Thymian from her home and give her child to another, who by the way dies in the care of a foster family. And once Thymian gets to the home for girls, the creepy and brutish assistant (Andrews Engelmann) certainly strikes a further abusive, patriarchal stance.
There may be a more nuanced position to take in regards to DIARY OF A LOST GIRL’s commentary, and it may not be entirely gender-based. For some of Thymian’s greatest antagonists, or at least those not entirely concerned in her true best interests, are also female. It starts with her Aunt Frieda (Vera Pawlowa), who introduces the whole plan to put Thymian out of the house. And it continues with her father’s second wife Meta (Franziska Kinzas), a…”successful” result of his propensity to have “relations” with the household’s housekeepers. An unsuccessful result opens the film as it is implied he impregnated the housekeeper Elisabeth (Sybille Schmitz), leading to an unsuccessful abortion and her death, or a successful abortion and her suicide, or an unsuccessful abortion and her suicide. It is clear why so many were afraid of DIARY OF A LOST GIRL’s content in 1929.
Anyways, Meta clearly dislikes Thymian, doing nothing to help her situation. Once Thymian gets to the reformatory, the head matron (Valeska Gert) rules with an iron fist, disregarding the situations that may have put these girls under her care. And even Thymian’s friend, Erika (played with incredible vitality by Edith Meinhard), leads her into Erika’s own sordid life at the brothel, led by a madame who is obviously complicit in the troubling developments of her girls’ lives. The accommodations of the brothel are more luxurious than those of the reformatory, however, and its madame more sympathetic, but one has to wonder about the similar positions the matron and madame are in.
I don’t want to paint a picture that the women of DIARY OF A LOST GIRL are entirely to blame for Thymian’s tragic saga, because they are ultimately more redeemable. Meta is put in a vulnerable position once Thymian’s father dies, with two children of her own, but her relative humility leads Thymian to bestow her inheritance upon them; by the way, this is another example of Thymian’s agency. Erika, who is portrayed as a comer-and-goer from the reformatory, is defended by Thymian, who now operates from a place of privilege, when the latter returns to the scene of her “discipline.” Strangely missing from this tour of redemptions is the matron of the home for girls, who is absent from the film’s closing moments.
In any event, this isn’t the extent of the “rogues gallery” taking advantage of Thymian, played by Brooks with an innocence that does not imply stupidity in any way. Truly, she is a lost girl in a labyrinth of the predatory human condition, a hypocritical, gluttonous German society that Pabst is clearly deriding. But there are less obvious villains in the story of DIARY OF A LOST GIRL. First and foremost is the character of Count Osdorff (the younger). Played by André Roanne with an admittedly likable naivete, the Count is a friend of Thymian’s bourgeois family, but is cut off by the older Count Osdorff, his uncle (Arnold Korff). After aiding in Thymian’s rescue from the reformatory, the Count goes along with Erika’s suggestion to return to the brothel, and benefits from the festive vibe there instead of thinking more seriously about Thymian’s state and quality of life. He professes to be helpless due to his lack of coin, but he also seems to refuse to pursue an honest living. When Thymian will apparently inherit her parents’ fortune, he marries her to benefit from the funding, but kills himself when he finds out she gave it to Meta.
Two relatively minor characters support this “wolf in sheep’s clothing” figure. One is a street sausage vendor who guides Thymian to the brothel, even though she initially declined to follow Erika there. Once he arrives, it’s clear he is in bed with the girls (haha), and knew full well what life he was delivering Thymian into. And “crusading progressive” Dr. Vitalis (Kurt Gerron) regularly visits the brothel to attempt to save the girls from their fate, but he always falls in with the party.
This host of characters gives way to the good nature of just two characters, both of them male. The first is minor. During the execution of her father’s will, Thymian finds a friendly face in the notary, who ends up slapping Meinert (present as a business partner of the father) for his reprehensible behavior and language and subsequently bowing to him in a stellar comic relief moment. But the second is much more significant. Upon the younger Count’s death, the Elder takes Thymian in. His acquaintance with a woman’s group that the reformatory Thymian was a vict…er, resident of reports to brings her to her former dungeon. The women of said group, by the way, may fall in with the countless people who fail Thymian and fail to see the fomentation of negative development at the home for girls.
In any event, the older Count Osdorff is portrayed as the savior of Thymian, in a way, just as a series of characters before him are portrayed as the villains. It may seem black-and-white coming from a proponent of “objectivity” such as Pabst, but ultimately, the story of DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is not entirely restricted to Thymian. Perhaps this is where the “fictionalized documentary” phrase came from; while watching the film, one can feel the broader, societal point Pabst is desperately trying to communicate. And that is this: our young women are strong, stronger than we really give them credit for. But that doesn’t discount the institutional and sociological barriers in their way, and without tolerant examples set by the older generation, male and female, but especially male, tragic circumstances may befall the girls of our society, spinning out into more terrible events, including physical and emotional abuse. As the elder Osdorff puts it: “A little more love and no one would be lost in this world!” That love can come in the form of believing the historically oppressed half our world’s population. It’s an observation made by an “honorable man,” as given life by one who probably sees himself as such (elder Osdorff and Pabst, respectively), but it’s no less of a humanist message.
