English text below

«Die Kamera weidet sich an Brooksʼ strahlender Schönheit, wenn Pabst dem Abenteuer der Apothekerstochter Thymian folgt, die ihre Unschuld verliert. Ihre Entwicklung vom Augapfel des Vaters über ihren sexuellen Fehltritt und das Erziehungsheim zum Liebling eines teuren Bordells und schliesslich zur verwitweten Gräfin gibt Pabst Gelegenheit, schonungslos das Deutschland der Weimarer Republik darzustellen im Kontrast zu Brooksʼ Verkörperung einer überschäumenden, gleichsam unschuldigen Vitalität.» (Ruth Baumgarten, Time Out Film Guide)
«Pabst umschifft in seinem letzten Stummfilm die Klippen des kolportagehaften Sujets geschickt und erzählt in sehr dynamischen Bildern. Der im September 1929 der Zensur vorgelegte Film bekam zunächst Schnittauflagen, wurde dann zwischenzeitlich als ‹entsittlichend› ganz verboten, nachdem eine Reihe von Frauenvereinen und Jugendhilfeeinrichtungen Sturm gelaufen waren. Schliesslich durfte er, abermals gekürzt, wieder auf die Leinwand. (…) Die rekonstruierte Version ist etwas länger als die Uraufführungsfassung.» (Ursula von Keitz, Programm Filmpodium, Jan. 2004)

"Diary of a Lost Girl is not the equal of Pandora's Box, but Brooks' performance is on the same high level. It has a frankness that would largely disappear from mainstream films after the rise of censorship in the early 1930s. She plays Thymian, an innocent young girl we meet on the day of her First Communion. Her family lives upstairs over her father's drug store, which is managed by a man named Meinert (the actor Fritz Rasp has a lupine face and cruel smile). It is revealed that her father has made the family's young maid pregnant, and she is thrown from the house. The next maid, Meta, observes that the father can be seduced, and efficiently does so. Thymian feels shut out at home as her father and Meta start a new family. She becomes pregnant by Meinert, and the scandal is too great for the bourgeois family; after her child's birth Thymian is sent to a cruel "reformatory" run by a sadistic lesbian taskmaster of a woman and her towering, shaven-headed husband. Running away with another girl, she finds her way to a whorehouse, where the grandmotherly madam makes it clear what Thymian's duties will now consist of.
One of the clients is Count Osdorff, an old friend of her family and a wastrel whose half-hearted attempts to help the girl come to nothing. In an ending of unrestrained irony, Osdorff's wealthy uncle marries Thymian, who now becomes a member of Society for the Rescue of Endangered Female Youth. The Society pays a visit on the whorehouse, where Thymian attempts to play the reformer role expected of her, but finally rises up in wrath.
One notable element of the film is that it's entirely the story of Thymian, just as Pandora's Box was entirely the story of Lulu. Louise Brooks didn't have a personality or screen presence that lent itself to supporting roles. If both young women are victims, neither is helpless, and the men who would exploit her find their evil turned against them. In a world of cruelty, the Brooks characters stand as enduring figures. How she accomplishes this is the mystery of her acting. 'The great art of films,' she wrote, 'does not consist of descriptive movement of face and body but in the movements of thought and soul transmitted in a kind of intense isolation.'" (Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com, 22.3.2012)

Drehbuch: Rudolf Leonhard, nach einem Roman von Margarete Böhme
Kamera: Sepp Allgeier

Mit: Louise Brooks (Thymian), Edith Meinhard (Erika), Fritz Rasp (Provisor Meinert), Josef Rovensky (Apotheker Henning), Andrews Engelmann (der Vorsteher), Valeska Gert (seine Frau), André Roanne (Graf Osdorff), Arnold Korff (sein Onkel), Vera Pawlowa (Tante Frida), Franziska Kinz (Meta), Kurt Gerron (Dr. Vitalis), Sybille Schmitz (Elisabeth)

113 Min., sw, DCP, Stummfilm, d Zw'titel/e