Diary of a Lost Girl with Louise Brooks + Book Signing with Daniel Kehlmann at MoMi

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), starring Louise Brooks, will be shown in at the Museum of the Moving Image on Saturday October 19th. This early afternoon screening is being shown as part of the MoMi's ongoing Silent, Please series.  More information about this screening, which will take place at the Redstone Theater and which will feature live musical accompaniment, can be found HERE.

Diary of a Lost Girl + Book Signing with Daniel Kehlmann
Sunday, Oct 19, 2025 at 1:00 p.m.
Featuring live piano accompaniment by Makia Matsumura 

Here is what the venue had to say about this event: "Like American star Louise Brooks and German director G. W. Pabst’s previous collaboration Pandora’s Box, this sensational and dazzling melodrama is one of the great German films of the silent era. The ever-incandescent Brooks plays the innocent pharmacist’s daughter, Thymian, who experiences corruption and abuse before finding spiritual and social liberation. The screening will be followed by a discussion and book signing with best-selling Daniel Kehlmann, whose acclaimed new book The Director (Summit), was inspired by the life of Pabst, who later would flee to Hollywood to resist the Nazis only to return to his homeland to create propaganda films for the German Reich. Kehlmann’s The Director was a Late Show with Stephen Colbert Book Club Pick and was called “nothing short of brilliant” by The Wall Street Journal."

Director G. W. Pabst. 1929, 110 mins. Germany. 35mm. 
With Louise Brooks, Fritz Rasp, André Roanne, Josef Rovensky.  

For more information about Diary of a Lost Girl, be sure and visit the Louise Brooks Society filmography page devoted to the film. Otherwise, here is a bit of trivia about this classic film.

— Pabst’s Diary of a Lost Girl was the third film adaption of Margarete Böhme’s bestselling book. The first was directed by Fritz Bernhardt in 1912. The second was directed by Richard Oswald in 1918. Both are considered lost films. The second version starred Erna Morena as Thymian, Reinhold Schünzel as Osdorff, Werner Krauss as Meinert, and Conrad Veidt as Dr. Julius. The film was well reviewed, but demands of the wartime censor led to cuts and even a change in its title. Once censorship was lifted after the end of WWI, scenes thought too provocative or critical of society were put back and its title restored.

–– Diary of a Lost Girl made its German debut in Berlin on October 15, 1929. By December 5, the film had been banned by the German state censor and was withdrawn from circulation. After cuts were made, the ban was lifted on January 6, 1930. In this censored form, it played across Europe and the Soviet Union. One cine-club in Madrid screened it as late as 1933. Diary of a Lost Girl was not screened in the United States until the 1950s.

— Otto Stenzeel (1903-1989) is credited for the music for Diary of a Lost Girl. He composed music for films from 1926 through 1930; among his best known efforts is the music for Menschen am Sonntag / People on Sunday (1930). In the 1930’s under the name Otto Stenzel, he led the orchestra at the Berlin Scala, one of the largest revue theaters in Germany. He also led his own swing-style dance band and made a number of recordings, including a Tango with with the Spanish-born Juan Llossas, who has an uncredited role in Diary of a Lost Girl as the leader of the small combo playing in the corner of the nightclub. 

 

The 1929 Louise Brooks film, Diary of a Lost Girl, is based on a controversial and bestselling book first published in Germany in 1905. Though little known today, it was a literary sensation at the beginning of the 20th century. By the end of the 1920s, it had been translated into 14 languages and sold more than 1,200,000 copies - ranking it among the bestselling books of its time.

Was it - as many believed - the real-life diary of a young woman forced by circumstance into a life of prostitution? Or a sensational and clever fake, one of the first novels of its kind? This contested work - a work of unusual historical significance as well as literary sophistication - inspired a sequel, a play, a parody, a score of imitators, and two silent films. The best remembered of these is the oft revived G.W. Pabst film starring Louise Brooks.

Want to learn even more? Back in 2010, the Louise Brooks Society published the "Louise Brooks edition" of Margarete Bohme's The Diary of a Lost Girl, the book the film was based on. It's a sensational read. Order your copy today at amazon.com 

THE LEGAL STUFF: The Louise Brooks Society™ blog is authored by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society  (www.pandorasbox.com). Original content copyright © 2025. Further unauthorized use prohibited. As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases.