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.

Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks, screens in Denver

This just in .... 

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), starring Louise Brooks, will be shown in Denver, Colorado on Sunday, September 14th. This late afternoon screening is one of a number of films being shown as part of the Denver Silent Film Festival. More information about this screening, which will feature live musical accompaniment, can be found HERE.

And here is what the festival has to say about the event. "Louise Brooks was far less than the international phenomenon she became when she first arrived in Germany in 1926  1928 to make the scandalous Pandora’s Box with Pabst. Diary mounted another serious attack on bourgeois German morality with its story of a young girl raped, and sent to a morally rigid “reform school” from which she escapes and eventually works in a brothel before finding a way to rise in social standing."

Musical accompaniment by Rodney Sauer.

Diary of a Lost Girl will be shown at the Sie Film Center, Denver's Only Independent Movie Theater, located at 2510 E. Colfax Ave., Denver, CO 80206

For more information about Diary of a Lost Girl, be sure and visit the Louise Brooks Society filmography page devoted to the film.

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 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.

This corrected and annotated edition of the original English language translation brought this important book back into print after more than 100 years. It includes an introduction by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society, detailing the book's remarkable history and relationship to the 1929 silent film. This special "Louise Brooks Edition" also includes more than three dozen vintage illustrations.

REVIEWS OF THE LOUISE BROOKS SOCIETY EDITION:

"In today's parlance this would be called a movie tie-in edition, but that seems a rather glib way to describe yet another privately published work that reveals an enormous amount of research and passion." - Leonard Maltin 

"Long relegated to the shadows, Margarete Böhme's 1905 novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl has at last made a triumphant return. In reissuing the rare 1907 English translation of Böhme's German text, Thomas Gladysz makes an important contribution to film history, literature, and, in as much as Böhme told her tale with much detail and background contemporary to the day, sociology and history. He gives us the original novel, his informative introduction, and many beautiful and rare illustrations. This reissue is long overdue, and in all ways it is a volume of uncommon merit." - Richard Buller, author of A Beautiful Fairy Tale: The Life of Actress Lois Moran

"Read today, it's a fascinating time-trip back to another age, and yet remains compelling. As a bonus, Gladysz richly illustrates the text with stills of Brooks from the famous film." - Jack Garner, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle 

"Thomas Gladysz is the leading authority on all matters pertaining to the legendary Louise Brooks. We owe him a debt of gratitude for bringing the groundbreaking novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl, back from obscurity." --Lon Davis, author of Silent Lives

"It was such a pleasure to come upon your well documented and beautifully presented edition." -- Elizabeth Boa, University of Nottingham

 

REVIEWS OF THE ORIGINAL ENGLISH LANGUAGE EDITION:

"The saddest of modern books." - Nelson Evening Mail (1909)

The "poignant story of a great-hearted girl who kept her soul alive amidst all the mire that surrounded her poor body." - Hall Caine (1907)

"There are many readers, however, who find it very shocking, and Mr. Bram Stoker, the advocate of book censoring . . . would ban it promptly." - New York Times (1907)

"The fact that one German critic asserted the impossibility of a woman herself immune from vice having written such a book, is proof that besides truth of matter there was compelling art in Margarete Böhme's book." - Percival Pollard (1909)

"The moral justification of such a publication is to be found in the fact that it shrivels up sentimentality; the weak thing cannot stand and look at such stark degradation." - Manchester Guardian (1907)

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.   

Louise Brooks in Diary of a Lost Girl screens in St. Louis on March 12

Diary of a Lost Girl (1929), starring Louise Brooks, will be shown in St. Louis(e), Missouri on March 12. This presentation by Silents, Please! STL will feature an introduction by SPSTL's Kate Stewart. More information about the event, which takes place at the Arkadin Cinema and Bar (5228 Gravois Ave in St. Louis), can be found HERE. 

According to the venue website, "Re-teaming actress Louise Brooks and director G.W. Pabst (Pandora’s Box), DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is a wonderfully salacious adaptation of Margarethe Bohme’s scintillating novel, in which the naive daughter of a middle class pharmacist is seduced by her father’s assistant, only to be disowned and sent to a repressive home for wayward girls. She escapes, searches for her child, and ends-up in a high-class brothel, only to turn the tables on the society which had abused her. Brooks delivers a tour-de-force performance that helped cement her status as one of cinema’s most luminescent beauties."

“A deliciously sordid soap opera…[starring] one of the most iconic stars that cinema has ever seen!” -Wendy Ide, The Times

In 2010,  the Louise Brooks Society published a corrected and annotated edition of the original 1907 English language translation -- notably, this edition, the first in English in 100 years -- brought this important work of feminist literature back into print in English. It includes an introduction by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society, detailing the book's remarkable history and relationship to the 1929 silent film. This special "Louise Brooks Edition" also includes more than three dozen vintage illustrations.  (Purchase on amazon.)

More about Diary of a Lost Girl can be found on the newly revamped Louise Brooks Society website on its Diary of a Lost Girl (filmography page).

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

Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks, screens in Kent, England

Diary of a Lost Girl, starring Louise Brooks, will be shown later today (February 23) at the Palace Theater in Kent, England. This screening will feature a live musical accompaniment by Lilian Henley on the piano. More information about this event can be found HERE.

According to the venue website: "Join us for a deep dive into night and the city, the characters and cabaret of Berlin in the late 1920s, including a young woman (played by the iconic bob-haired Louise Brooks) who we accompany as she finds her way through the dark and dangerous world.

Diary of a Lost Girl begins with the 16-year-old Thymian, daughter of a pharmacist, being given a diary as a first communion present, in which she will go on to record her life of shame and humiliation, betrayed by a succession of men and women. Her innocence ended after she is made pregnant, when she first records her experiences in a repressive reform school and then, having escaped, at a high-class brothel where she’s transformed from dowdy inmate into the stunning woman we know as Louise Brooks the film star.

Throughout it all, Brooks is an incredible, natural, modern presence. Her Thymian transcends her story, retaining her moral decency in a corrupt world. Director GW Pabst had already directed her in Pandora’s Box which outraged correct middle-class audiences in Germany (and everywhere!) on its release, and this film, set in Berlin towards the end of a period of social freedoms and cultural permissiveness (think Liza Minnelli in Cabaret) delivered much the same!"

 In 2010,  the Louise Brooks Society published a corrected and annotated edition of the original 1907 English language translation -- notably, this edition, the first in English in 100 years -- brought this important work of feminist literature back into print in English. It includes an introduction by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society, detailing the book's remarkable history and relationship to the 1929 silent film. This special "Louise Brooks Edition" also includes more than three dozen vintage illustrations.  (Purchase on amazon.)

More about Diary of a Lost Girl can be found on the newly revamped Louise Brooks Society website on its Diary of a Lost Girl (filmography page).

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

Louise Brooks film Diary of a Lost Girl set to screen in Toronto, Canada

The 1929 Louise Brooks' film, Diary of a Lost Girl, will be shown in Toronto, Canada on February 27 at the recently reopened Revue Cinema, Ontario's favourite independent cinema. And what's more, the film will be shown on the big screen with love musical accompaniment by Marilyn Lerner. More information about this special event, along with ticket availability, can be found HERE.

Diary of A Lost Girl

GERMANY | 1929 | 112 mins | NR

“Louise Brooks is the only woman who had the ability to transfigure no matter what filmi nto a masterpiece…She is much more than a myth, she is a magical presence, a real phantom, the magnetism of the cinema.” – Ado Kyrou, Amour-eroticisme et cinema

Based on Margarethe Böhme’s scandalous novel, DIARY OF A LOST GIRL is Louise Brooks and director G.W. Pabst’s follow-up to the iconic PANDORA’S BOX. No less sensuous, controversial, or provocative, DIARY showcases Brooks at her most transfixing.

The story of an innocent young girl disowned and sent away by her family after she is seduced and abandoned by her father’s assistant, Pabst’s film never succumbs to melodrama, but rather turns the table on the tormentors of women.

With showers of champagne set in the high-class brothels of Berlin, DIARY is Weimar at its most powerful. DIARY is a silent masterwork released at the era’s death knell and a film that further reinforced Brooks’ status as an icon, even if it ended up being her last major work and final silent film. – ALICIA FLETCHER

Digital Restoration Courtesy of Kino Lorber

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Director: G.W. Pabst
Cast: Louise Brooks; Fritz Rasp; Valeska Gert

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DETAILS

Doors Open 30 minutes before showtime.

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PRICING

General Admission: $17
Bronze/Loyalty Members, Students & Seniors: $14
Silver Members: $13
Gold/Individual/Family Members: FREE

For INDIVIDUAL MEMBERSHIPS ($350) and FAMILY MEMBERSHIPS, please email us at info@revuecinema.ca to get your ticket!

Prices include taxes. All membership benefits are available.

 

Want to learn more about Diary of a Lost Girl and the book that was the basis for the film? Check out the 2010  Louise Brooks Society publication, the Louise Brooks edition of Margarete Bohme's The Diary of a Lost Girl, edited and with a long introduction by Thomas Gladysz.

 

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.

This corrected and annotated edition of the original English language translation brings this important book back into print after more than 100 years. It includes an introduction by Thomas Gladysz, Director of the Louise Brooks Society, detailing the book's remarkable history and relationship to the 1929 silent film. This special "Louise Brooks Edition" also includes more than three dozen vintage illustrations.

 

The Louise Brooks edition of Diary of a Lost Girl is available at Amazon Canada and Amazon USA and elsewhere around the world.

 

"Long relegated to the shadows, Margarete Böhme's 1905 novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl has at last made a triumphant return. In reissuing the rare 1907 English translation of Böhme's German text, Thomas Gladysz makes an important contribution to film history, literature, and, in as much as Böhme told her tale with much detail and background contemporary to the day, sociology and history. He gives us the original novel, his informative introduction, and many beautiful and rare illustrations. This reissue is long overdue, and in all ways it is a volume of uncommon merit." - Richard Buller, author of A Beautiful Fairy Tale: The Life of Actress Lois Moran 

Read today, it's a fascinating time-trip back to another age, and yet remains compelling. As a bonus, Gladysz richly illustrates the text with stills of Brooks from the famous film. - Jack Garner, Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

In today's parlance this would be called a movie tie-in edition, but that seems a rather glib way to describe yet another privately published work that reveals an enormous amount of research and passion. - Leonard Maltin

Thomas Gladysz is the leading authority on all matters pertaining to the legendary Louise Brooks. We owe him a debt of gratitude for bringing the groundbreaking novel, The Diary of a Lost Girl, back from obscurity. --Lon Davis, author of Silent Lives

It was such a pleasure to come upon your well documented and beautifully presented edition. -- Elizabeth Boa, University of Nottingham (UK)