In 1967, Ron Jones, a teacher at a high school in Palo Alto, California, devised a "social experiment" among his students which he called "The Third Wave"; the idea was to show how easily support for a quasi-fascist ideology could spread. This experiment inspired the book "The Wave" by Morton Rhue, and this in turn served as the basis for this film, which transfers the action from America in the 1960s to modern Germany.
The film starts with high school teacher Rainer Wenger taking a class on autocracy. Like Ron Jones he devises an experiment to demonstrate how easily people could be manipulated into supporting a dictatorship. He starts by imposing stricter discipline and goes on to create a group which the class decide to call Die Welle (The Wave). Nearly all the students join it, and eagerly go along with Wenger's idea that they should all wear a uniform of white shirt and jeans as a symbol of identification with the group. They also create a distinctive salute and a "wave" logo which they begin spray painting around town. They hold parties to which only Wave members are invited and ostracise those few students who refuse to join.
Wenger is an anarchist by political conviction, so he presumably has no sinister motives in conducting his social experiment. Nevertheless, everything ends in disaster. One of the students, Tim, cannot bear the thought that The Wave, to which he has become totally committed emotionally, is a mere illusion, and commits suicide after shooting and wounding another student. The film ends with Wenger being arrested by the police.
This bleak ending was not in Rhue's original book, but I think that it represents a change for the better. (It also suggests that the film-makers share my doubts about the wisdom and ethics of stunts like Jones's, which treat children and young people as raw material for experimentation rather than as individuals). Without it the film would have been little more than a "message movie" on the banal theme of "Democracy good, dictatorship bad". With it, the film becomes a more complex and intelligent discussion of the circumstances under which fascism might develop. One of its arguments is that support for authoritarian ideas can grow even in the absence of those factors which are widely believed to have facilitated Hitler's rise to power- economic depression, high unemployment, a weak government, an unpopular minority on whom all problems can be conveniently blamed, or an aggressively nationalistic ideology. (Indeed, The Wave does not appear to have much of a political ideology of any sort, except towards the end when Wenger starts introducing left-wing anti-capitalist and anti-globalisation ideas).
More controversially (particularly so for a German film), "The Wave" also suggests that although fascism may have evil consequences, the impulses which lead people to support it are not always in themselves evil ones. The Wave is (unlike Hitler's) an inclusive fascism; membership of the group is open to all, regardless of race, religion or social class. The only students outside the group are those who have deliberately chosen to exclude themselves from it. Three of its keenest members are Sinan, a member of Germany's Turkish minority, Dennis, who is mocked as an "Ossi" (East German), and Tim, hitherto an insecure, unpopular outsider who has finally found a group in which he feels welcome and at home, which is why his eventual disillusionment causes him to react so violently.
The appeal of The Wave, and by extension that of all populist-authoritarian movements, is that they provide a sense of unity, of belonging, of purpose. There is also an implication that liberal democracy has its disadvantages, that it can give rise to cliquishness, inequality and alienation. The two students who stand out most strongly against The Wave are two girls Karo and Mona. (They are later joined by Karo's boyfriend Marco after he and Karo have had a fight). Mona does so because of her genuine left-wing views, but there is a suggestion that the popular, intelligent Karo refuses to join The Wave because it is one clique that she cannot dominate and prefers to cast herself in the more glamorous role of heroic resistance leader. She distributes leaflets round the school with the slogan "Stop the Wave!", which may be a deliberate piece of irony by the film-makers- ever since at least the time of King Canute trying to "stop the waves" has been a metaphor for attempting the impossible.
"Die Welle" can therefore be seen as a film about the failure of good intentions, as idealistic young students are tricked into supporting something quasi-fascist, just as many Germans and Italians in the twenties and thirties joined genuine fascist movements for what they thought were idealistic reasons only to find that they had become part of something evil. Similarly, Wenger's experiment, begun with the best of intentions, ends in tragedy.
At one time the German cinema was sometimes accused of failing to take a hard enough look at the country's Nazi past. In the last twenty or thirty years, however, there have been a number of German films which have subjected that past to intelligent scrutiny; examples which come to mind are "The Nasty Girl" and "Downfall". "Die Welle" is another excellent film within the same tradition. 9/10
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