The Wave

This German film about Nazi-like social conformism actually derives from a real-life experiment conducted by American history teacher, Ron Jones, on his high-school class in California in 1969. It was written up as an article (its writer Ron Jones appears in this movie as a café patron) then became an Emmy-award winning teleplay and a novel which became required reading for German high school.

In Dennis Gansel's treatment of it the story is now transposed to modern liberal middle-class Germany (albeit one in which the student haven’t read the novel). Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel) is a former '70s anti-establishmentarian who been assigned to take a class for a week long project on authoritarianism. In order to make the concept come alive for his way cool charges, he hits upon the idea of making a practical demonstration of the appeal of authoritarianism and by the end of the week he’s got an army of willing followers ready to take on the world. Except that’s not what he wanted and he has to find a way to kill off the beast he has created, thus leading to a tragic denouement.

The Wave is a well-made film that works within it own terms however I had two nagging questions. Firstly it is difficult to accept that the kids of this film would have gone from being post-modernly hip to party faithful in 5 days. I accept that this might have been the time frame of the original experiment but even accepting that the socio-economic conditions were more or less comparable, a lot has changed in 40 years. Secondly, why was Wenger horrified that his experiment was so successful. Surely that was the point and the project finished, the participants could close the book on it with less angst than is suggested here. These questions and the fact that “The Wave” swept beyond the confines of the Wenger’s class apparently feeding on an innate tendency to social stratification and exclusion (think of William Golding’s' Lord Of The Flies') suggested that this premise might have been more successfully realized in a futuristic sci-fi context where the horrors could have been more tangibly and effectively fleshed out.

 

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