The Wave

Dennis Gansel's The Wave (Die Welle) opened in 2008 and became one of the most internationally successful German films of its decade, particularly among educators. The film is loosely based on the actual 1967 California high-school experiment by teacher Ron Jones (also dramatised in Todd Strasser's 1981 novel The Wave and the 1981 American TV-movie of the same name) in which a class on autocracy was conducted partly as a participatory exercise.

A Hamburg high-school teacher named Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel), assigned at short notice to lead a project-week course on autocracy, decides to demonstrate the dynamics of authoritarian movements through a participatory experiment. He establishes a movement called Die Welle within his own class, uniforms (white shirts), a salute, group discipline, expulsion procedures for non-conformity. The students respond enthusiastically, particularly the ones whose social position improves under the new structure (Frederick Lau plays the most committed convert, in a role that launched his subsequent German-cinema career).

The film operates simultaneously as classroom drama, contemporary political-allegory, and meditation on the seductiveness of belonging. The German release was timed for the broader continuing public conversation about right-wing populist resurgence in Europe. The film became required viewing in many German schools as part of the political-education curriculum, partly continuing the role the original 1981 American TV-movie had played in American classrooms a generation earlier.