Gansel, Dennis, dir. Die Welle

Die Welle was indirectly inspired by the events at Ellwood P. Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, California, in 1967. Ron Jones, a teacher at said school, recreated the situation of the Third Reich so students could experience how easily fascism can be established under the right conditions. Jones ended the experiment once fellow teachers and parents complained about the nature of the assignment.

The novel The Wave (Strasser, 1981), while inspired by these events, does not stop there. The book was adapted into a TV short with the same name (1981), for which the teleplay was written by Johnny Dawkins, directed by Alexander Grasshoff. The 2008 film, in turn, was adapted from Grasshoff’s TV short, in which the setting was moved from the 1980s in America to Germany in the early twenty-first-century.

In the film, Herr Wenger is assigned to teach his pupils about autocracy during project week. The class determines that, in order for an autocratic situation like the Third Reich to take shape again, one needs a movement with an authoritarian leader, discipline, and (extreme) nationalism. With his class, Wenger creates an environment in which such a movement, under the name of Die Welle, slowly meets the necessary criteria: uniforms, a symbol and a greeting are established. Those who do not stick to the rules are excluded and, after a while, non-members from the entire school are harassed and assaulted.

Both the students and Herr Wenger become obsessed with the movement. Fellow students, teachers, and parents are worried about what the movement is doing to the students who are involved, and ultimately the project is forced to shut down. In his concluding speech, Herr Wenger explains to the students that they have now experienced exactly what it can be like to fall into the traps of autocracy, and that it indeed could happen again under the right circumstances. Initially, the students are resistant against his dismissal of the project. One student does not accept this sudden change, as Die Welle has given him friends, a sense of purpose and belonging. He starts to panic once students start to leave and pulls out a gun to stop them, shoots one of his peers, and then, after threatening Wenger, shoots himself.

Die Welle provides a hypothetical situation in which an experiment illustrates the dangers of autocracy that ultimately creates a dictatorship. The film provides a valuable learning experience, since it functions as a meta-reflection on teaching. In doing so, it is relevant to the field of Perpetrator Studies as it provides a fictional case study, though inspired by true events, in which fascism and violence against the other is normalised.

Author of this entry: Alyssa Vreeken.

Further Reading

Klink, Bill. “The Third Wave Presents Inside Look at Fascism.” The Cubberley Catamount, vol. 11, no. 14, 1967, pp. 3.

Lipsett, Anthea. “Like History in the First Person.” The Guardian, 16 Sep. 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2008/sep/16/schoolsworldwide.film.

Strasser, Todd. The Wave. Laurel Leaf Books, 1981.

Taaffe, Linda. “The Wave That Changed the World.” Palo Alto Weekly, 17 Mar. 2017, https://www.paloaltoonline.com/news/2017/03/17/the-wave-that-changed-history.

The Wave. Screenplay by Johnny Dawkins, directed by Alexander Grasshoff, American Broadcasting Company, 1981.

Wir Sind Die Welle. Screenplay by Dennis Gansel, Jan Berger and Peter Thorwarth, directed by Anca Miruna Lazarescu and Mark Monheim, Netflix, 2019.

Gansel, Dennis, dir. Die Welle. Constantin Film, 2008.