Die Welle (2008) | Director: Dennis Gansel | Rat Pack Filmproduktion GmbH / Constantin Film | IMDB: tt1063669

Not many movies can cause disgust and fear while still maintaining an entertainment value. Although one of its strenghts, this may as well be the film’s major flaw. Despite this dilemma, no questions remain about its’ effectiveness. What remains after you and your moviegoer partner leave the theatre is the discussion about if any of you are as susceptible to the experiment as the film characters were.

Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel), a creative and popular high school teacher is summoned to lecture an Autocracy course after his stifled and obsolescent colleague Wieland (minor supporting role played by Hubert Multzer) is given the course Wenger was expecting, Anarchy. Wenger indeed seems more inclined and motivated to teach Anarchy than Autocracy. He is an unconventional teacher with a major in Sport and Political Sciences, one that drives to school singing loudly to a cover of The Ramones‘ Rock’n'Roll High School. This kind of caricatural portrait is less effective than a realistic straightforward one despite giving the characters a fable-like quality. Nevertheless, one cannot dislike an old-school conservative teacher named Wieland (as in “like the country”).

Rainer Wenger (or simply Rainer as his students address him by first name) is unprepared to teach Autocracy as he spent the weekend preparing himself for the Anarchy course. He begins by asking his students the characteristics of an Autocracy. You quickly realise he knows the subject matter – don’t be fooled by his lack of preparation which is more of a how to organize the course than proficiency. Inevitably, the big question is raised: Germany will never succumb to a new dictatorship since “we know too much about it now”, says a clever student. Wenger, incapable of making the point that autocratic regimes are just around the corner given the necessary conditions, proposes the class an exercise in experimenting Autocracy for themselves. He quickly became “Herr Wenger” and slowly but steadily, imposed the rules of discipline, proper posture, unity and sense of belonging. It then goes up a few notches that include uniforms, marching and the use of a symbol. Without giving out too much, all I can say is that the experiment develops a life of its own during the course of the week to a sudden collapse of grim consequences.

Based on a real life experiment by American teacher Ron Jones in Palo Alto, Ca in 1967, moving the narrative to modern day Germany gives it a pungency that otherwise a Hollywood film could never attain. After more than half a century since the end of WWII, Germany is still a country feeling the guilt of a worldwide generational psyche. More than that, it’s a country unwilling to travel the same deadly path and inevitable repetition of history. It’s a country that thinks about the Holocaust and finds a way to include the dire confined lessons in young people’s minds as the proper way to educate younger generations for the dangers of repetition.

Never a film felt more actual and urgent – you just need to open any given newspaper on any given day. Nominated for the Grand Jury award at the Sundance Film Festival (2008), it failed to win the prize for the Swedish Ping-pongkingen. Nevertheless, on the year that Frozen River won the Festival, this seems like the perfect companion for the low-key masterpiece and, in my humble opinion, a subject of mandatory curriculum in every European and North American high school.