One of the former students Neel interviewed for the documentary said: "It was like learning history in the first person. Wenger is an anarchist by political conviction, so he presumably has no sinister motives in conducting his social experiment. I am certainly going to suggest this film to people I know including people who live on a staple of Hollywood blockbusters and like to keep away from festival films.

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. Similarly the school staff appear to have virtually nothing to do or say about the bleedingly obvious metaphoric occurrences on campus, until it's all over and too late. All of a sudden, this great mass of energy took place and they were all brilliant in their own way," Jones, now 68, explains in a gentle Californian drawl. It offers a balanced view on an organisation like "The Wave" by enquiring whether it is a crystallisation of the students' class-free utopia (at the cost of losing individuality) or a community for those in need of belonging and empowerment. They criticized that the psychological developments are missed out, Wenger and the other figures are partially constructed by cliches, [20] or defined by “something model-like”, [7] they also argued that the figures are “slightly oversubscribed stereotypes” [24] or “placeholders”.The contemporary society is so dispersed that we sure going to look positively to Wenger's idea of discipline and respect at first, and many of the students are going to follow him almost blindly (one of them even set his good clothes on fire, and only uses the new uniform). Der Film bringt seine Message zwar äußerst plakativ und wenig subtil herüber, doch an Eindringlichkeit verliert diese dadurch nichts. Gansel was working on the book for one year until he asked Peter Thorwarth to join him as a co-author.

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. A series of disturbing events take place as the experiment nears it's end, and some of the students begin questioning the real dangers of the Wave. Dass der Film nun in neu interpretierter und moderner Form zu haben ist, finde ich gut, denn jede Generation sollte sich dieses Phänomen ansehen und sich dabei hineinversetzen können. Rainer looks at the motley group of students before him, and embarks them into a movement, baptised the Wave, which will show them how fascism rises.In the same year, author Todd Strasser, writing under the pen-name "Morton Rhue", published his book "The Wave" (a novelization of the television movie), which was published in Germany in 1984 and has since enjoyed great success as a school literature text. Though many may view this as a positive aspect of this sort of togetherness, the point is that fascism has developed and can easily become corrupt. He projected footage of Hitler and the Nazi rallies on the wall to emphasise how easily the students had been misled into behaving like fascists.

A history teacher, Rainer Wenger, is forced to teach a class on autocracy, despite being an anarchist and wanting to teach the class on anarchy.

She is the typical hippieesque do-gooder who is almost fascistic herself in the way she is trying to get her own point across and thus creates an interesting and realistic persona. These are the only things that are not completely predictable, and that do not tend to point a finger at the audience, trying to teach them. Immer, wenn ich jemanden höre, der behauptet, es gäbe nicht einen einzigen guten Film aus Deutschland, muss ich schmunzeln und an Die Welle denken.

Please consider upgrading to a Pro account—for less than a couple bucks a month, you’ll get cool additional features like all-time and annual stats pages ( example), the ability to select (and filter by) your favorite streaming services, and no ads! As the experiment progresses, the students begin craft a gang culture around the principles of the experiment (the group being named the Wave), and as a result, the students begin to vandalize various locations and exclude anyone not wearing a white shirt (their chosen uniform).

Instead of revealing Hitler as the groups true leader, the teacher only gives a speech after which the events get out of control and a student dies. An subtle look in History if we think about Hitler (people listened to him and supported his evil plans) and Churchill (tried hard to say that the world was in danger times before the war reach England). The film ends with Wenger being arrested by the police and driven away, Bomber being taken away to the hospital, and Marco and Karo being re-united; the final shot shows Wenger in the back of a police car, staring blankly into the camera, a look of distress on his face. This girl is the spitting image of the ideal that German teachers and parents are trying to create at the moment and that in my own personal opinion is just wrong. As I watched the implausible changes in mood of a disparate bunch of middle-class kids towards a uniformed regiment, I remembered the bollockings my English teacher would give me about the fundamentals of narrative.