Caught Up In Die Walle

You can file this in the drawer that says "If you had told me this five yeas ago, I would have said yer nuts!" Last night I saw a German film that had Swedish subtitles. Here are the thoughts I had last night:

The screen darkened and the ending credits began to roll. The audience at Stockholm’s Sture movie theater sat in their seats, silent and still, despite the loud rock music that thumped while the credits rolled. No one moved, each lost in their own stunned silence, trying to overcome the predictable, yet chilling ending to the movie they had just watched.

The movie is Die Welle (The Wave) the latest effort from director Dennis Gansel (he also wrote the screenplay based on the book by Todd Straser). In the movie, Rainer Wegner (played by Jürgen Vogel), a popular high school teacher, finds himself relegated to teaching autocracy as part of the school’s project week. His students greet the prospect of studying fascism (yet again) grumbling: The Nazis sucked. We get it. Struck by the teenager’s complacency and unwitting arrogance, Rainer devises an unorthodox experiment.

In probing the underpinnings of fascism, Die Welle is far from a social-studies lesson. As with his previous film, Before the Fall, director Dennis Gansel uses teens to fashion an energetic, gripping drama that cuts through the ideology and goes straight for the marrow—the human motives and individual behaviors that contribute to gangs, cliques or national political movements. In stripping away the emotions and inconsistencies of his characters (the need to belong, to be cool, to be outside the norm), Gansel puts a local and human perspective on the terrifying paradox that these students may welcome the very things they denounce.




Die Welle is based on the true story of Ron Jones, a high school teacher in Palo Alto, California. His sophomore World History class was studying World War II. During one lecture, he was interrupted by a question. How could the German populace claim ignorance of the slaughter of the Jewish people? How can people who were neighbors and maybe even friends of the Jewish citizen say they weren’t there when it happened? They were good questions and Jones had no simple answer. Jones decided to take a week and manipulate his class into a fascist “state”. Beginning with a simple step, having his students sit at attention, Jones began the “movement” and gave it a name, The Third Wave.

When he ended the experiment, Jones used a ruse, telling the class that they were actually being trained as part of a national movement to change the way the country was run. He had them gather to “meet” the supreme leader of National Third Wave movement. When no such leader appeared, it slowly dawned on the students they had been duped. In the four years Ron Jones taught at Cubberley High School no one ever admitted to attending the Third Wave Rally.

In Die Welle, we, the audience, are also manipulated. Gansel uses violence in increasing doses to lead into his inevitable finish. He suggests that the fascist state creates an environment where violence is the answer to any challenge to that state. But in reality, the violent scenes could be drawn from any teen angst movie in the last fifty years, from Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without A Cause, West Side Story, and Over The Edge.
Reiner Wegner, however, teaches in the era of cell phones, SMS messaging, e-mails, and My Space. His students create web sites and are exposed to a modern world of video games and wars of terrorism shown on the daily news. Violence is not in the abstract and information is passed instantly. What the audience at the Sture realized this night was that the morality play they had just witnessed was not only believable but was wicked easily possible, not just in the Germany portrayed, but here in Sweden as well as anywhere.