In Germany, the “never again” mentality that fuels the educational system’s lessons of the dangers of fascism has lots of emotion attached to it. Stray outside German borders however and that sense of guilt is quite displaced. We teach about fascism as one of the many possible forms of governing a people and we can point to the Nazi regime with a sort of detached air of superiority; with an attitude that seems to say it wasn’t our mistake, it was theirs – we just had to solve it. Dennis Gansel’s 2008 update of the 1981 film The Wave, wherein an American teacher shows his students what fascism is like only to have the assignment spin wildly out of control, takes the story back to Germany. The film’s ending is unfortunately weak, but the process of getting there has all the same eeriness that makes you question just how dead fascism truly is.
When teacher Rainer Wenger (Jurgen Vogel) misses out on claiming Anarchy as his topic for Project Week, he opts instead for Autocracy expecting to have the lame duck class. He walks into his classroom to find that many students chose his class rather than subject themselves to the boring teacher who claimed Anarchy, and so begins questioning students about the governing style in question. It’s not long before a student challenges Wainer and suggests that what happened with Nazism could never happen again due to the collective awareness of how it ended the last time. Intrigued, Rainer sets about establishing an autocracy within his own classroom by showing his students how the promises of equality and uniformity can blind a society from other more important values. The class’s movement, The Wave, takes on a life of its own and soon has students from other classes joining in. Can Rainer Wenger step down as the head of The Wave and put an end to it? Does he want to?
Vogel does exceptionally well as the “cutting edge” teacher who finds himself swept away in his own excitement when his game takes off; whether through denial or pure enthusiasm, he doesn’t see the warning signs that his students have lost touch and begins to struggle with how far the lesson needs to go before it will actually make an impact, as fellow teacher and wife (Christiane Paul), watches warily from the sidelines. The cast that makes up the student body does a fairly good job of selling the transformation, with Jennifer Ulrich standing out, both in performance and plot, as the lone student who doesn’t believe fascism is something that should be experimented with just to prove a point.
The film’s concept has always held a lot of strength. What happened in Nazi Germany remains as a blemish on human history and as a badge of nationalistic disgrace for Germany’s citizens. Yes, they’ve moved on, but that knowledge is forever there. Or is it? How easily can public memory be wiped if it means regaining a sense of nationalist pride and reasserting itself as a national power in the world? Were the mistakes of Hitler-led fascism unique? Or are they inevitable steps as a social mentality becomes increasingly uniform and intolerant of opposing viewpoints?
Gansel’s take addresses all of these questions, but perhaps it moved too eagerly and quickly in doing so. While it could be interpreted as a testament to the addictive and highly satisfying mentality that comes with the feeling of being part of a single, coordinated movement, the fact that students fall into such a craze for the fictional Wave so quickly also undermines the story’s poignancy. For a film that wants to make an argument for the potential of fascism to rise again, even in a country still reeling from the scars of its last incarnation, it makes a serious misstep in picking up the pace. Or maybe that’s the only way it could happen; maybe the rebirth of fascism can only occur if it’s so fast that no one realizes what it is until they’re on the verge of committing a horrible act in its name.
That’s the endpoint of Gansel’s version, but once again he errs and has the character who makes this choice go to an extreme end, thus ultimately cheapening the final effect. What he wanted to accomplish is clear, but it feels like he hurried the ending in an effort to close everything up tidily, when in fact the more realistic ending would have been much darker. Although, depending on how you interpret the Rainer’s look of shock in the final few frames of the film, it’s entirely possible that Gansel found the fix for his otherwise cheap ending.
Even with all its flaws, Dennis Gansel’s take on The Wave proves an interesting new angle on the original and calls into question a lot of new issues. There’s truth to the idea that you can explore some subjects better if you examine them in a context where there’s a stronger emotional tie. With the American version, we saw the concept as a first-hand exploration of a second-hand event; in Gansel’s the mix of reactions to how The Wave is affecting the youth offers an unsettling truth: fascism does have its benefits and will always seem a tempting option for countries suffering from a nationalistic identity crisis.
DVD Bonus Features
Some brief interviews and a quick behind-the-scenes featurette are the only two substantial extras, along with the film's trailer.
"The Wave" is on sale November 29, 2011 and is not rated. Drama. Written and directed by Dennis Gansel. Starring Christiane Paul, Jennifer Ulrich, Jurgen Vogel.
