In a German school, a class of teenagers sits bored. Their history teacher,
Herr Wenger, seems equally unenthusiastic. For Project Week, he announces,
they’ll be studying Nazism, a prospect that elicits the usual groans:
haven’t we beaten ourselves up enough? Wenger whacks on the projector and
sobers them with footage of Nuremberg and Auschwitz. Lights on and a hand
goes up. It’s the perennial: how could a whole nation have let this happen?
This is a scene from Dennis Gansel’s latest film, and, given his previous one,
the acclaimed Before the Fall, about the Nazification of German youth, it’s
clear the director has a bone to pick. “I have a grandfather who was really
supportive of Hitler,” he confides. “He said, ‘When I was your age, I was
leading a division in Russia.’ And I have very left-wing parents. So, as
part of the third generation after the second world war, it is something I
really want to explore.”
In Die Welle (The Wave), the setting is present-day. Wenger (Jürgen Vogel)
invites his students to participate in an experiment. Put their faith in him
and he will deliver a unique insight into the mind-set of a citizen in a
totalitarian state. What begins as a playful study in psychological
manipulation — a few drills in collective behaviour, time trials in entering
the room — soon runs away with itself. By midweek, Wenger is recoiling in
horror. His acned darlings have been transformed into an ersatz Hitler Youth
— the title’s self-styled “Wave” — complete with uniform, badge, salute and
an eagerness to jackboot all nonbelievers. “It isn’t about politics at all,”
Gansel says. “It’s more about group dynamics and psychology.”
If the film sounds far-fetched, it isn’t. Bar some dramatic licence, it is
modelled on a very real experiment that took place in a schoolroom in Palo
Alto, California, over one week in April 1967. Known as “The Third Wave”, it
achieved similarly sensational results, a textbook case for psychologists.
Back then, at Cubberley High, in the heart of affluent Silicon Valley, the
orchestrator was a history teacher named Ron Jones. Against the backdrop of
1960s radicalism, he thought he’d spice up a routine social-studies lesson
for his 10th-graders. “It was very spontaneous and very improvisational,”
Jones remembers. “My own curiosity got the best of me and I started playing
with it. The first day was structured, but the other four were not, although
events were tumbling down on top of us.”
Mark Hancock was one of Jones’s then 15-year-old guinea pigs. “Ron was the
most popular teacher in the school. Kids wanted to be in his class,” he
says. “The thing to remember is, he was very young, right out of Stanford
University, so we really identified with him. This was not his first
experiment either, which is why we were so accepting of it.” Indeed, the
proverbial charismatic leader found his charges eminently suggestible. As in
the film, it began with the tenet “Discipline” — extolling the benefits of
correct posture, the merits of direct and courteous speech (the kind of
advice you wish would be directed towards your average British adolescent).
“Fascism takes steps, it doesn’t pop out of nowhere,” says Jones. “It comes
from a series of progressions.”
It was meant to have been a one-day exercise, but when Jones entered on the
second morning to find his silent and attentive class eager for more
dictation, he decided to run with it. He gave his group a name, The Third
Wave (after surfer lore that the last of a trio of breakers is the biggest),
a hand signal, membership cards. Soon, he was espousing the Orwellian (and
chantable) doctrines of “strength through community” and “strength through
action”. With even the class deadbeats happily involved, he instructed his
Third Wavers to proselytise. To a more sinister end, he established his own
Gestapo to rat out any sceptics. “We basically had a mini police state
going,” says Hancock. “You couldn’t trust your best friend. You were scared
to death because if you did something, you’d get caught, and if you got
caught, you got a bad grade. You were ruled by fear.”
The 30-odd original Wavers soon swelled to an order of 200, a Darwinian force
within the school. “It was like an explosion, constantly getting out of
control. It was taking on a lot of its own dimensions,” says Jones.
There were Good Germans, to be sure. “The traditional story is that every
single kid was enthusiastic; the reality was more complicated,” recalls
Hancock. The intimidatory atmosphere, however, kept them silent. “When
students were pronounced guilty in front of the class, it was, ‘Gee, that’s
good, let’s give ’em some more,’ ” says Jones. “Wow, it sent a chill up my
back, this kind of group desire to hurt someone.” Teachers and parents grew
concerned. With a recent history of violence at the school, the propensity
for something more cataclysmic seemed real. “One of the students in the
class was a bomb-maker,” says Jones. “He had blown off his hand the previous
summer.” Springtime was over for the reluctant Führer.
Unexpectedly, Jones cranked it up a notch. The Third Wave was no isolated
group, he informed his enraptured followers, but part of a co-ordinated
national youth movement, with cells all across America. A rally in the
assembly hall was called for Friday afternoon, at which a leader would
reveal himself on live television, declaring The Third Wave the national
third party. “I remember somebody saying, ‘We’re going to get the pigs out
of Washington,’ ” says Philip Neel, another of Jones’s pupils.
It was there Jones dropped his bombshell. At the appointed hour, to a fevered
auditorium, the TVs crackled blankly. Behind, on a screen, Jones projected
the same archive images of Nazi atrocities with which he had begun the week.
“He looked shaken up. He just said that what he had witnessed had
overwhelmed him,” says Neel. “He said, ‘Let me show you your future. You
guys were led by your own desires and were willing to give up your
freedoms.’ ” There were tears and tantrums — some upset, some relieved,
others confused. “I just felt ohmigod, the fact that he pulled this off, I
did not see it coming. Maybe that’s my own naivety, but what a great
experiment, one of the best learning experiences I ever had.”
The Third Wave was duly forgotten. “Very similar to what happened in Germany,
‘I didn’t take part, it didn’t happen,’ ” says Jones. It resurfaced in 1972
when a former pupil flashed him their quasi-Nazi gesture (“I was buying
underwear,” he laughs), prompting Jones to write about the experiment. It
assumed a new lease of life, attracting inquiries from ne’er-do-wells with
an interest in exerting group control. “Jim Jones called me from his
People’s Temple,” he says. In 1981 came a TV movie and a novelisation by
Todd Strasser (aka Morton Rhue). The book became an international bestseller
and a set text in German schools, which Gansel read. “The first question
was: would this be possible in my country with our dark burden?” he says.
“And the second: what would have been my part?”
The notable thing about both the original project and the German filmed
version is that they take place in white, middle-class suburbs, with no
racial tensions evident — illustrating Gansel’s central point, the embracing
of Nazism happened even in the cushy reaches of “Middle Germany”. But there
are also differences. It is much more plausible to suggest that kids in
1967, before the internet, could be duped into believing they were part of a
national movement. Also, and crucially, whereas in Gansel’s film the pupils
embrace the experiment as part of their routine course work — with no
virtual Weimar Republic to crystallise their actions — Jones’s pupils had a
very real incentive to play ball. “You had to get good grades to get into
college,” says Neel. “And to stay in college was to stay out of the draft.
There was definitely the spectre of Vietnam.” Resistance, as you might put
it, was futile.
An interesting upshot of The Wave, already a hit in Germany, is that Jones has
been approached by TV companies (including a British one) wanting to
replicate versions of his classroom experiment in a reality-show context.
Our love of lab-rat telly, Jones suggests, merely demonstrates our capacity
for the kind of malevolent behaviour he was trying to spotlight 40 years
ago. “What are we cheering? Are we any better than the Nazis?” he asks. Look
deep into your soul, viewer. We are all responsible.
The Wave is released on September 19
