About the work
Die Welle is based on the young-adult novel The Wave, which the American writer Todd Strasser published in 1981 under the pen name Morton Rhue. The novel retells an American television film broadcast the same year, whose script was based on history teacher Ron Jones's account of his classroom experiment The Third Wave, carried out in 1967 at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto. The book appeared in German in 1984, translated by Hans-Georg Noack. Among the stage versions, the one by Reinhold Tritt (Rowohlt Theater Verlag) explicitly draws on both Rhue's novel and Jones's experiment.
Plot
After showing his class a film about the Holocaust, history teacher Ben Ross cannot explain to his students at an American high school why so many Germans went along with the Nazi regime. He starts an experiment: with the principles Strength through Discipline, Strength through Community and Strength through Action, a symbol of its own, a salute and membership cards, the movement called The Wave takes shape and soon sweeps through the whole school. The outsider Robert flourishes within it, while Laurie, editor of the school newspaper and one of the first to object, is shunned and put under pressure; only when a Jewish student is attacked does Ross realise what he has set in motion. At an assembly where the members expect their leader to appear, he shows them a picture of Adolf Hitler instead and thus ends the experiment.
Cultural significance
The Wave is firmly established as required reading in many schools in the German-speaking countries; according to Rowohlt Theater Verlag, the book has sold more than three million copies in Germany. The television film it is based on had already won an Emmy and a Peabody Award. In 2008 Dennis Gansel transferred the story to a present-day German school in his feature film Die Welle, which received the bronze Deutscher Filmpreis in the feature film category that year.