Die Welle (The Wave) is a 2008 German film directed by Dennis Gansel and starring Jürgen Vogel, Frederick Lau, Jennifer Ulrich and Max Riemelt in the leads. The film shows the story of High school teacher Rainer Wenger (Jürgen Vogel), who is forced to teach a class on autocracy, despite being an anarchist. When his students, third generation after the Second World War, do not believe that a dictatorship could be established in modern Germany, he starts an experiment to demonstrate how easily the masses can be manipulated. It is based on Ron Jones’ social experiment The Third Wave. The film was produced by Christian Becker for Rat Pack Filmproduktion. It was successful in German cinemas, and after 10 weeks 2.3 million people had watched the film.
