The Wave, or how to build a dictatorship in five days

All it took was lunch with a friend, somewhere between a bò bún and a round of good yakitori skewers, for the conversation to drift toward social experiments, the kind of slope long lunches slide down on their own. One thing led to another and I remembered a film that had stuck with me since its release, The Wave, along with a question harder to digest than the meal. Why does a 2008 movie read so much like the 2026 news?

One week of class and everything tips over

The Wave (Die Welle in the original German), directed by Dennis Gansel, follows Rainer Wenger, a likable high school teacher played by Jürgen Vogel, who gets stuck running a project week on autocracy^[1]. His students shrug it off. A dictatorship could never take hold in Germany again, they've learned that lesson. So he tries a hands-on demonstration. Some discipline, white shirts for everyone, a salute, a name to rally around, and there it is, the Wave, a classroom movement that stops being a classroom movement.

The film earns its keep through the banality of its levers. No one wakes up dreaming of fascism. Each student finds something in the group they were missing, belonging for one, social payback for another, a substitute family for the most fragile of them. The trap closes over five days of class, and I'll stop there to keep the rest intact, except to say the film follows its logic all the way down, and the final scene is no school dance. German audiences took notice: 2.5 million tickets sold and a German Film Award to show for it^[1:1].

The real Third Wave

The uncomfortable part is how little Gansel had to invent. In April 1967, at Cubberley High School in Palo Alto, history teacher Ron Jones found himself stumped by a student's question, how could ordinary Germans have let it happen, and decided to answer it in practice^[2]. Monday, discipline ("strength through discipline"). Tuesday, community, a name, the Third Wave, and a salute. Wednesday, membership cards, while a class of thirty swelled past two hundred volunteers from across the school. Thursday, Jones announced a national movement, with its presidential candidate to be revealed the next day.

On Friday, the assembled students stared at a blank television screen, then watched a documentary about the Third Reich. The demonstration lasted five days, the same span the film would borrow four decades later, by way of Todd Strasser's 1981 novel that spread the story^[2:1]. You could object that a classroom is no scientific protocol, and you would be right. Which is exactly why others took the question into the lab.

Three experiments worth your time

On conformity, Solomon Asch showed back in 1951 that you don't even need uniforms. Faced with a trivial task, comparing line lengths, participants tested alone erred in less than 1% of cases, yet once seated in a group of confederates answering wrong with full confidence, 74% of them denied what their own eyes showed them at least once^[3].

On obedience, Stanley Milgram built his famous fake-shock apparatus at Yale in 1961, where 65% of participants agreed to deliver the maximum 450-volt jolt to a stranger because a man in a lab coat asked them to^[4]. Gina Perry's archival work has since complicated the picture, as a share of participants doubted the setup was real, which makes the result less spectacular without making it comforting^[4:1].

As for the celebrated 1971 Stanford prison experiment, guards versus prisoners drawn by lot, it deserves a mention as much for itself as for its demolition. French researcher Thibault Le Texier dug through the archives and showed that the guards had been coached on the expected behavior and that the conclusions were largely written in advance^[5]. A lesson with a double edge: we bend to the roles we're handed, and we have a weakness for stories that fit too well, even when a university professor signs them.

When a myth dresses up as science

That same appetite for a good story also manufactures fake experiments, beliefs that travel with the confidence of established fact without a shred of solid data behind them. Menstrual synchrony is the textbook case, and I'll plead guilty, since I served it to my friend that afternoon as settled truth before I bothered to look it up. The idea traces back to a 1971 Martha McClintock study in Nature, claiming that the cycles of women living together drift into alignment. Yet cycles of roughly twenty-eight days that last about five will overlap now and then by pure mathematical chance, and later reanalyses flagged the methodological errors in the original work, to the point that no serious research confirms the effect^[6].

Human pheromones sit on the same shelf, another thread from our lunch. Perfumes promise to switch on attraction, people happily cite Claus Wedekind's t-shirt study, where women preferred the smell of men whose immune system complemented their own, yet the result holds up poorly under replication, and the vomeronasal organ meant to pick up these signals is atrophied and nonfunctional in humans. To this day no human pheromone has been formally identified, as zoologist Tristram Wyatt keeps reminding us, having spent years tracking the molecules sold to us as such^[7]. Social experiments tell us a great deal, even when they don't exist, and I wish I had more time to sort the real from the legendary. If you're sitting on a fascinating one, true or mythical, my inbox is wide open.

Where to watch The Wave

In the US, The Wave is available to rent or buy on Amazon Video^[8], and it shows up in Apple TV's catalog as well. Streaming lineups shift often enough that a quick stop at JustWatch will give you the current picture.

Sixty years after Palo Alto, democracies we thought were anchored for good are sliding toward authoritarianism in plain sight, driven by the same mechanisms this high school film was already taking apart, the need to belong, the comfort of discipline, the convenient scapegoat. The lessons of the past hold less firmly than we hoped. A hundred and seven minutes with The Wave won't fix that, but they are a reminder of how gentle the slope feels, and of how much company you have on the way down.