Ganz nett. Kann man mal lesen aber bringt einen nicht sonderlich voran

Das Buch sollte man gelesen haben!

This book was given to me as a class reading and I just wanted to finish it after even reading what is was about. It's really interesting. I'm still so baffled that this whole thing happened in real life that little still shocks me to chor. I'm so hooked to it , I want to make a class presentation about the actual experiment. A really nice book.

There are some books that you know are important the minute you open the first page - and this book is one of them. „The Wave“ by Morton Rhue does not occupy itself with beautiful language or metaphors, it shows the hard and honest truth: That even though fascism often sounds like a word from a time long lost, it is still as relevant today as it was 80 years ago. The plot is the following: Ben Ross is a history teacher at Gordon High and wants to show his students the terror of the Third German Reich in the second WW. After a student says this would and could not happen again in today‘s society, it get‘s the teacher thinking and he starts a dangerous experiment: He starts a movement called „The Wave“, an elite student organisation. Their slogan is „Strength through discipline, strength through community, strength through action“ and while the students start excluding and beating kids up who aren‘t part of it, even the teacher Ben Ross starts to struggle with the feeling of power he gets by being their leader. The students start standing up straighter in class, have an own symbol and start greeting each other in the hallways with the movement of a wave. A hierarchy starts to form and the students develop collective views and norms, so that everyone who stands out becomes a target. It starts escalating to a point in which kids are afraid to express their honest opinion and the school shuts down the experiment as antisemitism and brutal beatings start becoming the punishment for students who do not participate in „The Wave“. The novel ends with Ben Ross telling „The Wave“ that their group is only a small part of an organized network with one leader promising to lead them to a better future. When all the students wait for their teacher to show them their new leader, he shows them a picture of Adolf Hitler. The students realise how radical they have become and that their previous statement, that fascism could not happen again, was absolutely false. It is an interesting novel because it shows both sides of fascism (or even a cult): Outsiders suddenly feel like they belong to something bigger & better, the students trying harder because they feel like they are working towards the same goal, integrity & community becoming important again. But the negative sides are also gravely shown: How people with other opinions get oppressed or beaten into obedience and how individualism gets sacrificed for „the greater good“ without the individuals even noticing it. The teacher also notes how cruel the feeling of power can make someone and how easy it becomes to order people around. Just like „1984“ by George Orwell is a mandatory lecture in English class, I personally think „The Wave“ by Morton Rhue should become a mandatory lecture in History class. It shows that you should always be aware that going with the flow does not necessarily make it right and that one should always second-guess the actions of a person who calls themselves a leader. Community should not mean sacrificing your own identity or excluding others that do not fit the status quo. Discipline shold not mean that you throw away all your beliefs and your own thinking for the sake of „belonging“. Action should not mean that you start punishing people for their opinions. „The obligation of anyone who thinks of himself as responsible is to examine society and try to change it and to fight it (…) This is the only hope society has“ (James Baldwin) The goal of this novel is noble and important, but I personally think there would have been better ways to reach it. The language can be seen as quite bland and the people themselves as shallow. We don‘t get to know much about them and even though I read the book in my free time, I still felt like I am reading a classic school lecture (and I‘m not even in school anymore!). The language is factual and lacks any real beauty, but I think it also serves a purpose: It is not about how the words are said, it‘s about the meaning of them. And maybe the characters are so shallow and we don‘t know much about them because they are supposed to be exchangeable, so that everyone can imagine themselves and their fellow humans as one of them. Or maybe I just really like interpretating things. I dunno. I remember watching the German movie adaptation as a kid. Growing up in Germany, the Nazi Regime has always been a present subject in all classes, so watching this felt like a very important thing to me. The message was clear and the movie disturbing in a necessary way. I remember that the ending was different though and the measures that the students took were even more extreme: They started wearing the same uniform and sprayed their symbol everywhere around town. And in the end, when the teacher tells them that „The Wave“ was only a class experiment and must stop immediately, the outsider student becomes so desperate because he feels his life‘s purpose slipping away and him falling back to being a loser again, all his friends and dreams being torn away from him by revealing it only as an experiment, that he takes a gun and kills himself. I didn‘t understand it as a kid. But now I kind of do. Look a little bit closer at your history books. You would be amazed to find how many people commit suicide when they find out their dictator has passed or been overthrown. People start to get so used to having someone to tell them what to do and being part of „something bigger“, so that when that is taken away from them, they feel like they have nothing left. It is not only important to talk about the dangers of that, it is necessary. Read the book. Tell your kids to read the book.

Sollte jeder mal gelesen haben.