The new wave breaking Germany's big taboo

After the Second World War, references to Nazism were banned from German cinema. Now, with a younger generation of film directors, the country is finally confronting its troubled past on screen

BACK in 1967, a California history teacher by the name of Ron Jones conducted a little experiment to show his high school students how easily a regime like the Third Reich could take hold. Over the course of a week, through subtle coercion, charismatic leadership and adherence to an attractively simple ideology, he turned his all-American class into a group of fascistic, card-carrying goose-steppers. In the process he thoroughly disabused them of the naïve belief that something as despicable as Nazism "couldn't happen here".

But could it happen again in the country that spawned it? That's the question posed in the new German film The Wave, which transposes Jones's real-life experiment to present-day Germany, with a (fictional) right-on, former radical teacher (played by Jürgen Vogel) conducting a similar test to engage his apathetic students in a project exploring autocracy.

Since the roots of fascism have historically taken hold among disaffected social groups, it goes without saying that a bunch of teenagers, who have disaffection encoded in their DNA anyway, will be particularly susceptible to it. Sure enough, once these sceptical students start wearing white shirts, adopting a secret salute and realising how much easier it is to submit entirely to mass, unquestioning conformity, it's not long before all hell breaks loose.

Though by no means a candidate for greatness, The Wave's German writer/director Dennis Gansel does pull off a superlative piece of "what if?" cinematic speculation.

The real value of the film, however, is the fact that it's a German production posing that question. Until recently, the country's filmmakers seemed reluctant even to refer to the Second World War, let alone openly interrogate the nation's complicity in the rise of Nazism. The Wave, however, is part of a recent series of taboo-busting films in which in which the country's filmmakers have started getting to grips with their own troublesome history rather than letting international directors do it for them.

Hitler's final days, the Holocaust and the collective shame of the country have been at the heart of recent films such as Downfall, Sophie Scholl, Four Minutes and the German/Austrian co-production The Counterfeiters. The Lives of Others, meanwhile, showed how similarly despicable behaviour flourished under the all-seeing eye of the East German Stasi during the Cold War. All were made in the past five years and all have found considerable success, critical acclaim, even Oscars.

Which poses two questions: Why has it taken so long for German filmmakers to look at their own history? And what do the films reveal about the way Germany sees itself?

The most obvious factor in the first question is time. The generation of Germans most directly involved in the war is dying out, leaving younger filmmakers like Gansel a little freer to grapple with what that generation's legacy for the country means to them. To some extent they're building on the work of the German New Wave of the 1970s, when the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders concentrated on reclaiming a country blighted by the previous generation's actions and finding their own place within it. It's only natural then that a new generation buoyed by their work, and more confident about Germany's identity, would start interrogating the past more directly.

Of course there are historical reasons for why this didn't happen sooner too. In the immediate aftermath of the war, German cinema underwent a process of "denazification". References to Nazism were banned from native productions and removed from imported films as late as the 1970s, with the Allies believing the German public too susceptible to fascism and unable to resist its allure to see any examples of it on screen. Though partially fuelled by the role cinema itself played in the rise of the Third Reich – Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl's notorious film documenting the Nuremberg rally of 1934 remains the most famous piece of propaganda ever produced – this also provided Germany with a convenient excuse not to confront its shameful past.

That didn't really change until 2004, when Downfall dared to dramatise Hitler's final days. Though in many ways this film and those that have followed are part of a general resurgence of interest in both the Holocaust and the war, instigated by Spielberg's Schindler's List and Saving Private Ryan, the film did bring to light the problematic nature of attempting to do this from a German perspective. How do you make believable films about the atrocities without endorsing the postwar justifications an in-denial population frequently fell back on?

Downfall drew fire for humanising Hitler, for instance, but it was actually more troublesome in its benign depiction of Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, as a voice of reason determined to persuade the Führer to surrender for the good of the German people. Even in a film about Hitler's inner circle, there was still a need to find something approaching a hero.

Sophie Scholl got round this problem by virtue of the fact that its titular character is one of the few genuine German heroines from this time: as a student she protested against the Nazis and was executed for her efforts. Both The Counterfeiters and Four Minutes focused on characters reflecting on their past sins, but in each case their respective predicaments (a Jewish forger trying to survive in the prison camps, an elderly lesbian pianist haunted by her passive failure to save her lover from the Nazis) ensured a degree of empathy. Even The Lives of Others was fairly easy on its Stasi antagonist, painting him as a victim of joyless totalitarianism.

That's why The Wave, for all its brashness and histrionic melodrama, often seems like a braver film. It's not afraid to look at how quickly ordinary people can fall and it doesn't make excuses for them. It's a further step in the right direction, but the real test for this new German cinema will be whether someone is prepared to make a period film that unequivocally indicts the millions of ordinary Germans who allowed the Holocaust to happen.

• The Wave is released 19 September