Das schweigende Klassenzimmer

What a beautiful and impressive movie about the courageous boys and girls of a school in East Berlin in 1956

I enjoyed watching this film. Based on a true story, it faithfully reproduces the atmosphere of the post-war period, a few years before the building of the Berlin Wall. The direction is sober, apart from the tear-jerking sequence with Jonas Dassler crying in a church. Good acting and plot twists kept my attention until the end. I was moved by the situation of these young people. I also appreciated the values they share, such as solidarity and fraternity. With all they have to go through, it's clear that living at that time in East Germany was not a bed of roses.

This film is even handed and explores why people take the positions they do. the themes are universal - the older generation carry the baggage of WWII, the legacy of fascism while the younger generation of high school students are idealistic and, to some extent, naive and easily manipulated. We understand why the East German government finds it imperative to stamp out 'counter revolutionary' activity. The characters are well rounded, not just evil cardboard cut outs. School officials are caught up in and compromised by a political system. The irony is by working together and maintaining solidarity the school students show precisely the qualities the 'socialist' regime of the GDR was supposed to be all about. The intrusive incidental music was the only thing which grated for me, and at times the movie lapsed in to melodrama but on the whole it was entertaining and thought provoking with a lavish attention to period detail.

Realistic, heart warming story about a fight against oppression

By great good fortune, I was able to watch this on Kanopy, a service of some public library systems. I had never heard of it before. I watched it tonight, 18 October 2019, frequently with tears in my eyes seeing how totalitarianism destroys families and individuals. "The Silent Revolution" -- or in a better translation from the German, "The Silent Classroom" -- needs to be seen by everybody, especially today's ignorant and/or misinformed young people who chant, usually mindlessly, "socialism" and "socialism" and "socialism." They're being misled by demagogic cries of "free, free, free," but the people, including the young people, will not be free. They will be, as were the young people of the Communist Bloc nations, herded into obedient groups, not allowed to question, not allowed to keep their own property or, ultimately, their own lives. Reading the other reviews, I am horrified and disgusted at the number of apparent communists or communist sympathizers who thumbed down the favorable reviews, though I have seen exactly that reaction to another true-life film about communist oppression, "Eleni." It's rare enough to see a motion picture describing the truth about the horrors and terrors of life under communist oppression, so I am very grateful to the producers of "The Silent Revolution," and grateful to Kanopy for letting me see it.