Splashed across the front pages of Berlin’s papers this morning, the news was inescapable: the Hoff is back. On New Year’s Eve twenty-three years ago, clad in an awesome leather jacket studded with flashing L.E.D. lights and standing in a crane suspended over the Wall, David Hasselhoff (alias the Hoff) sang his big-in-Germany single “Looking for Freedom.” While the song itself, which actually has nothing to do with Communism or the Cold War, hasn’t had the staying power of, say, “Wind of Change,” the Scorpions’ anthem to the end of the old world order, the apocryphal story that the Hoff subsequently claimed personal responsibility for having brought down the Wall stuck. Be that as it may, yesterday, in front of a reported ten thousand people protesting to keep one of the last remaining stretches of the Wall intact, Hasselhoff sang again (“I been lookin’ for freeeedom…”). And again. And again. And the crowd—albeit employing varying degrees of irony—loved it.
After the Wall fell, the jubilant Berliners who rocked out with the Hoff in 1989 couldn’t wait to get rid of it. One exception was the East Side Gallery, a nearly mile-long strip along the river where artists from all over the world converged in 1990. As a memorial to freedom, they covered it in giant paintings. Today, it’s one of the most visited spots in the city. Earlier this month, when a developer began removing sections of the East Side Gallery in order to access a riverside lot where he is building a luxury housing complex, it caused a wave of outrage. (The East Side Gallery is listed as a historical monument, but apparently is not protected under current city laws). “You can’t really make holes in the Wall and expect it to keep being an effective memorial,” said Axel Klausmeier, the director of the Berlin Wall Foundation. “The whole point of the Wall was that you couldn’t get across it.”
When the Hoff saw the news on Google Alerts, he tweeted his support. Last week, protest organizers invited him to Berlin. Before he had even confirmed, it was all over the German news (“OH NO! THE HOFF IS COMING TO SAVE THE WALL” read one yellow-press headline). Friday, he bought his ticket.
At a press conference held yesterday in a makeshift reggae club, you could barely see the Hoff’s familiar figure through the forest of TV cameras as he took the podium. On his right sat a newspaper columnist who recalled fleeing, with her mother and sister, as a sixteen-year-old, when her family heard that the Czech border had opened. To the left of the Hoff was protest organizer Marc Wohlrabe, a West Berliner whose teen-aged cousin in the East was imprisoned for years after a failed escape attempt. Wohlrabe said that, while the official Berlin Wall Memorial (which only has two hundred and twenty metres of Wall) stands for the sadness and darkness of the period, the East Side Gallery stands for the euphoria that followed the peaceful revolution of 1989.
Finally, it was time for the Hoff to speak. He remembered a visit to East Berlin while the Wall was up, when two girls he met at Alexanderplatz knew him not as the Knight Rider but as “the man who sings about freedom.” He talked about a music tour in the former East Germany after the Wall fell: acid rain in Karl-Marx-Stadt, a steak that tasted like shoe leather in Leipzig, fans in Schwerin wearing homemade cowboy hats. “This is a place where lives were lost!” he said, of the East Side Gallery, to cheers from the audience. “This is not a piece of real estate!”
He told the story of his cute German tutor on the set of “Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story” (he played the coach for the German national dodgeball team—Team Hasselhoff). “She said, ‘It’s ironic I’m teaching you German, because you taught me English—Aben lookin’ for freedom.’ ” He shook his head, and then he came back to the importance of the East Side Gallery as a place that keeps history alive. “It’s incredible, man! It’s like tearing down an Indian burial ground. I mean, it’s a no-brainer!”
Outside, in the early afternoon sunshine, the Hoff was mobbed. Alex, twenty-six, a lean guy with aviator glasses standing on a plastic chair, paused his chanting (“Hass-el-hoff! Hass-el-hoff!”) to take a swig of beer. “I’m a big fan, because he brought the Wall down,” he said, without a hint of a smile. “He was the only one who represented us East Germans. But now, I think it was an error in the historical process that the Wall came down, and it’s great that he’s going to fix it.” Just out of curiosity, was that his first beer of the day? Alex glanced at his Heineken. “I’d say it’s the eighth.”
Meanwhile, the Hoff had made it through the crush to his yellow protest bus. He climbed up and sang a capella, because there wasn’t time to organize the permits for a performance (“I been lookin’ for freeeedom…”).
A black-clad trio of East Berliners—Chricki, Beni, and Marcel—carried handmade signs on cardboard that read “HOFFTASTIC!”
“The role of Gorbachev, Bush, Kohl—totally overrated,” said Chricki, without looking up from the ground. “We have every confidence that now, based on what he has accomplished in the past, David Hasselhoff is going to prevent the destruction of the East Side Gallery. Then he’ll probably fix our airport.”
“He sang the Wall down,” added Beni, whose hair was dyed black to match his outfit. “Later, of course, the Scorpions whistled it away.”
There were some genuine fans, too—including Sandy Puetschke, sporting a leather jacket that she had made holes in and stuck Christmas-tree lights through. Hailing from near Dresden, she used to watch “Knight Rider” illegally. She, like just about everyone else I talked to, was wholeheartedly (and un-ironically) against taking down parts of the East Side Gallery. “For East Germans, it’s one of the most important memorials,” she said.
Britta Pietschmann, a young woman who said she had founded a “Baywatch” fan club—and that her organization is currently hoping to start working on making it illegal to wear anything other than red bathing suits in public swimming areas in Germany—explained that her cardboard sign, which read, simply, “BAYWATCH,” had a double meaning: “The East Side Gallery borders the river, so it’s kind of a coastline that we have to take care of,” she said. “We killed two flies with one swat!”
“I did what my parents never achieved,” crowed Lukas Vernaldi, an acrobat in orange pants who had just descended, along with a couple of friends, from an attention-getting shimmy along the top of the East Side Gallery. “I crossed the Wall to the West! Seriously, though, we’re here for the East Side Gallery. This is a piece of our history. I’m a child of the time—I was born in ’89—but my parents were very free-thinking, and I heard a lot about their trouble with the Stasi. Also, this is art. I’m an artist, and I don’t think you should just take it away.”
After a series of end-of-the-day interviews in a nearby hotel, the Hoff took a moment for reflection. “I was overwhelmed, and I felt I was exactly where I was supposed to be,” he said, flashing a bright smile. “I thought, this is just like the old days, like 1989; like, wow, I still got it. But of course, I don’t ‘got it,’ it’s the Wall that’s got it.”
Photograph by Odd Anderson/AFP/Getty
