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Live Freedom Tour 1990

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• May 8, 1990 Setlist

David Hasselhoff Setlist at Eilenriedehalle, Hanover, Germany

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David Hasselhoff Gig Timeline

• Apr 29 1990 Alsterdorfer Sporthalle Hamburg, Germany Add time Add time
• May 06 1990 Festhalle Frankfurt, Germany Add time Add time
• May 08 1990 Eilenriedehalle This Setlist Hanover, Germany Add time Add time
• Sep 15 1990 Wetten, dass..? #63 aus Saarbrücken Saarbrücken, Germany Add time Add time
• Sep 21 1991 Wetten, dass..? #69 aus Saarbrücken Saarbrücken, Germany Add time Add time

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David Hasselhoff Is Still Big In Germany 30 Years After His Berlin Wall Show

Rob Schmitz

David Hasselhoff performs during a concert in Berlin on Oct. 3 — Germany Unity Day. In 1989, his song "Looking for Freedom" was the anthem to many Germans' newfound freedom. Frank Hoensch/Getty Images hide caption

David Hasselhoff performs during a concert in Berlin on Oct. 3 — Germany Unity Day. In 1989, his song "Looking for Freedom" was the anthem to many Germans' newfound freedom.

Among pop culture's great mysteries: How exactly did David Hasselhoff become a rock 'n' roll God in Germany?

The 67-year-old star of decades-old television series Knight Rider and Baywatch doesn't skip a beat when asked the question.

"It all started with a girl named Nikki," Hasselhoff said during a recent interview with NPR in Berlin, where he was on a concert tour of Germany.

It was 1985. Hasselhoff's agent told him that Nikki had won a contest in a magazine and her prize was lunch with Hasselhoff at his home in Southern California. He remembers groaning, not wanting to go through with it. "I said [to the agent], 'I'm going through my Ernest Hemingway period.' Knight Rider was canceled; I lost my marriage. I'm sitting here staring out the window going, 'What am I going to do next?' " he said.

David Hasselhoff hovers in the cage of a hoisting crane above the Berlin Wall and sings "Looking for Freedom" on Dec. 31, 1989. Wöstmann/picture alliance via Getty Images hide caption

David Hasselhoff hovers in the cage of a hoisting crane above the Berlin Wall and sings "Looking for Freedom" on Dec. 31, 1989.

Darkening his Hemingway period were tepid U.S. sales of his debut rock album earlier that year. Hasselhoff needed a pick-me-up. So when Nikki ultimately came knocking, he reluctantly let her in. "And she went, 'Oh, it's very nice to meet you. Your album, Night Rocker, is No. 1 in my country,' " Hasselhoff recalled her saying. "I went, 'Where's your country?' And she said, 'Austria.' I said, 'Oh wow! Where is Austria?' "

Nikki showed him on a world map, and Hasselhoff went straight to work. He called the magazine that had given her the prize and asked it to suggest a concert promoter.

Within weeks, Hasselhoff was selling out concerts in Austria, and soon his album was topping the pop music charts in Germany and Switzerland too. But it was the title track of another Hasselhoff album, Looking for Freedom, a few years later that cemented his magnetic appeal to young Germans.

The song, which was based on an older German favorite, " Auf Der Strasse Nach Süden ," begins with Hasselhoff crooning:

"One morning in June / some 20 years ago / I was born a rich man's son / I had everything / that money could buy / but freedom I had none."

The drums kick in and, with it, the chorus:

"I've been looking for freedom / I've been looking so long / I've been looking for freedom / still the search goes on."

The album was released in 1989, a pivotal year for the spread of democracy through Europe: In June of that year, Poland held its first free elections; in November, the Berlin Wall fell. Communist East Germany was about to crumble. Among Germans, Looking for Freedom was the anthem to their newfound freedom.

After The Fall: 20 Years After The Berlin Wall

The night david hasselhoff rocked the berlin wall.

Hasselhoff's album went triple platinum in Europe. At the time, it seemed like everyone in Germany knew the title track.

"And I didn't know if they were singing it just for fun or whatever, but later on I found out that they were singing it, really singing it, like 'Amazing Grace,' " he recalled. "That was their song."

Soon after the Berlin Wall fell, Germany's Silvester Show — similar to The Dick Clark Show in the U.S. — invited Hasselhoff to sing "Looking for Freedom" on its 1989 New Year's Eve special, planned to be filmed inside a hotel. "I said, 'No. Only if I can sing on the Berlin Wall,' " Hasselhoff said.

He now admits this was a ridiculous request, but the German show agreed to it. On New Year's Eve of 1989, Hasselhoff sang his anthem for freedom while hoisted by a crane above the Berlin Wall to an estimated half a million Berliners.

"I grew up with the idea that he was responsible for breaking down the wall," remembers 36-year-old fan Thomas Erdmann.

Thomas Erdmann (center) poses with friends before attending David Hasselhoff's concert in Berlin on Oct. 3. Erdmann spent hours constructing a replica of the jacket his boyhood hero wore while singing at the Berlin Wall in 1989. Erdmann, who was raised in East Berlin, believed that Hasselhoff was responsible for the fall of the wall. Rob Schmitz/NPR hide caption

Thomas Erdmann (center) poses with friends before attending David Hasselhoff's concert in Berlin on Oct. 3. Erdmann spent hours constructing a replica of the jacket his boyhood hero wore while singing at the Berlin Wall in 1989. Erdmann, who was raised in East Berlin, believed that Hasselhoff was responsible for the fall of the wall.

Erdmann was 6 when the wall fell, too young to understand that his favorite TV star who drove a talking car was not responsible for the fall of communism in his country.

Thirty years later, on Oct. 3, German Unity Day, Erdmann was waiting to see his boyhood hero in concert at an arena in Berlin. He was dressed in a piano scarf and a black leather jacket that had blinking lights sewn onto it — a replica of what Hasselhoff wore for his memorable 1989 New Year Eve's appearance in Berlin. Erdmann said he spent 10 hours sewing on the lights the night before. For him, Hasselhoff conjures up memories of growing up in East Berlin, a block away from a wall that separated him and his friends from the freedoms of the West. "I remember this one drain hole in the wall, and we used to look through that drain hole to see the West," Erdmann remembered.

At this show, freedom was no longer a fleeting vision through a drain hole. Instead, freedom was right in front of thousands of screaming fans, singing along to an assortment of covers of songs by bands like Whitesnake, The Jesus and Mary Chain and Neil Diamond while shouting "Freedom!" repeatedly during guitar solos.

Hasselhoff could not seem to get enough during his three-hour concert. "Thirty years of freedom!" he yelled to his fans after emerging from a hydraulic stage in the middle of the arena. "Hello, Berlin! Ich bin ein Berliner! " he said — meaning "I'm a Berliner," an echo of President John F. Kennedy's famous 1963 speech.

At times during the marathon performance, Hasselhoff appeared more excited about the 30th anniversary of the fall of the wall than the assembled Berliners themselves, who have moved on since then.

But in the end, The Hoff knows his audience. His last song of the encore was, predictably, "Looking for Freedom," and it brought all audience members to their feet, clapping and singing, happy that Hasselhoff was still there to remind them that, in the words of his song, "the search goes on."

• David Hasselhoff
• Berlin Wall

‘I Was Just a Man Who Sang a Song About Freedom’: 30 Years Later, David Hasselhoff Looks Back on His Surprising Role in the Fall of the Berlin Wall

S aturday marks the 30th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, when, on Nov. 9, 1989, Berliners breached the 12-ft.-high wall that had divided the communist East side of the city and the capitalist West side of the city since 1961.

It was not only the beginning of a new chapter for Germany and the World, but also a new chapter in David Hasselhoff’s career. The actor and singer had made a name for himself in the U.S., especially as the star of the TV show Knight Rider , but he became even more of a celebrity in Germany after his song “Looking For Freedom” (an English adaptation of the 1978 German hit “Auf Der Strasse Nach Süden,” often translated as “On the road to the South”) came out in 1988, followed by the album of the same name in June 1989. It topped the charts in West Germany, in large part because its lyrics about the long search for freedom struck a chord among those living in a divided Germany. The coincidental timing of the song’s release and the wall’s destruction made Hasselhoff a surprising symbol of the end of the Cold War, a position cemented by his performance at Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate on New Year’s Eve 1989 .

He’s gone back and performed in Germany numerous times over the last three decades, and recently just completed the three-week-long “Freedom! The Journey Continues Tour,” which kicked off on Oct. 2 to coincide on the Oct. 3 anniversary of the reunification of East Germany and West Germany in 1990. TIME spoke to “The Hoff” by phone shortly after the tour ended — and before his next big project, starring in Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5 musical in London. (Fans of Baywatch will appreciate that, true to the star’s brand, he called from his car in Los Angeles, en route to buy bathing suits.) Here, he looks back at that unique concert, which he says gave him a new purpose in life.

TIME: How did it feel to perform in Germany 30 after you became a symbol of the Berlin Wall’s fall?

HASSELHOFF: I had a pretty amazing experience. I have a plethora of stories, of people who come to me and testified that “Looking for Freedom” was an anthem or a hymn of hope that they would sing. A 45-year-old man cried. He said he was 15 years old and he grew up in Rostock, a city in East Germany, and he said, “You really had something to do with bringing down the wall.” I said, “No, I didn’t. I was just singing a song about freedom, and I went behind the wall and met some girls.” He said, “No, it was a song of hope.” My whole tour was basically about [how] we’re still looking for freedom, because we are.

How did the concert at the Berlin Wall come about?

I flew over the wall in 1987 and flipped out. I couldn’t believe it. I said what the hell was this. It was unbelievable. The towers and the severity.

[When Looking for Freedom came out], I went to The Grand Hotel [in East Germany] to do an interview, and back then it was real gaudy and outside it was gray, and I said I can’t do the interview in here. I feel pretentious. I feel like the ugly American. So I went outside and met three girls and the three girls said, “Can we have your autograph?” Because they didn’t have selfies back then. I asked, “How do you know me? They said, “You’re the man who sings of freedom.”

[One day,] I got called: Would I like to sing at The Silvester Show, which was like the Dick Clark [New Year’s Eve] Show? My song was Number 1, and I said, “Sure, only if I can sing on the wall.” I [thought], no f—ing way will that ever happen. They called me back and they said, “You’re going to be in a crane above maybe a million people.” And I said, “Oh my God, let’s go!” Rock and roll!

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What do you remember about that night?

I remember it like it was yesterday. There was a camera on the crane, and I wasn’t playing to the camera. Usually you play to the camera. I just kept bending over and playing to the crowd because I was so moved by the experience. I was with the people that night, and I didn’t care if I fell out. I was on a mission from God. The whole thing was surreal. It was the greatest celebration of all time. I knew nothing except for having children would ever top this moment. Nothing has.

I brought pieces of the wall back — a little piece of freedom — and put them on plaques and gave them to the cast and crew of Baywatch . I don’t think anyone really appreciated it. I think they do now. I hope they do. I just brought a piece back recently; a small piece was given to me by a fan earlier this month with a picture of me singing “Looking For Freedom.”

Do you still have the jacket you wore, with the lights on it?

I wore it October 20 when I did Hamburg. I’d had it made for the Osmonds’ Fourth of July Stadium of Fire [in the ’80s]. I thought I’d turn the jacket on so that people could see me in the crane.

And the piano scarf?

[Touring recently,] I saw like 100 piano scarfs in the crowd and thought, “Hmm, we should have sold those for merchandising.”

In the footage, it looks like a firework went off close to you. Do you remember what that felt like?

I saw that tape of it just recently. Luckily I pulled away or I would have been hit in the head with a firework. But a firework hit me in the leg, which nobody saw. I just put it out. When it’s below zero, you don’t give a damn.

News clips about this moment have often described you as wanting more credit than you get for your role in the fall of the Berlin Wall. What are your feelings on that now?

It’s fake news. I never ever said I had anything to do with bringing down the wall. I never ever said those words. I was semi-responsible for protesting to keep it up [such as in 2013 ] . It’s pretty amazing the respect I get [in Germany]. They consider me a legend. I knew no one would care in America. I never got any kind of — and I didn’t want — credit. I didn’t care about that. There was the guy from Knight Rider singing a song about freedom. Knight Rider was sacred to everyone and hopefully we’ll bring it back as a movie. I was just in the right place at the right time with the right song. I was just a man who sang a song about freedom.

How do you see the difference between the world now and the world then?

It’s a strange world now. At least then we knew who the enemy were. We knew the enemy were the Russians and there was a Cold War. Now it seems like they’re everywhere. There’s a lack of freedom. It’s almost as if it’s O.K. to lie, whether it be from the White House or in the press. But it’s not O.K. Now it just seems that everyone is so, so quick to hate, and so quick to be violent. It is a sad, sad world.

How has that New Year’s Eve concert in Berlin, and your time spent in Germany, influenced you and the choices you’ve made in your career and life?

When I would sit in the scarab [boat] in Baywatch , I didn’t care what they thought about me in America. It wasn’t important to me. What was important was going to Germany and being a rock star. It shaped me because it gave me honor. It gave me credibility. It gave me humility. I’m just an actor who sang a song about freedom. I didn’t know anything about East Germany, and suddenly by the grace of God or the universe, I was given this responsibility: I hold those people [from East Germany] as they are crying. All I want to do is hug them and hold them and say, “It’s O.K., you’re free now.” And and I accept it with honor. And that shaped my whole life and my whole existence. I’m not a preacher. I’m not Billy Graham. I’m David Hasselhoff.

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• David Hasselhoff

Remember When: David Hasselhoff Plays a Part in Bringing Down The Berlin Wall

by Bryan Reesman February 4, 2024, 3:00 pm

On December 31, 1989, David Hasselhoff played a part in celebrating the reunification of Germany after the borders were opened in November of that year. Silvester Show , a popular music program in Germany, invited the actor and singer to perform at the first ever German-German New Year’s Eve party at the Brandenburg Gate.

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Dressed in a lit-up leather jacket and a piano scarf, Hasselhoff performed to the thousands of people assembled on both sides of the Berlin Wall and by Brandenburg Gate. The Wall began being officially dismantled in widespread fashion in June 1990; communism was in retreat in Eastern Europe.

This is supposedly the moment when the Hoff’s musical cache rose in Germany because many people witnessing the event associate him with that time period and moment. He has been a star there ever since. There is even a small David Hasselhoff Museum in a corridor at the Circus Hostel in Berlin.

One morning in June, some twenty years ago I was born a rich man’s son I had everything that money could buy But freedom, I had none

I’ve been looking for freedom I’ve been looking so long I’ve been looking for freedom Still the search goes on

The TV performance is him doing a solo rendition of “Looking for Freedom” from his 1989 album of the same name, which reportedly sold 500,000 copies in Germany. The song is actually a cover of the 1978 hit co-written by Gary Cowtan and Jack White (not of The White Stripes). It was originally recorded by Marc Seaberg and then in German by Tony Marshall (both in 1988), which both charted in the Top 20 in West Germany, but it was Hasselhoff’s version that was first released in December 1988 that hit No. 1 in West Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and No. 4 on Europe’s Hot 100 Singles chart in 1989. The Brandenburg Gate performance appears to be a lip-synced rendition of the song to a backing track—he’s standing on a crane with no band in sight—but that’s no surprise given the television tactics of the time. People did not seem to care; they were singing along happily.

One thing that is amusing: At the 3:17 mark, someone shoots what looks like a roman candle past his head and it just misses him. “I saw that tape of it just recently,” Hasselhoff told Time magazine in November 2019 . “Luckily I pulled away or I would have been hit in the head with a firework. But a firework hit me in the leg, which nobody saw. I just put it out. When it’s below zero, you don’t give a damn.”

When Hasselhoff spoke to Time, he had just finished a three-week German trek called Freedom! The Journey Continues Tour 2019. He still remembered performing at the Wall like it was yesterday.

“I had a pretty amazing experience,” Hasselhoff said. “I have a plethora of stories, of people who come to me and testified that ‘Looking for Freedom’ was an anthem or a hymn of hope that they would sing. A 45-year-old man cried. He said he was 15 years old and he grew up in Rostock, a city in East Germany, and he said, ‘You really had something to do with bringing down the wall.’ I said, ‘No, I didn’t. I was just singing a song about freedom, and I went behind the wall and met some girls.’ He said, ‘No, it was a song of hope.’ My whole tour was basically about [how] we’re still looking for freedom, because we are.”

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'Thirty years of freedom!' Why David Hasselhoff remains an icon for German unity

At his recent Berlin concert, the Hoff once again recalled his part in the fall of the Wall. His obsession with reunification is gauche – but his message of hope is still necessary

F reedom! Freedom! Freedom!” David Hasselhoff chants as he snakes his way through the Max-Schmeling-Halle, a basketball stadium erected near where a section of the Berlin Wall once stood. It’s German Unity Day, Thursday 3 October, and Hasselhoff is here to promote his 14th album Open Your Eyes. The date is no coincidence.

As the show begins, the actor and singer is raised on a hydraulic platform above the crowd, and it’s hard not to recall how, on New Year’s Eve 1989 – less than two months after the Wall fell – he was similarly lifted beside the city’s Brandenburg Gate in a bucket crane. “Thirty years of freedom!” Hasselhoff yells today, adding, in a nod to John F Kennedy’s 1963 speech, “Ich bin ein Berliner!”

On that December night almost 30 years ago, in a televised performance that never seems far from his mind, Hasselhoff sang Looking for Freedom, a song that held West Germany’s No 1 slot for two months during the tumultuous summer that led to the momentous East-West reunion. As the Knight Rider star mugged for the camera, Germans from both sides of the border sat astride the hated barricade. Some tossed fireworks dangerously close to Hasselhoff, his leather jacket illuminated by the sparks. “I’ve been looking for freedom,” he insisted, over and over again, “I’ve been looking so long.”

Hasselhoff was still clinging to his anthem the last time I saw him, grinning beneath his trademark coiffure at Berlin’s East Side Gallery. It was March 2013 and he was protesting developers’ intentions to dismantle some of the open-air gallery, which consists of murals on a stretch of the Wall, singing the song a cappella – repeatedly – through a PA strapped to a battered yellow van­. This was a campaign to which he’d stay loyal: in December 2017, he called again on the city’s mayor to halt construction of luxury flats on what was once the “death strip” alongside the River Spree. (Nonetheless, the building went ahead.) For many, this provoked amusement, as Hasselhoff’s actions often do. Most famous in Germany for a kitsch celebration of the Wall’s demolition, he was now battling to keep it standing.

To justify his presence at Max-Schmeling-Halle tonight – as if it needs justification – Hasselhoff offers his resumé before the show. Songs from the new album, as well as his hits, play over the PA while most people are still coming through the doors. A replica of KITT, his talking-car co-star, stands behind the sound desk, and clips of Knight Rider and Baywatch – as well as videos for his many German pop hits – are beamed behind the stage before his show gets under way.

Then for the best part of three hours, he hammers out, with almost unceasing force, a series of cover versions that makes as little sense as his German fame does to the British. An improbably convincing cover of the Jesus and Mary Chain’s Head On is followed by one of Modern English’s I Melt With You. He perches on a stool for Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, then vigorously owns the pomp of Open Your Eyes by gothic rockers Lords of the New Church. He dons his Baywatch uniform, wielding an inflatable buoy, for theme tune I’m Always Here, then continues with a Rat Pack standard. When he lifts his shirt to reveal a back tattoo of his own face and the legend “Don’t Hassle the Hoff”, the crowd’s squeals are punctuated with disbelieving splutters.

He also offers constant, gushing reminders that we’re commemorating “Thirty years! Thirty years of freedom!”, something he seems to be taking more seriously than Berliners, for whom time has passed as fast as rents have risen. Memories of the Wall have been chipped away at, just as the edifice itself was, before it was then sold in fragments to tourists. These days Berlin celebrates this annual public holiday mostly for the simple reason that it’s one of only nine granted to the city. (Bavaria, in contrast, has 13.)

Indeed, despite a handful of official festivities, the most prominent Unity Day events this year were demonstrations concerning the capital’s rather more immediate problems: widespread gentrification, with its subsequent spikes in housing costs; the growth of far-right extremism across the country, evident in a march involving 1,700 extremists, neo-Nazis and anti-Islamic German Defence League members, with counter-protesters numbering 2,000. Hasselhoff makes no mention of such issues.

In fact, Hasselhoff doesn’t seem to have moved on at all, something reflected in his music. This is what provokes his critics as much as his enthusiasts: to some he’s an embarrassing, outdated reminder of the profligate, superficial nature of much of western culture, while to others he’s emblematic of a coveted future and a goal achieved. He’s a symbol of unresolved conflicts, something with which Berlin is familiar.

As a globally recognisable star of huge shows – in 2011 Guinness World Records named him “the most watched man on TV” – he also provokes snobbery from those who consider themselves more cerebral, although it was he who recognised Baywatch’s commercial potential and invested his own money in the series when it was prematurely cancelled after its first season. He’s been releasing critically derided albums since 1985, some of which have nonetheless hit the top spots in Austria and Switzerland as well as Germany – even 2013’s A Real Good Feeling made the latter’s Top 30 – but prominent roles in musicals like Chicago, Jekyll & Hyde and The Producers, for which he was personally selected by Mel Brooks, have done little to restore his credibility.

Few, though, are as earnest about Hasselhoff’s work as he is, and this includes his fans. During an unnecessary – and lengthy – interval, I ask two of them whether they take him seriously. Their response is amusingly ambivalent, and when I query whether he takes himself seriously, their reply is equally equivocal. “Probably,” they reply, adding, “hopefully not.” This, of course, suits a man who sometimes betrays an unusual self-awareness, as appearances in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story (in which he plays the German team’s coach) and the droll mockumentary Hoff the Record – not to mention Sharknado 3: Oh Hell No! – attest. In February this year, he published an audiobook, Up Against The Wall – set, of course, in autumn 1989 – in which he juggles performing to 100,000 people and saving Berlin from nuclear attack with the help of a doppelgänger CIA agent stationed in east Berlin. “Is this the greatest thing you can ever listen to?” one reader asks on Goodreads. “I’m saying, ‘Probably’.”

But at other times he appears to be the only person not in on the joke. When he tears into True Survivor (the theme tune to cult Swedish time-travel-martial-arts-action-comedy Kung Fury, a short film in which he had a cameo role as “Hoff 9000”), it’s so beefed up it sounds like an immaculate parody of 80s hair-synth-rock. He plays it straight, and it’s this inappropriate sincerity that makes him an easy object of derision.

But his fans are conscious of his absurdity and some, at least, are protective of Looking for Freedom. One local friend, who grew up in the 80s, explained to me that, back then, Hasselhoff and his biggest hit represented “the sehnsucht [wistful longing] for western culture and the weird word ‘freedom’, embodied in a two-metre-tall, leather-clad, chest-haired dude – and, more importantly, a very catchy song that every kid was singing in school”. Explained like that, his status becomes more intelligible, and its longevity more sympathetic. Hasselhoff was in the right place at the right time, for which some will always be appreciative, and they remember Looking for Freedom with the same degree of respect as the English do Three Lions. Perhaps both make recollections of what went before, and what came after, less painful.

In Let’s Talk About Love: Why Other People Have Such Bad Taste – a critical consideration of the meaning of taste, as seen through the lens of Céline Dion’s career – critic Carl Wilson wonders “whether ‘easier’ music might contain hints for reconciliation with the world into which we’re already thrown. Maybe it deals with problems that don’t require leaps of the imagination but require other efforts, like patience, or compromise.” Hasselhoff’s audience seem familiar with both qualities, while cynics see things in less tolerant, more binary terms, rejecting him on purely aesthetic grounds. Reconciling these two viewpoints seems as much of a stretch of the imagination – especially when faced by Do the Limbo Dance, which tonight inspires a conga line through the stalls – as the idea of the Wall falling once did. But harmony is exactly what, on a smaller scale, the Hoff achieves. The arena is packed with people from across the social divide, and however much Hasselhoff is mocked outside its walls, here there are dreadlocks and mohawks, groups in matching Baywatch T-shirts, late middle-aged couples who’ve come straight from dinner, and others who weren’t even born when the Wall fell. Several fans even wear replicas of the jacket Hasselhoff donned in December 1989.

For them, Hasselhoff is a reminder of an era when division seemed to have been overcome: a time when the world might come together. Indeed, if you listen to his selections, the wildly varied music is of less import than the lyrics. He convinces us that the preposterous Hot Shot City – “You will find her on the street / In her red Ferrari / With her top pulled down” – is an anthem for Berlin, and employs Modern English to remind us to “dream of better lives / The kind which never hates”. Before Air Supply’s Lonely Is the Night, he instructs us to introduce ourselves to the people next to us, “even if you know them”, while the dramatic chorus of Open Your Eyes is spelled out on the screens behind him: “See the lies right in front of you.” As for Sweet Caroline, its message is perfect for a man so desperate for us to be friends, not least with him: “Hands, touching hands / Reaching out, touching me, touching you”.

It’s a message he communicates successfully, and it’s especially poignant in Berlin. Tonight, we’re a ragbag of people singing a ragbag of songs, remembering – or, in surprisingly plentiful cases, imagining – how it felt to be so full of hope. Frankly, it’s a relief. This is perhaps what the Hoff wants of us, too: to love and forgive each other as much as he loves and forgives us – which is as much as he wants us to love and forgive him. If we can manage that here, maybe we can take that tolerance away with us afterwards. It’s gauche, but nonetheless admirable and – if you drop your prejudices – rather bewitching. Hasselhoff is a recovering alcoholic, and one suspects that to him, as to many, this city is a symbol of how a “different” lifestyle can flourish after even awful things have happened. A bit more of this compassion, however self-satisfying, might resolve many conflicts, not just his own.

Whether he’s taken seriously or not, Hasselhoff is a unifying force. He’s contradictory, of course: he demands walls stay up which he once wanted torn down; he sings karaoke with a grubby Sunset Strip rock band like he’s changing the world. But even when the Wall tumbled – as Tim Mohr’s recent, gripping history of the 1980s East German punk scene, Burning Down the Haus, reminds us – there were plenty of anti-capitalist DDR citizens who rejected reunification and wished instead to see socialism remodelled. Contradictions are a part of life. Resolving them should be too.

He brings things to a close, inevitably, with Looking for Freedom, and if you pay attention, you realise he understands that the thing about “looking for freedom” is that “still the search goes on”. His relentless optimism is irresistible, and it’s infectious, too. That he keeps persevering is to be applauded – as he is noisily tonight – and there is hope in how so many remain prepared to listen.

• David Hasselhoff
• The music essay

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