Thirty-eight years ago to the day, Bruce Springsteen took to the stage at the Weißensee cycling track. The event was massive, both culturally and literally – about 300,000 people were in attendance. The oppression during the Berlin Wall era from the DDR’s communist government was becoming too much for the population and the idea of one of the West’s biggest rock and roll acts playing the biggest concert in DDR history seemed unthinkable.
For context, just one year prior, in June of 1987, David Bowie played in West Berlin in front of the Reichstag as part of his three-day Concert for Berlin. Thousands of East Berliners gathered at the Wall to listen to the performance and to hear ‘Heroes’, a song Bowie had penned while living in the city. Similarly, in June 1988, Pink Floyd played on the West side of the Wall. This time, East Berliners were met by heavy policing when trying to listen in to the music, and numerous arrests were made. The East Berliners could be heard chanting for the wall to be torn down.
This made seeing Springsteen, a hallmark of the West’s cultural scene, commanding a crowd of 300,000 all the more otherworldly. In Erik Kirschbaum’s book Rocking the Wall, he claims that the concert, alongside a speech Springsteen gave in German, galvanised the attitudes of the East Berliners. The speech read: “I am not for or against a government. I’ve come to play rock and roll for you, in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down.” His German was slightly garbled, but it didn’t matter. The crowd loved it, and he was met with an approving roar.
Right after his speech, Springsteen launched into a cover of Bob Dylan’s ‘Chimes of Freedom’. He knew exactly what he was doing. The song’s lyrics speak of a “city’s melting furnace […] with faces hidden while the walls were tightening”. The message couldn’t be clearer. “Springsteen’s concert and speech certainly contributed, in a large sense, to the events leading up to the fall of the Wall,” Gerd Dietrich, professor of history at Berlin’s Humboldt University, told Kirschbaum.
Among the 80 pages of files Kirschbaum dug up from the Stasi archives for his book was evidence that the concert was part of a leadership-sanctioned campaign to appease the country’s youth. “They were still reeling from incidents in 1987 when police used truncheons and electric stun guns to beat back East Berliners who, hungry for some of the fun the West was enjoying, had pressed themselves as close to the Berlin Wall as possible to listen to concerts by the likes of David Bowie and the Eurythmics that were being held just metres away from them in West Berlin.” The Stasi also tried to frame the concert as a charity event for Nicaragua, a country whose population was struggling after a brutal civil war. Springsteen refused to play under false pretences.
Ultimately, the concert, which was an attempt by the DDR government to appease the rising unhappiness among East German youth, ended up being a four-hour appeal for them to fight for their freedom. A year after Springsteen’s performance, David Hasselhoff’s ‘Looking for Freedom’, a reworked version of the popular German song ‘Auf der Strasse Nach Süden’ from the 70s, was number one in the charts. It’s now broadly remembered as the musical accompaniment to the fall of the Wall, and similar to Springsteen’s concert, symbolised the struggle for freedom East Berliners were going through. No singular musical artist was responsible for the fall of the Wall and none takes credit for it (not even David Hasselhoff, despite the rumours). It was, of course, the strength of the people living in East Berlin who tore it down – and many did so with their bare hands. Springsteen’s iconic performance, however, certainly was a powerful catalyst in changing the attitudes of the people on the east side of the Wall.
