From Reagan to Hasselhoff: 5 people who didn’t bring down the Berlin Wall

Did the Berlin Wall fall or was it pushed? Over the past 25 years, numerous myths and legends have sprung up around the chain of events culminating on the night of 9 November 1989. One popular theory says that while the collapse of the iron curtain may have looked inevitable, it took the intervention of some great minds to provide the crucial nudge. Never mind Polish trade unionists, Soviet politicians or East German dissidents, it was British and American politicians and popstars who made all the crucial interventions, right?

1) Ronald Reagan

The words went down in history: “Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” And lo and behold: soon after the US president Ronald Reagan had voiced his bold demand to the Soviet president in front of the Berlin wall, the borders opened. As John Heubusch, executive director of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Library, has put it: “One cannot ignore how [Reagan’s] powerful conviction ended the cold war by firing a verbal salvo, an oratorical demand to let freedom prevail.”

But one also shouldn’t ignore that Reagan gave his speech on 12 June 1987, a good 29 months before the actual fall of the wall. And there is little evidence that it had much impact on the dynamics of the dissident movement in East Germany, or on Soviet politics at the time.

Some 45,000 Berliners witnessed Reagan’s wall speech, compared to the 450,000 people who attended John F Kennedy’s “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963 – in other western parts of the city, there were demonstrations against the US president’s visit. Coverage of the event was only published in the back pages of the major international papers. German weekly Die Zeit did not even quote his request to Gorbachev.

Reagan had made similar speeches before, in 1982 and 1986. The only new element was him addressing Gorbachev directly. Reagan had been losing support domestically, so this show of strength may above all have been directed at an American audience. In that respect, it undoubtedly did the job.

2) David Bowie

Germanophile popstar David Bowie had close ties with Berlin, having lived in the city for three years during the 1970s. On 7 June 1987, shortly before Ronald Reagan’s visit, he came back for a concert in West Berlin right next to the Reichstag building, only a stone’s throw away from the wall. “We send our wishes to all our friends who are on the other side of the wall,” he said in German at around 10 pm, before launching into Heroes, a song he had written in the capital.

East Germans who had gathered to listen to the concert on the other side of the wall, the theory goes, were emboldened by the song to stand up to the authorities. Soon thousands of them were chanting “The wall must go!” and “Gorbachev! Gorbachev!”: rock and roll had set the stone rolling that would smash the wall. “The Wall has only another two years to go,” author Tobias Rüther has written about the Bowie concert. “That June in East Berlin, a few of the heroes emerged who would shortly bring it down. They have a David Bowie song on their lips.”

But was Bowie’s really the cause of these East Germans’ political awakening? Or was the concert merely another outlet for the frustration that had been building up inside the GDR for months? The extent of the demonstrators’ political motivation remains unclear. “At least once in my life, I wanted to be as close to the rock stars as I would perhaps never again be able to,” one fan was later recorded as saying.

Many of the eyewitnesses claim that the violent police crackdown on the third night of the concerts – Bowie headlined the second – were crucial in changing the mood against the state. East German police attacked protesters with water-cannons, hidden in the side streets around the Brandenburg gate. “The mood changed when individual people were picked out from the crowd and arrested by officers in civil clothing”, one of the protesters, Tina Krone, told Spiegel Online.

If we want to credit music with bringing down the Berlin wall, we should at least spread the praise evenly: the “Concert for Berlin” line-up also included New Model Army, the Eurythmics, Bruce Hornsby and Paul Young. Phil Collins’ Genesis, who headlined day three, surely don’t deserve to be written out of the history books either: “At the end of the day, we just wanted to hear music, they wanted to hear Genesis, this western band,” said Uwe Kulisch, another of the protesters.

Much more than Bowie’s Heroes, the song that played a key role in the protests of 6-8 June 1987 is a long-forgotten hiphop track by West Berlin group John F und die Gropiuslerchen. According to police reports, several protesters played “Berlin, Berlin, dein Herz kennt keine Mauern” (“Berlin, Berlin, your heart knows no walls”) on their tape recorders. The chorus, which samples a speech by ex-chancellor Willy Brandt, become their chant: “Die Mauer muss weg” (“The wall must go”).

3) Bruce Springsteen

The “Concert for Berlin” disaster changed attitudes in East Germany – not just among dissidents, but also within the regime. Rather than allowing themselves to be antagonised by western pop music, they realised they could use its powers for their own ends. Artists such as Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Depeche Mode, Bryan Adams and Joe Cocker were all allowed to play gigs in the east in the coming months.

In 1988, the socialist youth movement invited Bruce Springsteen to play in front of 160,000 people at Weißensee, at a safe distance from the wall, on 19th July 1988 – the biggest ever concert in East Germany, and biggest gathering of people until the actual fall of the wall. What the US musician didn’t know: the gig was billed as a concert in support of the government in Nicaragua. An 80-page Stasi dossier praised Springsteen’s “hard, unadorned songs about the underbelly of the American way of life”.

According to Reuters journalist Erik Kirschbaum’s book about the concert, Springsteen was outraged when he heard about the politicisation of his show, deciding to give a little speech at the start. “It’s great to be in East Berlin,” he said in German. “I’m not for or against any government. I came here to play rock & roll for you, in the hope that one day all barriers will be torn down.” He and his band then played a cover of Bob Dylan’s Chimes of Freedom.

One Springsteen fan remembers the gig as “a nail in the coffin for East Germany”, yet there was no immediate noticeable knock-on effect, no political chanting, no protests in the streets. When a genuine dissident movement did start to form in East Germany in 1989, it happened not in Berlin but in Leipzig.

4) Margaret Thatcher

At the unveiling of Madrid’s Plaza Margaret Thatcher in September this year, the Spanish capital’s mayor Ana Botella boldly claimed that “the end of the Cold War, tearing down the Berlin wall in a revolt against Communism, the downfall of the Soviet Union, could not be explained without Margaret Thatcher”. Even the late Baroness herself might have disagreed with that statement.

Thatcher certainly had a good relationship with Gorbachev, a man she said she could “do business with”, even though she never failed to stress how much she hated communism. Yet German reunification was far from what she had in mind. On the contrary, at a meeting in Moscow in September 1989, Thatcher told the Soviet leader how strongly she was opposed to reuniting the two halves of the country: “We do not want a united Germany,” she said. “This would lead to a change to post-war borders, and we cannot allow that because such a development would undermine the stability of the whole international situation and could endanger our security.”

Thatcher was not only concerned that the speed of developments in the GDR could destabilise Gorbachev, but also worried that a united Germany would become an “unstoppable force” in an unbalanced Europe. “We beat the Germans twice, and now they’re back,” she told ex-chancellor Helmut Kohl during a state visit in December 1989.

Her view was that the West had only backed the reunification in the mid 1980s because they thought it would never happen. Even after the border opened, Thatcher tried to put the brakes on developments in Germany, reigning in her rather more enthusiastic ambassador Christopher Mallaby and foreign minister Douglas Hurd.

5) David Hasselhoff

In an interview with German magazine TV Spielfilm in 2004, US actor David Hasselhoff was quoted as saying, “I find it a bit sad that there is no photo of me hanging on the walls in the Berlin Museum at Checkpoint Charlie” – a comment he later denied having made.

Looking for Freedom, Hasselhoff’s cover of Marc Seaberg’s 1978 hit, was released in West Germany on 21 June 1989, but remained banned in East Germany until the fall of the wall. He did not perform the song from the top of the Berlin wall until several weeks after the borders had opened. Safe to say, Hasselhoff did not bring about the collapse of the Berlin wall.

• Where on earth is the Berlin wall?