cornfedhick said:
The rumor that the Hof is wildly popular in Germany explains why Americans will neeeevvvvveerrr fully trust or relate to Europeans.
That cliché is actually quite easy to reason. Back in the eighties and early nineties, the Hoff was wildly popular all around the world. Remember he starred in
Knight Rider and
Baywatch, and I don't think those shows were any less popular in the US or elsewhere than they were in Germany.
It turned out, however, that the Hoff was very lucky, and happened to be the right man at the right time at the right place. His single,
Looking for Freedom was storming the charts just when the Berlin Wall fell, and since it dealt with the right subject matter as well, it became something of an anthem for the German reunification. What immortalised him, however, was New Year's Eve 1989/90. Most pictures you associate with the fall of the Wall, i.e. those of people dancing on the Wall in front of the Brandenburg Gate, were in fact taken on that day. And the Hoff was there too, performing his song on the Wall, to a mixed crowd of West and East Berliners who went wild. Nowadays, outside of Germany, people more remember how later, in 1990, Roger Waters performed
The Wall on the border of East and West Berlin (which was, at that time, not yet reunified), but within the country, the memory of the Hoff is actually more prevalent, because it was much more symbolic.
Fast forward, fifteen years later, in 2004, the Hoff's nimbus had already way declined everywhere, including Germany. He visited the town and the Wall museum, and remarked how there was no mention of his performance anywhere, and how he actually deserved it. This somehow got hyped by the media, and now a popular myth is in existence which credits him with German reunification. It's more of a joke really, but you will occasionally hear someone uttering it the way I did earlier in this thread.
Hasselhoff is actually more a piece of campy nostalgia in Germany, and brought forward when people reminisce either about the eighties as a phenomenon, or the early nineties, when everything looked bright and people were taken in by reunification-era euphoria. Nobody
actually takes him seriously here anymore.
