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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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 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 30thanniversary 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."
Outraged family members of the nine Americans killed in a drug cartel ambush in Mexico Monday reportedly urged the country's leaders to accept President Trump’s offer to help destroy the cartels as the first funerals were held Thursday.
“We’re living like we’re in Afghanistan, 100 miles from the U.S. border,” Rosa LeBaron, who lost cousins, nieces and nephews in the attack, said, according to Reuters.
Three women and six children were gunned down this week when members of the Juarez Cartel attacked their convoy of three SUVs in Northern Mexico about 70 miles south of Douglas, Ariz. The families were on their way to see relatives in the U.S.
Investigators said the families may have been mistaken for a rival gang.
“They are as bad or worse than ISIS. ISIS have an ideology,” LeBaron said of the cartels. “These sicarios (hitmen), why are they doing it? Out of greed and pure evil," Reuters reported.
Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador thanked Trump but said Mexico would handle the cartels with "independence and sovereignty."
“It was lamentable, painful because children died, but do we want to resolve the problem the same way (as previous administrations)? By declaring war?” he said after the attacks. “We will not continue with the same and we will show that our proposal works, despite it not being easy. We are confident that we will achieve good results.”
Since the attacks, López Obrador has doubled down on his government's non-violent policy of “hugs not bullets” that aims to stamp out the cartels by addressing symptoms like access to education, poverty and unemployment.
If the current trends continue, operating income at Hong Kong Disneyland could fall by $275 million in Disney's current fiscal year, which ends in September 2020, the company's chief financial officer Christine McCarthy said during an earnings call.
The local theme park was a drag on international business last quarter, when operating income at Hong Kong Disneyland fell $55 million, offsetting growth at parks in Paris and Shanghai. McCarthy warned profit could fall by $80 million in the current quarter.
As a whole, Disney's parks unit — which it breaks out in its earnings report as parks, experiences and products — brought in $1.4 billion in operating income for the fourth quarter, a 17% increase over the same time last year.
Disney's warning underscores the gloomy picture for Hong Kong's economy. Official data released last week confirmed what many had feared: The city has plunged into recession, after months of protests have forced shops to close, paralyzed public transportation and scared off tourists.
Visitors to Hong Kong plummeted 37% in the third quarter, according to the city's financial secretary. Hotels were on average only two-thirds full, a drop of 28% compared to the same period a year earlier.
With no immediate resolution to the city's political crisis in the cards, economists say Hong Kong's first recession in a decade could extend into the new year.
Germany Has Been Unified for 30 Years. Its Identity Still Is Not.
East Germans, bio-Germans, passport Germans: In an increasingly diverse country, the legacy of a divided history has left many feeling like strangers in their own land.
By
Photographs by
BERLIN — Abenaa Adomako remembers the night the Berlin Wall fell. Joyous and curious like so many of her fellow West Germans, she had gone to the city center to greet East Germans who were pouring across the border for a first taste of freedom.
“Welcome,” she beamed at a disoriented-looking couple in the crowd, offering them sparkling wine.
But they would not take it.
“They spat at me and called me names,” recalled Ms. Adomako, whose family has been in Germany since the 1890s. “They were the foreigners in my country. But to them, as a black woman, I was the foreigner.’’
The integration of East and West has in many ways been an unabashed success. Germany is an economic and political powerhouse, its reunification central to its dominant place in Europe.
But while unification fixed German borders for the first time in the country’s history, it did little to settle the neuralgic issue of German identity. Thirty years later, it seems, it has even exacerbated it.
Ethnic hatred and violence are on the rise. A far-right party thrives in the former East. Ms. Adomako says she is still afraid to go there. But she is not the only one who feels like a stranger in her own land.
Germany’s current effort to integrate more than a million asylum seekers welcomed by Chancellor Angela Merkel in 2015 is just the most immediate challenge. It is compounded by past failures in a country that opened a regular path to citizenship for the children of immigrants only in 2000.
In the decades since the wall fell, Germany’s immigrant population has become the second largest in the world, behind the United States. One in four people now living in Germany has an immigrant background.
But that is not the story Germans have been telling themselves.
Two decades after the country stopped defining citizenship exclusively by ancestral bloodline, the far right and others have started distinguishing between “passport Germans” and “bio-Germans.”
The descendants of Turkish guest workers who arrived after World War II still struggle for acceptance. Jews, most of whom arrived from the former Soviet Union, are wary after a synagogue attack in the eastern city of Halle last month shocked the country that had made ‘‘Never Again’’ a pillar of its postwar identity.
Not least, many East Germans feel like second-class citizens after a reunification that Dr. Hans-Joachim Maaz, a psychoanalyst in the eastern city of Halle, calls a “cultural takeover.”
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Dr. Hans-Joachim Maaz outside a synagogue in the eastern city of Halle where two people were killed in an attack last month.
Across the former Iron Curtain, a new eastern identity is taking root, undermining the joyful narrative that dominated the reunification story on past anniversaries.
“It’s an existential moment for the country,” said Yury Kharchenko, a Berlin-based artist who defiantly identifies as a German Jew despite — and because of — the armed guards outside his son’s nursery in Berlin. “Everyone is searching for their identity.”’
Overcoming the past, especially the Nazi ideology that gave rise to the Holocaust, has been a guiding precept of German identity since World War II. In West and East alike, the ambition was to create a different, better Germany.
The West resolved to become a model liberal democracy, atoning for Nazi crimes and subjugating national interests to those of a post-nationalist Europe.
The East defined itself in the tradition of communists who had resisted fascism, giving rise to a state doctrine of remembrance that effectively exculpated it from wartime atrocities.
Behind the wall, the East was frozen in time, a largely homogeneous white country where nationalism was allowed to live on.
“Under the lid of antifascism, the old nationalism partly survived,” said Volkhard Knigge, a historian and director of the memorial at the former Buchenwald concentration camp. “The lid came off in 1989.”
That is one reason nationalist populism thrives more openly in the former East. The other is that easterners have been rebelling against a western narrative that has disempowered them.
Dr. Maaz, like many of his patients, now identifies as East German, something he never did under Communism.
The West, he said, had misunderstood 1989. It had overlooked the role national identity played in the East’s peaceful revolution against Soviet rule.
“We marched, we defeated communism, but it all became a victory of the West,” he said.
“We were never given the power to tell our version of the story,” he added. “You can’t even say that you had a happy childhood without breaking a taboo.”
That eats away at people, he said.
The bitterness is all the greater as easterners were complicit in their own subjugation, he said. “The western prejudice was: We are better. The eastern prejudice was: We are not as good,” he said. “Now easterners are saying: We are different.”
The far-right Alternative for Germany has successfully tapped into that feeling, styling itself as an eastern identity party and fueling resentments — not least toward migrants, who they say threaten German identity.
More than nine in 10 migrants live in the former West. But it is in the former East that antimigrant sentiment is strongest. Dr. Maaz says that has less to do with immigration than mass emigration in the years following 1989.
Some regions lost two generations. “There is demographic anxiety and that has sharpened the sense of a threat to identity,” he said.
Ms. Adomako, who grew up in West Germany, recalled the wave of antimigrant attacks in the years after the fall of the wall. She is still afraid to travel in the East, which remains largely white.
For the first part of her life, the West, too, had been overwhelmingly white. When she was born in the 1960s, she was the only black child in her West Berlin school.
By the time her daughter, Antonia, 20, finished high school last year, one in four of the students in her class were nonwhite.
But four generations after her great-grandfather came to Germany from Cameroon, then a German colony, Antonia still routinely gets asked: “Where are you from?”
“When I’m abroad, I feel German,” she said. “But when I’m in Germany, I don’t know.”
Ulrich Gerst, 36, a teacher in a multiethnic school who grew up in the wealthy southwest of Germany, tries hard to avoid asking that question.
In 2010, Mr. Gerst wrote a master’s thesis about how schools could help students develop their identity. He says he wants to see a Germany that celebrates hyphenated identities. Still, even he sometimes catches himself assuming women in head scarves are not German.
“These subconscious devices are still prevalent,’’ Mr. Gerst said.
For a long time, that discrimination was not merely subconscious, but structural.
Even as Germany became a major immigration country, no real path to citizenship was extended even to the children of immigrants born in the country.
After the fall of communism, the intrinsic racism of German citizenship law became impossible to ignore. Russian citizens with German ancestry who spoke no German were suddenly allowed passports, while second-generation Turks born and raised in Germany were not.
The change to the immigration law in 2000 opened parallel tracks to citizenship for those who were born in Germany or who had lived in the country for at least eight years.
As a child, Idil Baydar says she felt German. But that has changed. The 44-year-old daughter of a Turkish guest worker who arrived in the 1970s now describes herself as a “passport German foreigner.”
“The Germans have turned me into a migrant,” said Ms. Baydar, a comedian who has grown popular on YouTube by mocking Germany’s uneasy relationship with its largest immigrant group.
The final straw came last year when a verdict was reached in a series of 10 murders of mostly Turkish immigrants that had been blamed on other immigrants. In reality, they had been carried out over seven years by an underground neo-Nazi group shielded by Germany’s own intelligence service.
Recently, she has been planning an “escape route,” possibly to Canada.
“My German friends tell me: ‘You’re overreacting,” she said. “I tell them: ‘If I had blue eyes and blond hair, I’d say the same.”
“And now they’re chasing foreigners on German streets,” she added, referring to far-right extremists attacking people who looked “foreign” in the eastern city of Chemnitz last year.
In June this year, a regional politician who had defended Germany’s refugee policy was shot dead on his front porch. Then in October, there was the attack in Halle on the synagogue, which narrowly escaped a massacre, though two were killed.
The Jewish community in Germany, which counts around 200,000 members, is nervous. As a Jew in Germany, said Mr. Kharchenko, the Berlin-based artist, “You’re inevitably asking yourself: Could it happen again?”
Understanding that it could is key to preventing it, said Mr. Knigge, the historian at the Buchenwald memorial. “That’s the most important lesson from German history,” he added.
The resurgence of pre-fascist ideology today worries him, he said. People crave a strong national identity, he noted, and the old West German recipe of deliberately tying it to humility — “being proud of not being proud” — has not satisfied that need.
It has also proved a difficult template for integrating newcomers. “We need to make the lessons of the Holocaust about human rights and the protection of minorities relevant to all minorities,” Mr. Knigge said.
Now, 30 years after the fall of Communism, Germany has another opportunity to try.
Ibrahim Kodaimi, a 52-year-old father of five, said he would never forget the smiling faces and hot food that greeted his family three years ago after their long, treacherous journey from Syria.
But his 20-year-old daughter Nahida said she felt excluded for wearing a head scarf.
And his 18-year-old son Omar said he had tried to make German friends in school, but had found them unresponsive. He said he spent time mostly with other immigrants during recess.
“It was like that,” Mr. Kodaimi interjected.
“It’s still like that,” Omar responded.
Even so, Omar is determined to make Germany accept him.
One of his proudest moments, he said, was when a German, after hearing him speak the language, asked if he had been born in Germany.
Adapting a phrase that Ms. Merkel used when the waves of migrants came to Germany, he said, “Ich schaffe das” — “I can do it.’’
John Eligon and Christopher F. Schuetze contributed reporting.
Produced by Mona Boshnaq, Allison McCann and Gaia Tripoli.
A student of a Hong Kong university who fell during protests at the weekend died early on Friday morning, hospital authorities said, setting the stage for a fresh wave of demonstrations in the self-governing territory in the coming weekend.
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology students' union said the man was a 22-year-old surnamed Chow who was a two-year undergraduate in the computer science department. In some reports, he was identified as Alex Chow and Chow Tsz-lok.
The South China Morning Post reported that he died of cardiac arrest after being in a coma since early Monday morning.
Chow's case has been embraced by the protest movement, which has called for city-wide vigils in his honour.
More:
The student was believed to have fallen in the early hours of Monday in the New Territories district of Tseung Kwan O, while police were trying to disperse the protesters with rounds of tear gas.
Chow was later found lying unconscious in a pool of blood inside a car park that police had fired tear gas into after protesters hurled objects from the building.
Protesters claimed that by firing the tear gas, police also delayed the deployment of emergency medical services to the victim.
Police officials acknowledge that tear gas had been used to disperse protesters near the car park, but say there was only a small amount of gas in the air when emergency responders found Chow.
The precise circumstances of how Chow came to be injured are unclear but he has been embraced by the five-month-old protest movement.
Alex Chow, the HKUST student fell from a carpark 4 days ago, is gone. He was just 22 yo, and had a bright long future ahead of him. https://t.co/EeNu6YSrnk
Al Jazeera's Sarah Clarke reporting from Hong Kong said that the protesters are blaming police, saying they had failed to adhere to tear gas guidelines.
Clarke added that as Friday also marks as a day of graduation for a number of students at the University of Hong Kong's science and technology campus, students have joined a memorial to paid tribute to the 22-year-old.
"The university has... asked for students and these protesters to show restraint, to show peace and to avoid conflict but at the moment the protesters have marched up and are now vandalising and graffitiing some of the operations on this campus that are affiliated with the mainland Chinese companies," Clarke said.
In a social media post, pro-democracy leader Joshua Wong said Hong Kong residents "mourn the loss of the freedom fighter in HK."
"We will not leave anyone behind - what we start together, we finish together. Given the losses suffered by HK society in the past month, the gov must pay the price."
Anger in Beijing
Meanwhile, China slammed protesters, calling them as "mobsters", after a pro-Beijing legislator was injured in a stabbing.
In the latest incident, a man holding a bouquet approached pro-Beijing legislator Junius Ho on Wednesday morning as the politician was campaigning in his constituency near the border with China.
The attack was "not only a serious criminal act but also pure election violence," Xu Luying, spokeswoman for the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office of China's central government, said on Thursday, according to the official Xinhua news agency.
Xu said protesters in Hong Kong "intend to create a 'chilling effect' by threatening and intimidating their candidates and their supporters", in order to "affect the election results of the district councils and realise their purpose of seizing political power".
Xu also called for "strong punishment" against violence in Hong Kong and for a "fair, just, safe and orderly environment" for the district elections, set to be held on November 24.
The international finance hub has been shaken by five months of huge and increasingly violent protests calling for greater democratic freedoms and police accountability.
With Beijing and Hong Kong's unpopular leader Carrie Lam refusing to offer a political solution to the protesters' grievances, violence has spiralled on both sides of the ideological divide.
In October, Wong, the pro-democracy leader, was barred from contesting a seat in the upcoming polls.
An election officer had ruled that the concept of self-determination advocated by Wong's party, Demosisto, contradicted the Basic Law, Hong Kong's mini-constitution.
Students attend a ceremony to pay tribute to Chow Tsz-lok, 22, a university student who fell during protests at the weekend and died early on Friday morning [Tyrone Siu/Reuters]
One of slain Islamic State of Iraq and Iran (ISIS) leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi's wives revealed "a lot of information" about the jihadist group's "inner workings" after she was captured last year, a Turkish official told Agence France-Presse.
The official said Baghdadi's spouse identified herself as Rania Mahmoud but was in fact Asma Fawzi Muhammad Al-Qubaysi.
AFP said the woman was arrested on June 2, 2018 in the Turkish province of Hatay, near the Syrian border, along with 10 others, including Baghdadi's daughter, who identified herself as Leila Jabeer.
Asma Fawzi Muhammad Al-Qubaysi, a wife of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, is seen in an unknown location in an undated picture provided by Turkish security officials
TURKISH SECURITY OFFICIALS / HANDOUT / REUTERS
The official said the family links were confirmed using a DNA sample of Baghdadi provided by Iraqi authorities.
"We discovered (the wife's) real identity pretty quickly. At that point, she volunteered a lot of information about Baghdadi and the inner workings of ISIS," the official said.
"We were able to confirm a lot of things that we already knew. We also obtained new information that led to a series of arrests elsewhere."
The detainees are being held at a deportation center in Turkey, a senior Turkish official told CBS News, adding, "There may or may not be other high-value targets in Turkish custody. I am not at liberty to discuss ongoing investigations and intelligence operations."
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan revealed for the first time on Wednesday that Al-Qubaysi had been detained.
Turkey's President Recep Tayyip Erdogan in January 2019
Burhan Ozbilici / AP
"We caught his wife -- I say this today for the first time -- but we didn't make a big fuss about it," Erdogan told a gathering of students in Ankara.
He confirmed that Turkey had also captured Baghdadi's sister and brother-in-law.
Erdogan took a swipe at the United States for making a big deal of Baghdadi's killing, saying, "They started a very big communication operation."
The ISIS leader was killed in a U.S. special forces raid carried out with the help of Kurdish fighters in the northwestern Syrian province of Idlib, just across the border from Turkey.
According to the U.S. account, Baghdadi ran into a dead-end tunnel in his hideout and detonated a suicide vest, killing himself and two children.
The raid came in the wake of a Turkish military offensive against the Kurdish militants, who have been a close ally of the West in the fight against ISIS but are viewed as terrorists by Ankara.
Image from video posted on militant website on April 29, 2019 purports to show ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
AP
Erdogan told reporters Thursday that members of al-Baghdadi's "inner circle" have been attempting to get into Turkey from Syria, and that the number of al-Baghdadi relatives who've been caught by Turkey "is close to reaching double digits," the AP said.
It was the second straight day in which Erdogan sought to publicize Turkey's efforts to capture ISIS members who were close to al-Baghdadi, the AP noted. Turkey has been criticized over its recent military incursion into Syria to drive out Syrian Kurdish fighters from northeast Syria due, among other things, to concerns it would enable an ISIS resurgence, the AP pointed out.
