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Uncovering the story of the epic Bruce Springsteen concert in East Berlin on July 19, 1988, this revised edition contains additional color photographs and a new preface by a Bruce Springsteen band member depicting how the Springsteen concert in Berlin changed the world. Research was collected from dozens of fans, participants, and organizers, as well as Jon Landau, Springsteen’s long-time friend and manager, who unearthed old newspaper clippings, TV tapes, Stasi files, collected photos, and memorabilia. Take a trip with Springsteen and be transported to the divided city, where The Boss, live on stage, delivered a bold speech calling for all barriers to be torn down to a record-breaking crowd of more than 300,000 delirious young East Germans full of joy and hope. Their tremendous, powerful cry for freedom became the "final nail in the coffin" of the Communist regime, which subsequently led to the uprising that brought down the Wall.
- Sales Rank: #875482 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-05-01
- Released on: 2015-06-15
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
�"... a fascinating historical snapshot of Communist cultural officials scrambling to contain the brewing political restlessness all around them."
The Wall Street Journal
"This book makes a strong case that historians should explore Springsteen's impact in fueling the revolution."
Der SPIEGEL
"Springsteen is still with us. The regime of the GDR is not."
The BBC
"Once in a while you play a show that ends up staying inside of you, living with you for the rest of your life. East Berlin in 1988 was certainly one of them."
The Guardian"...a glorious example of the influence that rock 'n' roll can have on people who are hungry and ready for change."
--The Washington Post
"An illuminating and impressively detailed examination of a frequently overlooked moment in the nexus of rock music and political liberation."
--Eric Alterman, author of�The Promise of Bruce Springsteen
"It was cultural forces, not merely political or military ones, that won the Cold War for the West. ... Young East Germans wanted their rock and roll;
--The Star Ledger,�New Jersey
From the Author
After a riveting Bruce Spring�steen concert in Berlin in 2002, I was riding home in a taxi when the driver suddenly started chattering on about another Spring�steen performance--in Communist East Berlin, back in 1988. He said that July '88 show was the most amazing thing ever, anywhere. Spring�steen rocked East Berlin and rattled the whole Communist country. The concert behind the Iron Curtain happened more than fourteen years before our chance encounter on that cold October night, but the heavyset taxi driver with the thick gray beard and long scraggly hair couldn't stop raving about it."Yeah, I know," I said, trying to close my eyes and relax. I had just filed a Reuters news agency report on Spring�steen chastising George W. Bush for bullying countries like Germany that were opposed to invading Iraq. "I've seen lots of Spring�steen concerts too, and they're always amazing.""Nein, nein, nein!" the driver replied. "No! You don't understand." That East Berlin concert was really different. There was never anything like it. More than 300,000 people watched it live, and millions more saw it on television. The whole country was shaken up. "It was the most incredible thing that ever happened in East Germany," he said, growing animated, his garlic-scented breath drifting in my direction.For millions of baby boomers, Springsteen's music has been the soundtrack of our lives. Four decades of song lyrics are lodged in our collective memory, like "It's a death trap, it's a suicide rap, we gotta get out while we're young, cuz tramps like us, baby, we were born to run," from Born to Run, and "It ain't no sin to be glad you're alive," from Badlands. The Berlin taxi driver's uncontainable enthusiasm about that concert was contagious, and he got me wondering: Had there been something really special about that Spring�steen show in Communist East Berlin?The more I delved into it, the more I wanted to know. It was fascinating, for instance, to find out that Spring�steen had the moxie to deliver a short anti-Wall speech in East Berlin. It was also incredible to read about the size and unruliness of the biggest-ever East German concert crowd--estimated to have been at least 300,000 people--and how countless thousands without tickets simply stormed the gates to get in.And then it dawned on me--what made that particular concert so extraordinary was its date: July 19, 1988. That was less than sixteen months before the Berlin Wall fell. Could there have been a connection between the Spring�steen concert, the ensuing rebellion in East Germany, and the Berlin Wall falling that no one had seen before? Might there be a direct line between Spring�steen on July 19, 1988, and the Berlin Wall bursting open on November 9, 1989?I've been wondering about these questions ever since. It seems clear to me that there must be a link between that Spring�steen concert and the shifting sentiment in East Germany that led to the Berlin Wall's collapse. I got excited by the idea of trying to find out about the atmosphere and what really happened when Spring�steen went behind the Iron Curtain in 1988, but there was always the daunting prospect of how I was ever going to find people who were at a concert a quarter of a century ago. That turned out to be easier than I thought because, it seems, almost everyone living in East Germany and at least in their teens in 1988 was either at the concert, knew someone who was at the concert, or heard or saw it on the radio or TV. It was almost as if time stood still on that day in East Germany--everyone seems to have a memory of it.As good fortune would have it, Spring�steen was back in Berlin in May 2012, on his "Wrecking Ball Tour," and many who attended had been at the 1988 concert as well and, like Spring�steen himself on stage, were more than happy to talk about their memories. I talked to scores of eyewitnesses and a number of historians in Germany and the United States about the question of whether Springsteen's four-hour performance and fearless call to bring down the Wall might have had something to do with the revolution that began roiling in East Germany in the weeks and months that followed. Whether you believe that Springsteen's epic concert contributed to the movement that brought down the Berlin Wall depends to a certain degree on whether you believe in the power of rock 'n' roll. Among those who are convinced of those revolutionary forces is Philip Murphy, America's ambassador to Germany and an unabashed Spring�steen fan. Although he wasn't in East Berlin in 1988, Murphy believes his fellow New Jerseyan did have an appreciable impact on East Germans: "I know and love Springsteen's music--and can only imagine what kind of effect the live concert must have had on East German audiences, on people living under an oppressive regime, wanting change so desperately." In the words of J�rg Beneke, who was among the hundreds of thousands who saw the concert live, Springsteen's concert was like "a nail in the coffin" for Communist East Germany, the beginning of the end.What is beyond doubt is that Springsteen's 1988 concert in East Berlin is a glorious example of the influence that rock 'n' roll can have on people who are hungry and ready for change. This is the untold story about that once-in-a-lifetime concert in East Berlin and the role Spring�steen may have unwittingly played in helping fuel a rebellion that would bring down the Berlin Wall.-Erik Kirschbaum
About the Author
Erik Kirschbaum, a native of New York City and long-time Springsteen fan, has lived in Germany for more than twenty-five years. He is a correspondent for the Reuters international news agency and a non-fiction author, and is based in Berlin since 1993. He has written about entertainment, politics, sports, economics, renewable energy as well as disasters, earthquakes and climate change in nearly thirty countries in Europe and North America. He is also a devoted father of four, an enthusiastic cyclist, a solar power entrepreneur and an unabashed crusader for renewable energy. Rocking the Wall is his third book.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
From One Who Was There...
By Mike Spengler
This review is in part a response to Edward Ruppenthal's "most helpful critical review". I was in the horn section for the 1988 "Tunnel Of Love" tour, and so was part of the East Berlin concert. I've been in touch with author Erik Kirshbaum and have sent him my recollections from before, during, and after the concert. It's possible he might include my memories in a future updated version- either e-book or print.
Having said that, I found Erik's book to be well-written and detailed as befitting a fine journalist working with sources at hand. Quite a bit of what he's written dovetails with my recollections, and there is quite a bit that is new information to me. His interview-based thesis that the concert inspired a lot of younger East Germans to become more actively hopeful about change is well-argued, although I find myself more in agreement with Jon Landau's thoughts about it (pg.126-paperback edition). It was fun reading the updated memories of the young woman who was brought onstage for "Dancing In The Dark" (pg. 103). I'm sure all 200,000-plus people who were there remember her... I do...:-)
My only (very) minor quibble with it is the lack of an index- which just reflects my being the son of writers. For not just Bruce fans, but for historians recalling the changes of the last half of the 20th Century, it is a valuable work...
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Springsteen -- the background music for discontented East Germans
By Tom Heneghan
The history of great events in written in several phases. First come the journalists, who knit together as many facts and as much analysis as they can on the fly to answer the burning question "what's happening?" When the dust settles, some journalists and historians with quick reflexes produce books that stand back and put the event into greater perspective, usually with new details and insight the frontline reporters could not have had. After that come further waves of history writing, some taking an ever wider perspective and some drilling down into details of the event. The best of the latter reflect some of the former.
When Erik Kirschbaum, one of my Reuters colleagues from the 1990s, told me about his idea for "Rocking The Wall: Bruce Springsteen: The Untold Story of a Concert in East Berlin That Changed the World," I was intrigued. As the Reuters chief correspondent for Germany in 1989, I wrote one of those first drafts of history, pumping out the news hour after hour after the Berlin Wall opened. My colleagues and I followed the story for several more years, learning more and more about the once opaque communist system and how it fell apart. The first wave of books came out in the early 1990s, giving far more details and insight into the politics that led to the peaceful revolution of 1989 and the way the two halves of Germany organized and carried out their reunification. My book "Unchained Eagle: Germany after the Wall," published in 2000, retold the story from the top-down political perspective.
I'd heard about some Western rock stars or groups playing in East Germany in the late 1980s, but by mid-1989, when I took up my post in Bonn, the political issues were so dominant that these details didn't seem interesting. Maybe I wasn't enough of a Springsteen fan at the time, maybe I didn't have the luck that Erik had to find a taxi driver who told such a gripping story about his 1988 East Berlin concert. Whatever the reason was, I - like all the other journalists writing the big East-West German saga in those days -- didn't drill down as far as Erik did to recount the story he tells.
But history thankfully isn't a closed book. So when Erik heard 14 years later about the Woodstock effect that the Springsteen concert had in East Germany, he knew this was one of those stories that would enrich our understanding of how the apparently most successful of all the communist states collapsed so quickly. There are several political explanations for why the East Germans lost their fear of the repressive state - the main one in my book was that success of the courageous October 9 demonstration in Leipzig, when the Stasi troops did not mow down the marchers, emboldened East Berliners to hold a peaceful mass demo at Alexanderplatz on November 4 and then flock to the Wall to force it open five days later.
But that courage the Leipzig demonstrators showed probably had to come also from somewhere or something stronger than just mounting political frustration. There must have been some kind of inspiration too. Like the anti-Vietnam war protest music I listened to in the 1960s, concerts like Springsteen's and some audacious songs by local artists (like the expelled singer Wolf Biermann, the very popular but eventually banned Klaus Renft Combo and others) provided the cultural support for East German dissenters. Erik has done the research and conducted the interviews to show how all this became the background music for the discontented who finally took to the streets chanting "Wir sind das Volk" (We are the people). They were the sound track for East Germans who didn't "need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows."
As a colleague of Erik's, I'm pleased for him to see how well he's uncovered this aspect of East German cultural history and placed it firmly in the wider perspective of the political story we were covering at the time. As an amateur historian, I have to admit I'm envious of the story he got and wish I'd had this perspective in my own book. Erik has taken our understanding of East Germany's "peaceful revolution" several steps further than the previous waves of history writing had done. And he's done it in such a readable way that both Springsteen fans and contemporary European history buffs will enjoy it.
Great job, Erik!
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating story...a must-read fror Springsteen fans!
By Karin S
This is a great book that really got me thinking about how the Cold War really ended. Why do people always assume that it takes takes and nuclear missiles to win wars...this time it was rock 'n' roll that helped end the Cold War. I think it's time to take a new look at all the factors that went into the collapse of the Berlin Wall and this book really opened my eyes about a lot of things. I couldn't stop reading this thing once I started and finished it in a day. Great story and well worth the money.
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