I'm writing a paper for my Pop Culture in Communism class. I decided I wanted to do how music influenced the wall falling after watching something about Hasslehoff's performance at the wall. After a bit of research I read about quite a few people who performed. I'm kinda just wondering how much the concerts influenced that "peaceful falling" of the Berlin Wall and end to the Cold War in general.
I don't know how much this will help you, but there's two rock concerts that stand out to me. The first is the Moscow Music Peace Festival, which took place in Central Lenin Stadium on Aug. 12-13, 1989. That was just a few months before the fall of the Berlin Wall and was definitely emblematic of the way things were changing. More than 100,000 people attended the event, which included Skid Row, Bon Jovi, Cinderella, Motley Crue, Gorky Park, Ozzy Osbourne and Scorpions.
That concert was topped two years later by the Monsters of Rock festival on Sept. 28, 1991. The event took place outdoors at Tushino Airfield and featured AC/DC, Metallica, Pantera and a lot of other groups.
Keep in mind that this was just a month after the attempted coup against Gorbachev, and changes were sweeping across the Soviet Union even as the concert took place. Free admission was offered, and though there were strong arguments against having the concert, it went ahead.
With an estimated 1.6 million people attending, it remains one of the largest mass events in world history.
Hasselhoff performed at a concert (among many other artists) at new years eve 1989 - that was over six weeks after the wall came down. I read an interview with the organizer of that event back then, and he claimed that Hasselhoff basically just showed up at that concert and pushed his way on stage.
I would say not much at all. There had been a few instances in the 80’s where the GDR kids would gather near the Wall/Rampart to listen to rock bands play in West Berlin. This would lead to conflicts with the Peoples’ Police who did not want thousands of teenagers gathered near the Wall/Rampart. Reference Anna Saunders, Honecker’s Children: Youth and Patriotism in East(ern) Germany.
The most influential factors in the eventual peaceful fall of the Wall was the media in the West, a GDR politician, named Guenter Schaboski, and two Stasi border control officers by the names of Harald Jaeger and Heinz Schaeffer. Schaboski had given a press conference in which he stated that the process for approval of exit visas would be sped up. When a journalist asked him when this would go into effect, he answered, mistakenly, that it would be effective immediately. The Western media took up on this and started broadcasting that the Berlin Wall, and the Inner German Defense Border, for that matter, were now down and East Germans could freely travel to the West. Since most East Germans watched the Western news, crowds began to gather at the various checkpoints/border transfer centers in Berlin. The border troopers, who still had shooting orders (those weren’t repealed until 22 December 1989), were extremely nervous. A fury of calls from the various Stasi border control officers went unanswered. Jaeger and Schaeffer, both working on 9 November 1989, lay claim to being the first to allow the Easterners to cross into the West. Oddly enough, the GDR government did not have the authority to let people travel freely to the West. That decision had to be made by Gorbachev. It did not prevent it from happening though. Reference Mary Sarotte The Collapse: The Accidental Opening of the Berlin Wall.