Was Hasselhoff present when the Berlin Wall fell?
David Hasselhoff
His music career took off in the late 1980s and achieved success at the tops of the charts, with his album "Looking for Freedom" which went triple platinum in Europe. He had one #1 hit in the German pop charts in spring of 1989 ("Looking for Freedom"). He was noted for his performance of the single at the Berlin Wall on New Year's Eve 1989, two months after the East German government had opened the wall, but nine months before unification took place. Wearing a piano-keyboard scarf and a leather jacket covered in motion lights, Hasselhoff stood in a bucket crane and performed the song along with the crowd. The performance has had a lasting impact on German pop-culture with Hasselhoff commenting that the song became an "anthem" and "song of hope" for the people of East Germany. In 2004, Hasselhoff lamented the lack of a photo of him in the Checkpoint Charlie Museum in Berlin.
Zbigniew Brzezinski
In 1989, the Communists failed to mobilize support in Poland, and Solidarity swept the general elections. Later the same year, Brzezinski toured Russia and visited a memorial to the Katyn Massacre. This served as an opportunity for him to ask the Soviet government to acknowledge the truth about the event, for which he received a standing ovation in the Soviet Academy of Sciences. Ten days later, the Berlin Wall fell, and Soviet-supported governments in Eastern Europe began to totter. Strobe Talbott, one of Brzezinski's long-time critics, conducted an interview with him for "TIME" magazine entitled "Vindication of a Hardliner".