[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ly3DVJVgJhQ]
David Hasselhoff has put his shirt on and found a place back in the spotlight.
The former Baywatch beefcake is back in Germany, where he’s hailed as a pop icon, to join a protest over removing some of the last remnants of the Berlin Wall, the Guardian reports.
In 1989 Hasselhoff became a part of history when he performed his anthem, “Looking for Freedom,” at Berlin’s New Year’s Eve concert just a few weeks after the Wall fell — wearing a difficult-to-unsee leather jacket covered in blinking lights. The song became an instant hit, topping German pop charts despite the fact it actually had nothing to do with the Cold War.
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“I didn’t realize the significance of ‘Looking for Freedom’ in east Germany until a few months ago,” Hasselhoff said on Sunday. But the Knight Rider star figured it out in time to perform it again almost 25 years later in front of thousands of protestors angry at a plan to build luxury apartments on the site of Berlin’s East Side Gallery — a mile-long segment of the Wall that has been transformed into a permanent art exhibit and tourist attraction. The demolition has since been put on hold to look for an alternate solution, but Hasselhoff has vowed to keep pushing to cancel the plan, even organizing a concert benefit and fundraiser.
“You can’t really make holes in the Wall and expect it to keep being an effective memorial,” Axel Klausmeier, the director of the Berlin Wall Foundation, told the New Yorker. “The whole point of the Wall was that you couldn’t get across it.”
“I was overwhelmed, and I felt exactly where I was supposed to be,” the 60-year-old actor said about his performance, according to the New Yorker. “I thought, this is just like the old days, like 1989; like, wow, I still got it. But of course, I don’t ‘got it,’ it’s the Wall that’s got it.”
Here’s that jacket, by the way: