But the regime had one more ace up its sleeve. One of the biggest rock stars of all time would come to their socialist republic: Bruce Springsteen.
As part of his Tunnel of Love Express Tour, he’d agreed to play in East Berlin. With at least 160,000 people in attendance (some estimates go up to 500,000 since so many watched without a ticket), it was the biggest concert in GDR history and the biggest audience Springsteen ever played for.
The event had a huge impact on both Springsteen himself and his East German audience. In his autobiography, the American rock star remembers how he had never seen so many people in one place and how touched he was by the homemade American flags some of the revellers had brought along.
Many East Germans who attended the concert in turn remembered it fondly for decades. I spoke to a few over the years – after all, even at the conservative end of the attendance figure estimates, we’re talking about 1% of the entire country’s population seeing Springsteen at the Radrennbahn Weißensee on 19 July 1988.
I was so intrigued by the stories I heard from East Germans about what it was like to see Bruce Springsteen then, that I resolved to go to a concert myself if I ever got the chance. That chance came last weekend when I watched him play in front of 90,000 fans at Wembley.
Of course, Springsteen is now 36 years older than he was in 1988 but he has lost nothing of his magnetic charisma, and I could at least begin to imagine how people must have felt back then. If he has the capacity to pull people out of their 21st-century lives for three hours with his music and his energy, his concert in the small, enclosed world that was the GDR in 1988 must have been like something from another planet.
Michael Pilz didn’t even particularly like his music but attended anyway for the spectacle and wasn’t disappointed. Listening to Springsteen’s American growl, he felt ‘homesick for the world, and this world was a guest in the GDR for one night.’
In and of itself there was nothing forbidden or rebellious about the concert. Like the others, it had been organised by the Free German Youth. They had officially billed it as a ‘Concert for Nicaragua’ to commemorate the 9th anniversary of the Nicaraguan Revolution and as a working-class hero, Springsteen also fit the propaganda bill.