Erik Kirschbaum

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.

Kirschbaum got the idea to write "Rocking the Wall" while sitting in a taxi on the way home from a riveting Springsteen concert in Berlin in 2002. He had just written a story about that concert for the Reuters news agency when the taxi driver started raving about Springsteen's '88 concert in East Berlin. Kirschbaum was tired and just wanted to relax; he told the taxi driver "Yeah, I know. All Springsteen concerts are special." No, no no, the taxi driver yelled. You don't understand. All of East Germany was rocking and shaking during and after that concert, he said. So Kirschbaum started looking into the concert and sure enough: there were 300,000 people there, the biggest crowd in East German history and the biggest crowd Springsteen ever played for. And then he even delivered an anti-Berlin Wall speech in the middle of his concert. And 16 months later the Berlin Wall collapsed.