(Photo: Erika Berlin)
For decades, American actor David Hasselhoff has been a huge celebrity in Germany, mostly for his singing. So it's proper that the people of Berlin have built a shrine in his honor. Go to the basement of the Circus Hostel in the Mitte neighborhood and you'll find a carefully curated arrangement of Hasselhoff relics, including a piece of the Berlin Wall that he personally broke off and the piano keyboard scarf that he wore at the time.
Ericka Berlin of Mental Floss visited the museum. She writes:
According to the staff, it’s most often found when visitors at the upstairs café or basement bar stumble upon it on their way to the restroom. "People often come into the bar giggling after having discovered it," bartender and museum curator Ally Chaplin tells mental_floss. "We also have a few Hoff masks left over from one of our parties displayed in the bar, which encourages people to ask about him, and then we can send them to look at the museum if they haven't already found it."
Originally devised as a gimmicky shrine around eight years ago, the bar’s patrons embraced the dark, framed portrait of the actor and would occasionally graffiti their love for him around the bar. When the hostel renovated in 2014 and installed its own microbrewery in the spot the shrine had stood, one of the hostel’s co-owners suggested expanding their Hoff lore with a museum in an unused hallway on the opposite side of the basement. Chaplin took on the project, spending months scouring eBay and Amazon for memorabilia. "The Knight Rider car was the hardest item to secure," she says. "They come up periodically on eBay auctions, but they get quite expensive."
-via Jonah Goldberg