One crisp autumn morning after a long night of Wildbrau beer and Spaetzle noodles, I awoke atop an Ikea bunk bed to find David Hasselhoff hovering over me, wearing nothing but his "Baywatch" bikini. I was disoriented. He was tan and hairy, with a smile the size of Stuttgart. When I leaned in to have a closer look, we bumped noses. Lucky for me, he was just a magazine pinup taped to the ceiling. (Darn the low clearance in these Hanseatic-era houses!) I heard a muffled giggle from the bunk below, then I remembered where I was: spending the weekend in Hamburg with a friend's family and her five younger siblings.



The Hasselhoff-on-the-ceiling prank was but one in a long line of pop-cultural awakenings I experienced in the fall of 1989 during my semester abroad in the land of eternal Oktoberfest. In those days, a still-divided Germany lay at the crux of tradition and tackiness. Sure, the West had the historic part down pat: Albrecht Durer's self-portrait in Munich's Alte Pinakothek and the Cologne Cathedral were proof plenty of that. Yet even if the East (where