Crowds at the Stuttgart fair, 1937

Between the booths women in long coats and a little girl gaze up at the rides beside a policeman in a peaked cap, an old woman with white hair looks about in wonder, and a fruit seller waits behind her basket. A woman carries off a huge teddy bear, and a bunch of balloons printed with cartoon figures floats against the sky. From a swinging gondola of the zeppelin carousel the crowd turns into a pattern of hats, a boy in glasses grins, and the halls of the fair pass below, one lettered Festwirt Paul Greiner and another Stuttg..., the beginning of the Stuttgarter Hofbräu sign.

A whole town on its feet, workers and burghers, grandparents and children, was the national community as the regime liked to show it; in the crowd, apart from the flags at the gate, little marks the year.