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This image emerged from the pages of The Illustrated London News for 14 September 1909 and shows "nearly the entire city of Berlin" coming out for the arrival of the Zeppelin III. And, as you can see (click into the image for a larger view) there are at the very least hundreds of thousands of people present. And most of them seem to be waving--it must've been extraordinary. I've done a little detail work for the larger image, concentrating on the guy in the front foreground with the binoculars--I love the kid to his upper left waving a handkerchief, filled with every expectation.
Perhaps a similar sized crowd (some estimates putting the number at a million) showed up to listen to Bruce Springsteen perform in East Berlin in 1988. I have no idea what the East German government was thinking when they allowed him to perform. Listening to hundreds of thousands of people singing along to "Born in the USA" is monumental and very emotional--the video stays like that the whole way through, but the crowd really seems to find its voice at 2:52. Both scenes are pretty ecstatic, all those people seeing something that they'd never seen before... I guess it woul dbe possible for someone to have been in both crowds in their lives--a little tottering, and watching at the fringes of a brittle-bone-cracking crowd, but certainly possible. (And definitely possible for certain enhanced crowds in that same city in the 1930's, but I won't go there.) Somehow I've got a connection going between the kid in the 1909 scene and the kid in the Springsteen video at 5:02
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