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younger critics and victims of Hitler, £rika and Klaus Mann, observedthat "the German people do not take to centralization. Germany'sstructure is regional. The Germans do not care to, and donot actually, accept dictation from Berlin." 2 The annotator of theReynal and Hitchcock American translation of Mein Kamþf notesthis fact. "Manifestly," he observes, "the Germans have tended tobreak into groups, and most efforts to keep them together havefailed or succeeded only in part. Doubtless the major reason for thisdivergence is not racial but religious, . . . After the war Germanyvery nearly disintegrated again. Movements favoring an independentRhineland, an independent Silesia, an independent Bavaria gained considerablemomentum. Many Germans will tell you that if the Hitlermovement should fail, a new breakup of Germany would follow." 3I mention this not as expressing any special virtues among eitherItalians or Germans but as a fact completely at variance with somepopularly accepted notions of these histories. England, France,Russia, Spain long before—centuries in some cases—had been drawntogether into national, unitary bonds. Until the middle of the lastcentury Italy remained a land of eight small states, Germany a collectionof some thirty-nine separate units.When, following the Franco-Prussian War, the Germans unitedin a single state, the new nation was erected not into a single centralpolitical unit, but rather into a federal union of many states. Theconstitution lodged certain very limited powers with the federalgovernment—the empire—and reserved the remainder to the states.The central government had jurisdiction over foreign relations, thearmy and navy, imports and exports, the postal, telephone, andtelegraph system, and nothing else. Even the administration of thefederal laws was committed not to federal officials, as with us, butto the several states. Far from being an autocrat, the Kaiser presidedover a federal government which actually possessed less powersthan the United States federal government.Its power of taxation was severely limited. It depended for itsrevenues on import and export duties, excise taxes and stamps ons Tbe Other Germany, by Erika and Klaus Mann, Modern Age Books, New York, 1940.3 Mein Kamþf, edited by Dr. George N. Shuster and others, Reynal & Hitchcock, NewYork, 1940.79