BRUENING SEES U.S. AS CENTRAL GOVERNMENT

Tracing the course of centralized government in Germany and the attempts to democratize it from the last century down to the present time, Dr. Heinrich Bruening, former German Chancellor, told members of the Politics Club last night that he saw something of a parallel in the United States of today. The meeting was held in the common room of Leverett House.

Dr. Bruening said that the fundamental problems of democratic government are long and difficult of solution, and had been worked for unceasingly in Germany. Changing his tone, he observed that "they are easily solved under a totalitarian state," where no attempt is made to preserve the ideal of self-government.

Illustrating from the old Prussian bureaucracy, whose history he traced from the Constitution of Weimar in 1813, he declared that the system only worked when men of the highest calibre had control of the machinery. When the ideal of self-administration in the states and townships of the German Federation had been fairly well established, Bruening said, laws were more of a directive character than an attempt to fit every case. He said that adaptability and elasticity characterized this legislation.

Germany's foremost exile claimed that the Nazis have not tried to solve the problem of a clear delineation of the function of the central, state, and municipal powers.