Ray Stannard Baker, an American traveler to Germany at the turn of the century, exclaimed: “From the moment of landing on German soil, the American begins to feel a certain spirit of repression which seems to pervade the land.” Intellectually and visibly struck by the omnipresent guiding and rather militaristic hand of the German government – erect, militarily dressed, and heavily armed policemen on nearly every corner; statues and sculptures honoring and commemorating German leaders and soldiers on the rooftops of city buildings, in public parks, at important and sometimes unimportant intersections; and uniformed soldiers constantly on drill or parade – Baker concluded that he never before knew “what it really means to be governed,” and that he agreed with the sarcastic remark of a German socialist who had said: “It takes half of all the Germans to control the other half.” Most vexing of all to Baker were the ever-visible signs posting the comprehensive government and police regulations that seemed to deal with nearly all forms of human behavior, prescribing what was allowed and more often proscribing what was verboten. Feeling the “wild west in me slowly suffocating,” he eventually came to amuse himself by making a curious game of trying to discover what was not yet forbidden but, no doubt, soon would be. One of his odder discoveries concerned the hitherto unregulated automobile buses of Berlin, which “tooted up and down the streets like so many steam locomotives, running at a rate of speed much greater than that of the ordinary trams.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]