WEITLING, WILHELM CHRISTIAN. - Propagandist, communist organizer, pioneer of communism in Germany, b. at Magdeburg on 8 Oct. 1807 and d. at Nuova York on 25 Jan. 1871.
A tailor, poet, lively and fanatical publicist, he became a communist in Paris, reading Babeuf and the utopian socialists: Fourier and Cabet. Appointed foreign agent by the Parisian League of Communists, he was in Geneva in 1840 and then in Lausanne, Zurich, and Berne. There he wrote the Gospel of the Poor Sinner (Berne 1842), for which he was sentenced and expelled. He travelled in Russia, England, Belgium, and Holland in order to organize centres of communism: finally also in Nuova York. The Revolution of 1848, however, found him in Berlin. Forced to flee, he returned to America, where he founded the newspaper The Democratic Union and attempted a communist colonization in Wisconsin. Having returned to Europe, he made Hamburg the headquarters of communist propaganda and founded a League for Freedom. Threatened, he fled to
London, and in 1851 he was for the third time in Nuova York, where for three years he published his Republic of Workers.
Poorly educated, he was a theorist of the new ideas, conceived in a highly simplistic manner: the State was bound to provide what was necessary to every member of the community, who, in return, was obliged to work six hours a day. Enlightenment, social revolution, and anarchy influenced his mentality equally and confusedly, inspiring his actions.