WEITLING, Wilhelm Christian. – Propagandist, organizer, communist, pioneer of communism in Germany, b. at Magdeburg on 8 Oct. 1807, d. at New York on 25 Jan. 1871.
A tailor, poet, lively and fanatical publicist, he became a communist in Paris after 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 condemned and expelled. He traveled in Russia, England, Belgium, and Holland with the aim of organizing communist centers; finally he went to New York. However, the Revolution of 1848 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. Returning to Europe, he made Hamburg the seat of communist propaganda and founded a League for Freedom. Threatened, he fled to London and in 1851 was in New York for the third time, where for three years he published his *Republic of the Workers*.
Poorly educated, he was a theorist of the new ideas, conceived in a very simplistic manner: the State was held to provide for the needs of each member of the community, while the latter, in turn, was obliged to work six hours a day. Enlightenment, social revolution, and anarchism influenced his mind equally and confusedly, inspiring his actions.