Wilhelm Weitling | Biography

Wilhelm Weitling, although considerably less well known than his fellow poets of the Vormärz (the period from 1840 up to the German revolutions of March 1848), such as Georg Herwegh, Ferdinand Freiligrath, and Hoffmann von Fallersleben, exemplifies more than any of them the convergence of political theory, activism, and literary practice in the 1840s. He is widely considered to be the first communist theoretician.

Wilhelm Christian Weitling was born in Magdeburg on 5 October 1808, the illegitimate son of a seamstress, Christine Weitling, and Guillaume Terijou, a soldier in the French occupying force. After completing school Weitling was apprenticed to a tailor; as a journeyman he moved to Leipzig in 1830, to Dresden in 1832, to Vienna in 1834, and to Paris in 1837.

In Paris he was one of the founders of a German socialist organization, the Bund der Geächteten (League of Outlaws); later the organization was called the Bund der Gerechten (League of the Just) and, after that, the Bund der Kommunisten (Communist League). In France he came under the influence of utopian socialists such as Etienne Cabet, François-Noël Babeuf, and Hugues Félicité Robert de Lamennais, and he translated the latter's Livre du peuple (Book of the People) into German in 1838. His first work, Die Menschheit, wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte (The Human Race, as It Is and as It Should Be, 1838) offered a utopian socialism based on a revolutionary interpretation of the Bible. The involvement of the League of the Just in the insurrection of the "société des saisons" (society of the seasons) in 1839 forced him to flee to Zurich. There, in 1840, he founded the periodical Der Hülferuf der deutschen Jugend (The Cry of German Youth for Help), which was renamed Die junge Generation (The Young Generation) in 1842. His Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit (Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom, 1842) revealed the emergence in Weitling of a proletarian class consciousness. His next book led to his prosecution for blasphemy in 1843 on the basis of the prospectus through which Weitling had tried to solicit subscriptions; he was sentenced to ten months' imprisonment and subsequent banishment from Switzerland for five years. The book itself, Das Evangelium des armen Sünders (The Gospel of the Poor Sinner), was published the following year. It is an interpretation of the Bible in which Christ--"der revolutionäre Zimmermann" (the revolutionary carpenter)--is portrayed as a communist preaching the abolition of private property. Weitling holds that the contradiction in contemporary society between a nominal Christianity and "die Macht des Mammons" (the power of Mammon) results from a misunderstanding of the teachings of Christ; Christ "war ... ein Kommunist" (was ... a communist) who regarded property as inherently evil: "Das Prinzip der Lehre Jesu ist die Gemeinschaft der Arbeiten und Genüsse" (the principle of Christ's message is the communality of work and of pleasure). The spectacular nature of Weitling's trial and the publication of the poems he wrote while in prison as Kerkerpoesien (Prison Poems, 1844) generated great interest in radical circles. Released from imprisonment, he arrived in London in August 1844. Unlike many of his colleagues in the League of the Just, he found it difficult to get involved in British working-class politics and had little patience with the new, "scientific" direction that communist thought was taking.

In 1846 he moved to Brussels, where Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were becoming increasingly prominent in the Belgian branch of the League of the Just; but after losing a confrontation with Marx that established the victory of "wissenschaftlicher Sozialismus" (scientific socialism) over "Gefühlssozialismus" (intuitive socialism) he became increasingly isolated. He immigrated to New York at the beginning of 1847, returning to Germany in 1848 as the representative of the New York lodge of the Befreiungsbund (Union of Liberation). That year he founded a weekly newspaper, Der Urwähler (The Archetypal Voter), in Berlin, but it quickly collapsed. It rapidly became clear that Weitling was out of place on the German revolutionary scene. Nevertheless, he continued to be hounded by the authorities and fled back to New York, via London, in 1849. He edited and published the utopian socialist journal Republik der Arbeiter (Workers' Republic) from 1850 to 1855, and he was involved for a time in attempts to establish a workers' cooperative bank and a communist settlement in Communia, Iowa.

In 1854 he married the twenty-two-year-old Dorothea Caroline Louise Toedt, who had immigrated to the United States with her parents two years previously. The Weitlings had five sons and a daughter.

The publishing firm connected with his Republik der Arbeiter republished most of his early writings, but after his first treatise on cosmology appeared in 1856 (the second was not published until 1931) his publishing ventures collapsed. He was forced to return to tailoring and spent years fighting a patent battle with the Singer Sewing Company over buttonhole and embroidery machines he had invented. He became an American citizen in 1867. He died of a stroke on 5 January 1871, the day after he attended a banquet of the Workers' International.

Recent attention to Weitling, particularly in the former German Democratic Republic, has centered on his relationship to Marx and Engels and his theoretical writings, which are seen as important in the development of early socialist thought. His literary work, which has received little attention, consists of twelve poems in the collection Volksklänge (Sounds of the People, 1841) and his Kerkerpoesien. Like his theoretical writings, the poetry in Volksklänge demonstrates the changes that mark off the Vormärz from Young Germany (the socially engaged writers of the 1830s, represented by Theodor Mundt, Ludwig Wienbarg, and Karl Gutzkow). Instead of vague cries for German unity and freedom and instead of the rejection of absolutism in non-class-specific terms, Weitling's watchword is "Gleichheit" (equality), which has more-explicit political connotations. His verses on the Rhine crisis (France's threat in 1840 to extend its borders east of the Rhine) express hope for the establishment in Germany of a free and equal society that will be an example to the rest of the world. "Das Geld" (Money) and "Klage und Hoffnung" (Lament and Hope) focus on the existing distribution of wealth as the main impediment to social and material equality. This ideal is one that was "von den Brüdern Jesu Christs verstanden" (understood by brothers in Jesus Christ). The principles of Christian socialism--the constant theme of Weitling's theoretical writings--find particularly vigorous expression in "Jakob von Hutten," a hymn of praise to the sixteenth-century Anabaptist leader Jakob Huter, who set an example for the present by establishing a social order based on the communality of goods. The poems have little intrinsic merit; the simple rhyme patterns and the hymnlike forms, with frequent use of refrains, indicate that they were meant to be sung in the exile craftsmen's clubs in France, Switzerland, Belgium, and England, as well as in the political underground in Germany, as a means of raising consciousness and reinforcing a political message; in many cases Weitling indicates the particular folk tune to which the poem is set. They constitute the tip of an iceberg of poems, songs, pamphlets, and other ephemera that were published in the late 1830s and 1840s and, as such, afford an insight into these stormy years. Kerkerpoesien is fascinating for its account of his anguish in jail but lacks the emotive force of the comparable poems of his contemporary, the English poet-activist Thomas Cooper, published two years later.