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...