106 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTish socialists, and that he referred to Weitling's organizing activi
ties as "the first independent movement of the German prole
tariat."^1
Weitling has been forgotten; Marx and Engels remain world
figures. Yet the philosophical tailor also is entitled to his place in
history. No proletarian author ever described the miseries of the
poor more eloquently or contrasted the life of the rich and the
poor more vividly. Weitling compared the growing threat of in
dustry with "an iron bodice crushing the tender forms of chil
dren." He had initiated the workers of Germany into the propa
ganda for communism and in 1845, Engels commented excitedly
on "the break-through of communist literature in Germany." In
June, 1845, the Police Commissioner of Bregenz referred with
alarm to the spread of communism in Switzerland and in the neigh
boring German states, and to its infiltration into the workers' or
ganizations in Switzerland, France, England, Germany, and Hol
land. Friedrich Kapp, a "proletarian" and a "communist" who
was then planning a colony in North America, and who later be
came one of the few Forty-eighters to return to Bismarck's Ger
many, wrote in 1845, "A new spirit is stirring among us in West
phalia. The reading society which I founded has sixty members
... a local Jewish merchant, an excellent person, is reading aloud
to the people at the inn from Friedrich Feuerbach's Religion of the
Future and from Weitling's Garantees and Harmony of Freedom
[sic]." In 1846, Weitling's books could be found in the library of
the Communist Club of Berlin where they were read eagerly.
Marx and Engels still regarded his program as "the only existing
German communist system,"^2 and a recent historian of the social
ist movement has called Weitling "one of our greatest and best
(^1) Gustav Mayer, Friedrich Engels: Eine Biographie, I, 116-17; and Friedrich
Engels, Die Entwickelung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft
(Berlin, 1907), 26.
(^2) See Max Adler, Wegweiser-Studien zur Geistesgeschichte des Sozialismus
(Vienna, 1931), 287-313; also Brügel, Österreichische Sozialdemokratie, I, 42-43;
and Edith Lenel, Friedrich Kapp (Leipzig, 1935), 48-49.