8 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
states that constituted the disunited Germany of his day. In July,
1830, he arrived in Leipzig, where he remained until the fall of
1832 in the employ of Höpfner and Walsbach, ladies' tailors. Here
he was well paid. He genuinely respected his employers and he
had ample time for leisure and recreation. Indeed, he found con
ditions so satisfactory in this leisurely city of the easygoing Saxons
that he later referred to this period of his activity as a tailor as the
most satisfactory in his career. The work proved so pleasant that
he considered it a joyous recreation. The comrade with whom he
lived in Leipzig was August Schilling, who also became interested
in socialism and communism, and the correspondence between
these old friends continued until shortly before Weitling's death
in New York.^3
It was apparently in Leipzig that Weitling first tried his hand
at writing. He sent satirical verses and several more serious articles
on political and social questions to the Leipziger Zeitung, only to
have them rejected, and he probably concluded at that early date
that something was wrong with this business of freedom of the
press. He may have played some minor part during the revolu
tionary upheaval of 1830 in Saxony, though in later years he ex
pressed his disgust with its lack of a definite program, as he had
seen this crisis develop in European affairs. According to some
accounts, one of his satirical poems was used on a transparent sign
and carried in a parade by Leipzig radicals.
By the fall of 1832, Weitling was in Dresden, and two years
later he made his first appearance in Vienna. Here his first em
ployer was Franz Bayerl, and he worked as an expert in ladies'
tailoring at the unusually high wages of sixty to seventy gulden
a week. After four months with Bayerl, he worked for two months
for Christian Schwarz, and then for eight months for Johann
Schmidt. At the end of April, 1835, he left the Austrian capital,
presumably to return to Germany. Actually, he seems to have
(^3) See Wilhelm Weitling to August Schilling, New York, July 22,1869, in "Wil¬
helm Weitling und sein System der Harmonie und Freiheit," Die Zukunft (Ber
lin), I (1878), 585, 583-94, 606-15.