38 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTAltenburg. His voluminous and fantastic correspondence with
Weitling was couched mainly in Biblical allegory. Jailed in Ger
many in the 1830's with nothing to read but the Bible, he heard
voices and saw visions and thereafter found the complete explana
tion for most human experiences in the Old Testament. In Switz
erland he renamed one of the Alpine peaks Mount Sinai; wrote
brochures on "The Restoration of the Kingdom of Zion," "An
Appeal to the World of Women," and "A Challenge to the
Priesthood"; published a collection of poems dedicated "to the
altar of liberty"; and translated Cabet's communist creed. A few
of the German communists were religious mystics and were ready
to believe in a new Messiah. Weitling himself was not without
faith in a kind of Second Coming and eventually came to conceive
of himself in the major role of the deliverer.^15
Of quite a different nature was Weitling's brief association with
Bakunin, whose "Swiss interlude" in a stormy career happened to
synchronize with our tailor's sojourn in Switzerland. Over
whelmed by the beauty of Zurich and by his debts, the embryo
anarchist lived in one room overlooking the lake and the moun
tains, read George Sand, and translated Schelling. Through Her¬
wegh, at whose wedding to the beautiful Emma Siegmund in
Baden Bakunin was best man, he was introduced to the group of
radicals in Switzerland. His biographer maintains that "the most
important figure who crossed Bakunin's path during his sojourn in
Switzerland was Wilhelm Weitling." The latter had called on the
Russian, and the Russian legation had promptly reported to the
home government that the two men were becoming congenial.
Bakunin discovered that his new friend was something of an un
disciplined fanatic, but he found him to be an honorable man and
full of faith in the potentialities of the human race. Although his
efforts to initiate Weitling into Hegel's philosophy proved in vain,
Bakunin read Weitling's Guarantees of Harmony and Freedom
when it appeared and considered it "a really remarkable book."
(^13) See Johann Caspar Bluntschli, Bluntschli-Bericht, Die Kommunisten in der
Schweiz nach den bei Weitling aufgefundene Papiere (Zurich, 1843), 46-47.