84 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNIST
tention until well after the days of trial were over, but he preserved
the files of the Communist Chronicle among his papers in America.
Weitling had achieved the martyrdom to which he had alluded
frequently in his writings. But now that it had come it almost broke
his spirit. He proved to be a difficult and unruly prisoner, and he
was disciplined several times. His long confinement and his com
plete inability to adjust to jail conditions made him so neurotic that
he never entirely recovered. A morbid concern with his role as
the "second Messiah" and a certain megalomania, already apparent
in some of his earlier writings, now developed into a serious per
secution complex.
Some years later, a trunk was discovered in Hamburg which
contained a diary covering the period spent in the Zurich jail. Un
earthed in the archives of Hamburg in 1926, and ably edited by
Professor Ernst Barnikol, the manuscript was published in Kiel
in 1929, under the title, Gerechtigkeit: ein studium in 500 tagen.
Bilder der wirklichkeit und betrachtungen des gefangenen.
Barmby, the London communist, had indicated as early as 1844
that Weitling was at work on "a lengthy history of his imprison
ment." The author himself reported, after his arrival in the United
States, that some of his papers had been confiscated in Hamburg
in 1849 when the police invaded the home of a paper hanger with
whom Weitling had stayed, and carried off a trunk full of papers.
An inventory of the contents revealed, among other things, mate
rial dealing with other publications like the Garantieen, and the
Urwähler, which Weitling had started in Berlin during the revo
lution; his Notruf an die Manner der Arbeit und Sorge, issued in
New York in 1848; books and papers dealing with the organiza
tion of the League of Liberation; a few volumes on philosophy
and grammar in French, German, and English; a hundred copies
of A. Scherzer's Musestunden und Schweisstropfen (Paris, 1847);
and nine writing pads which comprised the manuscript for his
treatise on Gerechtigkeit (Justice).
As the result of a brilliant piece of textual criticism and analysis,
Professor Barnikol concluded that the manuscript, based on the