86 THE UTOPIAN COMMUNISTstances to take flight from misery and deprivation into the world
of introspection, and to seek refuge in an imaginary paradise sup
ported by a God whose name he hardly ventured to pronounce.
These prison recollections reveal an egocentric, persecuted mind,
ready to draw strange analogies between the Passion of Christ
and the martyrdom of the prophet of communism. They bring
to a focus the puzzling contradictions in Weitling's character. His
sensitive nature broke under solitary confinement in a dark and
narrow cell. He became unruly and irritating and quibbled often
with his jailers. Alone with his thoughts and with nothing else to
occupy him, he began to reveal symptoms of paranoia. He was
depressed because his arrest made so little impression on the move
ment which he led, and called forth no popular demonstrations
for his release. He began to identify himself with earlier martyrs,
such as Thomas Münzer. He raged against the prevailing system
of justice and predicted a day when, "of an evening," workers and
peasants would settle their disputes over a pipe of tobacco without
lawyers or courts.
Weitling became so depressed that he was tortured with
thoughts of suicide and the fear of insanity. He accused his jailers
of depriving him of letters which he had carried for a dozen years,
containing strands of the hair of his mother and grandmother,
though the facts indicate that the letters were returned by the
prison officials and that he himself had taken out the hair and
hidden it in his clothes. The prisoner wrote to the authorities of
Zurich to protest against his treatment and charged that he had
been stripped and searched no less than eight times; that he had
been four times confined in a dark cell for periods ranging from
eighteen to forty-eight hours, and that he was being watched
through a peephole by an Austrian spy, a lawyer from Vienna,
who was quartered in a neighboring cell.
There followed tales of mysterious rappings at night on the
walls of his dark cold cell, of hunger and despair, of the terrors of
the night with its weird sounds, and of the thoughts of the prisoner
about death and a great task still unfinished. As Weitling became