COMMUNIA, IOWA 239
bund for three years, he predicted, Communia could well be de
veloped to a point where it would be able to house all the members
of the organization who might wish to live there, to take care of
all its pensioners, and to draw a huge volume of German immigra
tion into the West. In his mind's eye he pictured the building of
additional city-colonies, whose raw and finished products would
supply workers' co-operatives in the urban areas. With the help
of the Tauschbank, he was confident, a large part of the finan
cial resources of the Arbeiterbund could be dispatched to Com
munia to assure its steady expansion.
In December, 1850, Die Republik der Arbeiter published the
constitution for the colony of "Kommunia," Iowa, with a letter
from B. F. Weiss, a member, describing the settlement. According
to this account, the little rural community already had a library
and a musical and singing society; and the settlers were altogether
satisfied with life in their new communist paradise. To be sure,
differences of opinion occasionally interrupted the harmonious
relations of the colonists, but these were attributed to the "quarrel
some society" from which the original members had to be re
cruited. Near by, a group of Mecklenburgers owned a plot of land
and expected to build the following spring. In Communia itself
there were several friends whom Weitling had converted to com
munism in Switzerland. With one of the settlers, he had shared a
room in Dresden in 1832, and he had known Joseph Venus, the
blacksmith, in Bern in 1841. Others of the original group un
doubtedly recognized Weitling's prominence in the radical move
ment. He and his co-worker Franz Arnold, during their first visit
to St. Louis, were invited to visit the settlement, probably in the
hope that they would recommend its support by the Arbeiter
bund as soon as that organization began to function.
The story of Communia itself begins with the career of Andreas
Dietsch, a brushmaker in the canton of Aargau, Switzerland, who
in 1842 published Das tausendjährige Reich, a little treatise which
Weitling republished twelve years later in New York. In this
interesting bit of Utopian literature, Dietsch, a typical son of the
barré
(Barré)
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