Herman Ehrenberg wrote the longest, most complete, and most vivid memoir
of any soldier in the Texan revolutionary army. His narrative was
published in Germany in 1843, but it was little used by Texas historians
until the twentieth century, when the first--and very
problematic--attempts at translation into English were made. Inside the
Texas Revolution: The Enigmatic Memoir of Herman Ehrenberg is a product
of the translation skills of the late Louis E. Brister with the
assistance of James C. Kearney, both noted specialists on Germans in
Texas. The volume's editor, James E. Crisp, has spent much of the last
27 years solving many of the mysteries that still surrounded Ehrenberg's
life. It was Crisp who discovered that Ehrenberg lived in the Texas
Republic until at least 1840 and spent the spring of that year as ranger
on the frontier. Ehrenberg was not an historian, but an ordinary citizen
whose narrative of the Texas Revolution contains both spectacular
eyewitness accounts of action and almost mythologized versions of major
events that he did not witness himself. This volume points out where
Ehrenberg is lying or embellishing explains why he is doing so, and
narrates the actual relevant facts as far as they can be determined.
Ehrenberg's book is both a testament by a young Texan "everyman" who
presents a laudatory paean to the Texan cause, and a German's
explanation of Texas and its "fight for freedom" against Mexico to his
fellow Germans--with a powerful subtext that patriotic Germans should
aspire to a similar struggle, and a similar outcome: a free, democratic
republic.
