Herman Ehrenberg’s memoir of the Texas Revolution, originally published in Germany in 1843 as Texas und seine Revolution [Texas and its Revolution] is considered to be the most thorough account of the Texas Revolution that exists and therefore is incredibly important as a primary source. But it is problematic.
The Handbook of Texas has this to say about Ehrenberg:
…As a teenaged volunteer member of the New Orleans Greys, he participated in the siege of Béxar in 1835 and the battle of Coleto in 1836, where he was captured along with the rest of Col. James Walker Fannin’s command. After surviving the massacre of most of these prisoners at Goliad (when he received a saber cut on his forehead that left a lifetime scar), Ehrenberg wandered alone as far as the Colorado River, where he was recaptured and taken with other Texan prisoners to labor for the Mexican army at the port of Matagorda. He escaped a second time during the Mexican retreat following the battle of San Jacinto and made his way to safety…Although Ehrenberg was a close observer of his comrades-in-arms in Texas and a generally reliable eyewitness to the battles in which he took part, his memoir is also a literary creation intended for a German audience. In it, he not only espouses democracy and freedom for a united Germany as well as for Texas, but also embellishes his story of the revolution with imaginary incidents and invented characters and dialog, making it necessary for historians to use his work only with extreme caution. Nevertheless, his narrative offers valuable insight into the attitudes and ideals of a young Texan “everyman,” and constitutes one of the very few book-length works by a citizen of the Texas Republic.
The early translations of his work into English, which began to appear in book-length form only in the early twentieth century, notably works in 1925 and 1935, are marred by both unintentional errors and tendentious censorship. A new translation was published in 2021 by Dr James E. Crisp, emeritus professor at the University of North Carolina. Dr Crisp worked for many years on a fresh annotated translation of the memoir and expanded biography of Ehrenberg’s very eventful life that corrected the deficiencies and outright mistakes associated with the earlier translations. I assumed a role in the book as co-translator about ten years ago upon the death of Louis Brister, who began the first translation. It has been a great honor to be associated with the book which heretofore has garnered several awards including the Summerfield G. Robertson award, the Western History Association Award and the Texas Philosophical Society Award, which I had the honor of attending.
jamesckearney.com 