The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 102, July 1998 - April, 1999 Page: 346
559 p. : ill. (some col.), maps, ports. ; 23 cm.View a full description of this periodical.
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Southwestern Historical Quarterly
Leipzig. In 1858, when Kuhne published his father-in-law's journal, he
and his wife lived in Dresden.'
As Kihne noted in the foreword and a postscript to the prison jour-
nal, there were several pages of notes, narrative sketches, drawings, and
preliminary maps among Harkort's papers, but they seemed to him too
fragmentary or too obscure for publication.4 There were certainly some
notes from his months spent in Texas among these materials, for
Harkort had written in February 1834 to his former teacher in Freiberg
that he was planning to publish one day a lengthy and detailed account
of his many travels and adventures abroad.5 In the years following the
publication of Harkort's prison journal, however, the manuscript materi-
als once in the hands of Eduard Harkort's heirs had apparently been
lost. Harkort's great-granddaughter, Gertrud Kuhne Herrmann, whom I
located in East Berlin in April 1980, remembered that the heirs had not
been able to gain possession of the papers until about 1853, and then
only after considerable effort. She conjectured that, like many records
and personal possessions of other families in Germany, her great-grand-
father's papers had probably been destroyed during World War II.6 After
fruitless inquiries to several archival sources in the Federal Republic of
Germany and the German Democratic Republic, including the
Stadtarchiv Leipzig and the Deutsche Staatsbibliothek in Berlin, I also
became convinced that if Eduard Harkort had indeed made a record of
his experiences in Texas, those valuable papers had no doubt been irre-
trievably lost or destroyed.
However, in 1990 the staff of the Westfiilisches Wirtschaftsarchiv in
Dortmund, where Harkort family archives are preserved, learned from a
researcher's casual remark that a certain Frau Strubell in Ratingen near
Diusseldorf possessed a number of Harkort documents. The owner of
these documents was located and contacted, and in response to the
archivist's request to donate the documents, the widow of Dr. Alexander
Strubell, a great-grandson of Henriette Harkort and Gustav Kiihne, gave
to the archive in Dortmund a folder that contained numerous letters,
several sketches, a copy of Kiihne's book, and a journal fragment in
which Eduard Harkort had recorded his impressions and experiences in
Texas during the spring and summer of 1836. Two years later I learned
' Brister (trans. and ed.), In Mextcan Prisons, 4; Eberhard Winkhaus, Wir stammen aus Bauern- und
Schmiedegeschlecht: Genealogie eznes stiderlandischen Sippenkreises und der shm angehdrenden
Industriepwonsere (Gorlitz: C. A. Starke, 1932), 67-68.
4 F[erdinand] Gustav Kuhne (ed.), Aus Mepcanischen Gefdngnessen: Bruchstick aus Eduard Harkorts
hinterlassenen Papieren (Leipzig: Carl B. Lorck, 1858), viii-ix, 104.
5 Ibid., 10o.
e Gertrud Kuthne Herrmann to Louis E. Brister, June 8, 198o and Sept. 14, 198o.346
January
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Texas State Historical Association. The Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Volume 102, July 1998 - April, 1999, periodical, 1999; Austin, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth101219/m1/403/?rotate=90: accessed April 25, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu; crediting Texas State Historical Association.