Memoirs of a nobody

the long version

Radical editor, Republican Party operative, freethinking colleague of Karl Marx - Austrian Henry Boernstein was hardly a "nobody," but his is one of the nineteenth century's great unknown lives. After leaving Paris following the ill-fated revolutions of 1848, Boernstein became a leader of the large German-speaking immigrant population in 1850s St. Louis. He edited the premier German-speaking newspaper in the region, the Anzeiger des Westens, and played a major role in shaping the complex political landscape of St. Louis before the Civil War. A friend of such significant Missourians as Thomas Hart Benton, Francis Blair, Jr., and Nathaniel Lyon, he was also a novelist, playwright, director, and actor who eventually led the St. Louis Opera House. He also served as a colonel of volunteers with the Union forces in Missouri early in the war and participated in the Camp Jackson raid in 1861.