Socratic Memorabilia

The book was written in 1759 as an answer to Kant and Berens, who had been trying to recall Hamann to reason after his conversion. Its dedication is famously double-edged — addressed to the public and to ‘the two’, meaning them — and its manner is deliberately oracular. Hamann wrote to be misunderstood by the wrong readers.

The argument runs through Socrates, and the choice of figure is the point: the Enlightenment claimed Socrates as its patron, and Hamann takes him back. Socratic ignorance is presented not as an intellectual position but as an act of faith; the daemon, the appeal to what cannot be demonstrated, is exactly what the rationalists cannot account for in their own hero.

The editor of the collected edition notes that when Hamann wrote it he had read neither Plato nor Xenophon, working only from Cooper and Charpentier, and that he later marked parallel passages in his own copy after reading Plato. It is short, dense and notoriously difficult, and it shaped Herder, Jacobi, Kierkegaard and, through them, a great deal of later thought.

The German is free at zeno.org, in a clean modern transcription, and the Roth edition of Hamann's Schriften is free at Archive.org in Fraktur. The standard English translations — O'Flaherty 1967, with a commentary, and Haynes 2007 — are under copyright and are the work of scholars who spent years on Hamann; if you want the authoritative English text, buy one of those. Ours is a new translation made for this edition, and we say on the page and in the book how it was made.

This is a new English translation of Johann Georg Hamann's Sokratische Denkwürdigkeiten, published anonymously at Amsterdam — really at Königsberg — in 1759. Hamann's German is in the public domain. This translation is not: it is © T.S. Baker Books, 2026.

How it was made, plainly. The translation was produced by a language model working from the German, section by section, and then reviewed and corrected. We say so here and on the book's page because these editions are priced within reach of scholarly translations and you should know what you are buying before you buy it, not after you open the file.

This is not the first English translation and does not pretend to be. James C. O'Flaherty published one with a commentary in 1967, and Kenneth Haynes included the work in a Cambridge volume in 2007. Both are in copyright, both are the work of scholars who spent years on Hamann, and neither was consulted at any point in making this one — not as a crib, not as a check. Where we have gone wrong, we have gone wrong on our own.

The German text. We took two independent transcriptions of the German, from zeno.org and from Projekt Gutenberg-DE, and compared them word by word. They agree at 95 per cent, and every difference between them is one of them printing a footnote where the other links to it: neither is abridged, and both carry all sixty-two of Hamann's notes. The scans of the collected Hamann available to us are set in Fraktur, which optical character recognition reads so badly that "sicherer" comes back as "fiherer" and "so" as "fo"; the transcriptions are a far better witness than anything we could have recovered from those.

The notes are Hamann's own — the Euripides, the Seneca, the passage from Balzac's Socrate Chrétien, the Luther. They are translated here where Hamann wrote them in German, and left as he gave them where he quoted Greek, Latin or French, with an English rendering in square brackets. A handful of cross-references added by later editors have been dropped.

A word about the difficulty. Hamann wrote this book eighteen months after his conversion in a London lodging house, and he wrote it at two friends — Christoph Berens, who had sent him to London, and Immanuel Kant, whom Berens had recruited to argue him back into the Enlightenment. It is addressed "to the two," and the whole of it is a reply. It is also, by common consent, among the hardest prose in German: allusive, ironic, elliptical, quoting six languages, and deliberately written so that a stranger would not follow it. We have translated what he wrote rather than what he might have written more plainly, and have not smoothed the argument out where he left it knotted.

The free German source is linked from this book's page.