ABSTRACT
Johann Georg Hamann was born to Johann Christoph, a barber-surgeon, and Maria Magdalena Hamann on August 27, 1730 in Königsberg, East Prussia. Two years later, the Hamanns had another son, Johann Christoph. In a short autobiographical work titled Gedanken über meinen Lebenslauf written in 1758, Hamann describes his pietistic upbringing and fairly ambitious if unsystematic early education. Hamann entered the University of Königsberg where he initially studied theology, but later switched to law.1 He left the university without a degree and became a private house tutor�� first for the son of Baroness Budberg in �ivonia and then for the sons of Count von Witten in Courland. In 1756�� Hamann took a position with a trading firm run by the family of a university friend, Johann Christoph Berens (1729-92). In April of the following year, Hamann traveled to London on a secret business mission that ultimately failed2 and consequently experienced a period of dissipation, careless spending, and purposelessness. Isolated and in debt, Hamann found a room in a house owned by a young couple and began a concentrated reading of the Bible. On March 31, 1758, after reading Deuteronomy 5, he had some sort of powerful religious experience in which he identified himself as Cain3 and saw his life mirrored
1 At the university, Hamann did not possess any true intentions to become a theologian nor lawyer: “… ohne Ernst, ohne Treue ein Jurist zu werden; so wie ich keine gehabt hatte noch gewiesen hatte um ein Theolog zu sein.” (Johann Georg Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, vols. 1-6, ed. by Josef Nadler, Wuppertal et al.: Brockhaus et al. 1999 (Nachdruck der historisch-kritischen Ausgabe von Josef Nadler, Vienna: Thomas Morus Presse im Herder Verlag 1949-57), vol. 2, Schriften über Philosophie, Philologie, Kritik, p. 21.) 2 There is speculation about the exact aim of this mission; however, in Gedanken über meinen Lebenslauf, Hamann reveals that it involved the Russian ambassador who rejected the message he delivered. (See also James C. O’Flaherty, Johann Georg Hamann, Boston: Twayne Publishers 1979, pp. 21-2.) 3 Hamann writes, “ Ich fühlte mein Herz klopfen, ich hörte eine Stimme in der Tiefe desselben seufzen und jammern, als die Stimme des Bluts, als die Stimme eines erschlagenen
in the Israelites’ struggles.4 This experience was absolutely decisive for the rest of Hamann’s life; it shifted his attention from business and writing projects consistent with the goals of the Enlightenment to a thoroughgoing commitment to theological concerns and religious life.
