A Scandal in Königsberg

"This was a real surprise for me, but an immensely pleasurable one. Christopher Clark is an outstanding historian, one who often paints on a very broad canvas in books such as Sleepwalkers , which is about the outbreak of the First World War . This book, though, is very different. It’s a beautiful little pearl of a book, just 160-odd pages long. In it, he tells the story of a religious and political furore that broke out in the 1830s in the small German port of Königsberg, when two preachers in a small religious sect, one called Johann Ebel and the other Heinrich Diestel, became caught up in a huge and very public scandal. Clark is brilliant at both dealing with the material at hand and looking at its wider implications. He gives us, for instance, a gripping picture of the post-Napoleonic Wars landscape in eastern Germany, with the eruption of religiosity and dozens of different religious sects, and how alarmed the different German authorities became by these developments. And he paints an acute portrait of the charismatic Ebel, who was eventually accused of gross sexual impropriety. All of this Clark lays out brilliantly. But what particularly interests him, and gives the book its real charge, are the modern echoes of this scandal, the rumours, the paranoia, the lies. It’s an early version of the culture wars, essentially, and Clark happily but subtly draws parallels between what happened then to what’s happening today: fake news and alternative facts. It’s absolutely wonderful and a total surprise. I was completely gripped."