A Scandal in Königsberg

Tales from the edge of the Prussian world

Königsberg is a strange old place. For one thing, it doesn’t exist anymore. Formerly the capital of East Prussia, it was destroyed in the Second World War and then rebuilt as a Soviet city under its new name: Kaliningrad. Today, it is the capital of a Russian exclave, bordered by Poland and Lithuania.

Königsberg has always had an appeal that exceeded the aesthetic reality of the city. Since it’s vanished and is now almost gone from living memory, it has the status of a kind of Prussian Atlantis, a quasi-mythical place everyone gets to build in their own imagination without reality getting in the way. But it seems that even when it existed as a Prussian city, visitors were often underwhelmed when they arrived at the very edge of the German-speaking realms, expecting more than they found.

It is with this notion that historian Christopher Clark picks readers up in his latest book, A Scandal in Königsberg, which will be in UK bookshops from Thursday. In the first chapter, entitled The City of Almost, he takes us to the Königsberg of the 1830s. At this point, its most glittering intellectual celebrity, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, has been dead for the best part of three decades. Yet, there remain shrines to his legacy, and “Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment,” Clark tells us.

Yet, the capital of East Prussia (which was, as the name suggests, the Prussian kingdom’s easternmost outpost) had a tendency to underwhelm visitors. The contemporary resident philosopher Karl Rosenkranz described it as “the city in which everything exists in a state of almost” – almost a royal residence, almost an industrial city, almost a seaside city, almost wealthy, almost a fortress – “and so on and so forth…”

For me personally, Königsberg is also a city of almost. I feel I almost have a connection to it, but not quite. One of my grandfathers was born on the outskirts of the city in the 1930s, pretty much a century after the events of the scandal described in Clark’s book. Germans fled and were expelled from there at the end of and after the Second World War, and that’s how my grandfather eventually ended up within the current German boundaries, where he met and married my grandmother. Without this turbulent history, I wouldn’t exist.

Königsberg Castle in the late 19th century

Like many East Germans with this kind of backstory (around a quarter of the initial population of the GDR consisted of expellees and refugees from the former German territories in the east), my grandfather never really talked about his origins. Yet, despite having been a young teenager when he fled East Prussia, he retained this heritage as part of his identity. My grandmother – despite never having been to the place herself – had to learn how to cook Königsberger Klopse (Königsberg meatballs) for him. It was ony towards the end of his life that he began to tell me some stories about his childhood and the journey, as well as reciting local nursery rhymes and poetry from East Prussia.

Hundegatt area in Königsberg in the 1920s

It was too little too late for me to feel that this was my story. Königsberg remained an elusive and hazy city in the corners of my mind. I contemplated travelling to Kaliningrad at various points in my life (before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, that is). I used to speak Russian very well because I’d learnt it at school, so that wouldn’t have been a hurdle to exploring the place. What put me off was that I would have visited a city my grandfather wouldn’t recognise. The Königsberg of his childhood simply doesn’t exist anymore, and it never will again. So I put Kaliningrad lower down my travel priority list and never went.

Modern-day Kalinigrad

Yet, the East Prussian port city that was retains a hold on me as a person and as a historian. So when I received a review copy of A Scandal in Königsberg, I was duly excited. I’m even more excited that I will be moderating the book launch with Christopher Clark at Daunt Books in Marylebone tomorrow (Monday), for which there are still tickets available if you happen to be in London and would like to join. With this bit of shameless self-promotion out of the way, here is a little preview of the book and some thoughts on it:

When you hold it in your hand, A Scandal in Königsberg is a surprisingly slim book. I remember listening to Clark’s last book, Revolutionary Spring (on the 1848/9 revolutions), on Audible for weeks – it was over 30 hours long. This new book is much shorter, but no less engrossing – a tale of religious passion, public scandal, and cultural anxiety that quietly echoes many of our modern concerns. At just under 200 pages, it’s not trying to be a sweeping epic. Instead, it zooms in on a strange episode from 1830s Königsberg.

The book centres on a little-known scandal that unfolded in the port city. In the 1830s, two Lutheran pastors, Johannes Ebel and Georg Diestel, were accused of leading a secretive spiritual circle that allegedly encouraged unhealthy emotional dependency and sexual excess, particularly among the daughters of the local elite. Some of the claims were wild. There were even whispers of women dying from "sexual exhaustion."

What makes Clark’s telling so effective is the way he brings this seemingly obscure episode to life without ever overplaying its strangeness. He presents the facts with clarity and restraint, occasionally with a sprinkle of the sense of humour that laces all his writing. It’s a style that allows the oddness of the events to speak for themselves.

At the same time, Clark resists the urge to turn what is quite a hair-raising tale into a mere spectacle. His interest lies in what the scandal reveals about its time: the tensions between Enlightenment rationalism and emotional religiosity, the role of charismatic figures, and the public's vulnerability to rumour and moral panic.

There’s also something eerily modern about how it all unfolded. With a figurative wink, the author tells us right at the beginning that “resemblances to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.” The spread of misinformation, the divisive impact of media coverage, the polarisation of opinion – all of it feels familiar. Clark doesn’t force the comparison. He doesn’t need to, as it stares you in the face.

I found the book’s brevity refreshing. It moves at a brisk pace and doesn’t get bogged down in digressions, a fast-paced weekend read that combines delicious historical gossip with deep dives into the intellectual, social and religious tensions of the age. The book touches on themes ranging from the relationship between the state and its people to mental health and gender relations.

I won’t go into too much detail here on content – no spoilers for the event on Monday or for those of you who would like to read the book. Suffice to say that A Scandal in Königsberg is a rewarding read. It’s not a major work in the sense of scope or scale, but it doesn’t need to be. It succeeds on its own terms: as a well-told account of public scandal that tells us as much about the 1830s as it does about our own time.