A Scandal in Königsberg, Christopher Clark, Allen Lane, £22

Königsberg is at once an extraordinary and quite typical place. Immanuel Kant was born in this Baltic port city, situated in what was the province of East Prussia, and remained moored to it for the rest of his life. Napoleon captured it in 1807 – ‘Königsberg is mine’, he wrote to Joséphine – and made it a staging-post for his disastrous invasion of Russia. Hitler declared it an ‘invincible bastion of German spirit’, though it was taken by the Soviets after a terrible three-month siege in 1945. It is now known as Kaliningrad, part of a Russian enclave that’s bounded by Poland and Lithuania and cut off from the rest of its country by about 400 miles.

Then again, which cities in Eastern Europe have not been invaded, liberated and invaded again, renamed and reconstituted, cut up and left to dry? For all its singular qualities, Königsberg (as was) might as well be considered an exemplar of its kind. A city that stands for other cities.

Much the same could be said of certain happenings there, such as those described in Christopher Clark’s A Scandal in Königsberg. Previous doorstoppers by the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge University – such as his account of the events leading to the First World War, The Sleepwalkers, and his more recent evocation of the upheavals of 1848, Revolutionary Spring – make this book, with its roughly 140 pages of main text, look slight. But that slightness is an optical illusion: Clark uses a scandal that befell Königsberg in the 1830s to tell a story of Europe and religion, and the battle between reason and imagination. Everything here is extraordinary and, on some level, quite typical.

What was that scandal? It involved a preacher called Johann Ebel and his supporter, another preacher, Heinrich Diestel. Both were among the most prominent religious figures in Königsberg at the time, although Ebel, in particular, appears to have been a divisive character. His expansive, empathetic brand of Lutheranism appealed to many of the city’s most well-to-do women. It also infuriated their husbands and other male relatives. One of these, a count with the stupendous name of Finck von Finckenstein – who, if the book has a bad guy, is the bad guy – wrote a letter to his cousin, Zelina von Mirbach, warning her against associating with Ebel. In it, he suggested that the preacher ran a kind of cult that, in Clark’s paraphrase, ‘had issued instructions to engage in sexual vices so stimulating as to have caused the death of two young girls’.

Von Mirbach showed this letter to Diestel, who was outraged on his friend’s behalf. He responded to von Finckenstein in unequivocal terms (such as ‘miserable lying brat’); after which, the argument was passed up the administrative chain until both preachers, Ebel and Diestel, were eventually subjected to church and criminal trials involving sex, lies and some of the notable families in Königsberg. The scandal riveted the Prussian public, who could read all about it in the state’s extremely active press.

We shall get on to the outcome of those trials later. In the meantime, it is worth observing that Ebel was indeed a peculiar character, at least for the time. He wore his hair long and parted down the middle – ‘like a lady’, as one contemporaneous scholar, quoted by Clark, put it. His spiritual mentor was someone called Johann Heinrich Schönherr, who developed a ‘homespun theosophy’ based on – how to put this? – the congress of spheres of fire and water. He had already been investigated by church authorities on several occasions, thanks to this association with Schönherr.

Yet, once again, there is something almost emblematic about Ebel’s eccentricities. Clark situates him in the tumult of his time, when preachers and laypeople alike sought meaning after Napoleon’s conquests and the wars of liberation that followed. ‘Religion passed like a spiritual power surge across Europe’, he writes. ‘The waning of ecclesiastical authority went hand in hand with an expansion of religious feeling. The consequence was a loss of certainty and a proliferation of possibilities.’

There were also, of course, countervailing forces. The president of the province of Prussia, Theodor von Schön, supported fine Enlightenment ideals such as liberty, but he also guarded against new public freedoms turning into a chaotic free-for-all. Meanwhile, his liege, King Frederick William III, had recently moved to standardise Christian practice – under a new ‘Church of the Prussian Union’ – in the name of national unity. Someone like Ebel, with his hippyish hair and unorthodox upbringing in the church, must have stood out as a troublemaker.

Clark has tremendous fun in this setting, and not just because of its soap opera-ish potential. The whole book feels like, which is what it may well be, a historian letting loose in between projects. There are two passages – one a debate between a pastor and three students of theology in a roadside inn; the other an encounter between the writer Fanny Lewald and the philosopher Karl Rosenkranz – that are written in novelistic dialogue. The opening warning that ‘Resemblances to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out’ is far from the only mischievous aside.

But, just as the slightness of A Scandal in Königsberg’s page count should not be taken for slightness of content, Clark’s sense of fun should not be taken for a lack of seriousness. This book is a model of research, of time spent excavating depositions and diary entries, and it is unlikely that anyone – including Ebel himself – has ever had a clearer view of the Ebel case. What’s more, this clarity enables Clark to drive towards some significant truths.

What are those truths? It is no spoiler to say that both Ebel and Diestel were found – for the most part – guilty by the courts. Because he is a proper historian, and not a true-crime podcaster out for attention, Clark doesn’t quite reach his own definitive ruling on this verdict, though he does show how petty, slanted and hypocritical the case against the two men was. Take one of von Finckenstein’s more lurid claims, that Ebel had once urged him to have sex with his wife while the preacher watched. It turns out that this was, more likely, one of the good count’s own sexual proclivities, projected on to the accused.

There are bigger and broader conclusions in the final chapter of the book, which is helpfully called ‘Closing Thoughts’. These touch on everything from the nature of rationality (‘Ebel’s was not a “religion within the boundaries of reason” in the Kantian sense, but rather a reason within the boundaries of religion’) to Ebel’s hairdo (‘Against the backdrop of this highly polarised model of gender relations, Ebel was a disturbing presence’).

Most of all, though, A Scandal in Königsberg closes with empathy: for the two preachers, naturally, but also for the women of that Baltic port city who had an important spiritual buttress yanked from their lives by vain and jealous men. ‘The characters caught up in that commotion were not historical or allegorical exemplars’, Clark reminds us at the very end, through the voice of Fanny Lewald, ‘they were people.’ Königsberg is at once extraordinary, quite typical and – we should never forget, as readers – very, very real.