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A Scandal in Königsberg

Author Christopher Clark
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On sale Mar 10, 2026 | 7 Hours and 0 Minutes | 9798217282234
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As told by one of our greatest historians, the story of the scandal that took down two Lutheran preachers in the heart of nineteenth-century Prussia—a chamber piece of cultish esotericism, pseudoscience, and political resistance that conjures up Europe at the end of the age of reason and presages our current age of misinformation

In 1835, Johannes Ebel and Georg Diestel were tried with having started a cult. Worse: A cult that encouraged scandalous sexual behavior in women, including daughters of prestigious Prussian families—causing the deaths of two young women from sexual exhaustion. The trial would absorb and polarize the city of Königsberg for half a decade and ruin the lives and careers of its defendants, despite their eventual legal exoneration. The historical moment it encapsulates—a Europe reeling from the triumph and horror of a new industrial, imperial era, struggling to decide which principles will reign in the aftermath of Enlightenment reason—is a fable for our present time of political, social, and existential disquiet.

The great Cambridge historian Christopher Clark—known for The Sleepwalkers, his monumental, defining study of the causes of the First World War—came across the files containing this story three decades ago; it has been swirling in his mind ever since. In gripping, narrative prose, Clark immerses us in a Königsberg scarred by the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, where Immanuel Kant had recently inaugurated the theory of consciousness that completely reshaped humanity’s understanding of itself—but where now the distinction between reason and fanaticism was now up for grabs. A Scandal in Königsberg is a European history in exquisite miniature—and a peerless lesson in the theological and philosophical debates that animated the Western world at one of its great moments of transformation. 

Rich and provocative, A Scandal in Königsberg articulates an unsettling antecedent for our most fiercely litigated contemporary questions of sexual identity, freedom of thought, and who gets to decide what constitutes the truth.
© Alexander Hein
Christopher Clark is a professor of modern European history and a fellow of St. Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Revolutionary Spring, The Sleepwalkers, Time and Power, Iron Kingdom, and other books. View titles by Christopher Clark

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As told by one of our greatest historians, the story of the scandal that took down two Lutheran preachers in the heart of nineteenth-century Prussia—a chamber piece of cultish esotericism, pseudoscience, and political resistance that conjures up Europe at the end of the age of reason and presages our current age of misinformation

In 1835, Johannes Ebel and Georg Diestel were tried with having started a cult. Worse: A cult that encouraged scandalous sexual behavior in women, including daughters of prestigious Prussian families—causing the deaths of two young women from sexual exhaustion. The trial would absorb and polarize the city of Königsberg for half a decade and ruin the lives and careers of its defendants, despite their eventual legal exoneration. The historical moment it encapsulates—a Europe reeling from the triumph and horror of a new industrial, imperial era, struggling to decide which principles will reign in the aftermath of Enlightenment reason—is a fable for our present time of political, social, and existential disquiet.

The great Cambridge historian Christopher Clark—known for The Sleepwalkers, his monumental, defining study of the causes of the First World War—came across the files containing this story three decades ago; it has been swirling in his mind ever since. In gripping, narrative prose, Clark immerses us in a Königsberg scarred by the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, where Immanuel Kant had recently inaugurated the theory of consciousness that completely reshaped humanity’s understanding of itself—but where now the distinction between reason and fanaticism was now up for grabs. A Scandal in Königsberg is a European history in exquisite miniature—and a peerless lesson in the theological and philosophical debates that animated the Western world at one of its great moments of transformation. 

Rich and provocative, A Scandal in Königsberg articulates an unsettling antecedent for our most fiercely litigated contemporary questions of sexual identity, freedom of thought, and who gets to decide what constitutes the truth.

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© Alexander Hein
Christopher Clark is a professor of modern European history and a fellow of St. Catharine's College at the University of Cambridge, UK. He is the author of Revolutionary Spring, The Sleepwalkers, Time and Power, Iron Kingdom, and other books. View titles by Christopher Clark

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