"A Scandal in Königsberg," Christopher Clark - A Review

 Giving birth can be difficult, which is one reason why T.S. Eliot called April “the cruelest month.” It is the month when nature re-awakens and birds and animals emerge and give birth, breaking the comfort of winter’s dormancy. Among those that come out from hibernation are Connecticut’s Painted Turtles. The photo depicts a “bale” of turtles, sunning themselves to harden their shells and stacked for socialization.

 

This review has nothing to do with turtles . I just liked the photo, which I took a few days ago.

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

A Scandal in Königsberg, Christopher Clark

April 18, 2026

 

“The tension between reason and faith, between philosophy and

revelation was one of the central themes of these years.”

                                                                                                Christopher Clark, A Scandal in Königsberg, 2025

 

Christopher Clark, the Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, is the author of The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War and Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia 1600-1947. While researching the latter, he came across the story of a little-known scandal that took place almost two hundred years ago in Königsberg, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad but then the capital of East Prussia.

 

In his introduction to this short (152 pages) history, he explains that the “scandal” spread through conflating news with rumor and facts with innuendos. “Resemblance, he writes, “to present-day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.” 

 

Johann Ebel (1784-1861) and Heinrich Diestel (1785-1854) were Lutheran pastors in early 19^th Century Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. It was the home of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and the place from which Napoleon gathered his forces for the invasion of Russia in June 1812, and to which they returned, bedraggled and defeated six months later. Kant was a philosopher of the Enlightenment period, an elderly professor when Ebel and Diestel were students in Königsberg. The Enlightenment had introduced reason, science and critical inquiry: “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.” The era saw the growth of individual liberty and natural rights. Cark writes that as a sensitive young student Ebel found it difficult to reconcile “...the rationalist teachings of his instructors with the warm positive belief he had grown up with at home.” A central theme of those late Enlightenment years was tension between reason and faith.

 

It was also a time when patriarchalism reigned, when intelligent, unhappy women, married to wealthy landowners and aristocrats, sought sympathy and ministration in religion. They found it with Ebel and Diestel. As the scandal unfolded, the two men were castigated as home-wreckers and disruptors of family harmony. Yet not a woman complained. In the end, after seven years, both men were exonerated, but their lives and their livelihoods had been destroyed. As Clark tells us, it was allegations of sex that “..gave wings to the scandal.” In his chapter titled “Closing Thoughts,” Clark writes: “The grotesques conjured up by the press (at the behest of the provincial authorities) were not images of what had actually transpired around Ebel and Diestel, but the fantastical inversions of liberal ideals.” 

 

While it may seem strange to recommend a book about a scandal that was largely contrived and in a city and country that no longer exist, Christopher Clark is too accomplished an historian and too good a writer to ignore. The book can be read as a history of a little-known Prussian city on the Baltic during an interesting time, when philosophy and religion were transitioning. Or it can be read as a parable for our times.