A Scandal in Königsberg

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--that had even caused the deaths of two young women from sexual exhaustion. The trial would absorb and polarize the city of Konigsberg 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 what principle 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 his monumental, defining study of the causes of the First World War, The Sleepwalkers--came across the files containing this story three decades ago; it has been swirling in his head since. In gripping, narrative prose, Clark immerses us in a Konigsberg scarred by the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, where Immanuel Kant so recently inaugurated the theory of consciousness that completely reshaped humanity's understanding of itself--but where now the distinction between reason and fanaticism is up for grabs. A Scandal in Konigsberg 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 Konigsberg 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.