Christopher Clark is the Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. He was knighted in 2015. His previous books are _The Politics of Conversion_, _Kaiser Wilhelm II_, _Iron Kingdom_, _The Sleepwalkers_, _Time and Power,_ _Prisoners of Time_ and _Revolutionary Spring._
He joins us for _A Scandal in Koenigsberg_, an electrifying micro-history of a city torn apart in a storm of scandal and sensation.
_Now part of the Russian Baltic enclave of Kaliningrad, the former Prussian and German port of Koenigsberg has always been a somewhat sleepy place, doomed to be famous for having once been the residence of Immanuel Kant. But in the late 1830s, just for a short while, it became famous for all the wrong reasons..._
Christopher Clark's brilliant new book is the result of many years of fascination with this strange case.
Sensational accusations were bandied about, implying that beneath the town's somnolent surface there were dark erotic currents and wrenching betrayals of trust. For the Prussian authorities this was just the sort of moral collapse they feared most. In the aftermath of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, which had unsettled a generation, every lapse could be seen as the harbinger of new storms.
_A Scandal in Koenigsberg_ beautifully brings to life a time and a place that we would now situate in the tranquil 'Biedermeier' years between the seismic upheavals of the 1810s and 1840s. But there is a timeless quality to this small vortex of turbulence, in which spiritual hunger, vanity, professional rivalry, sexual incontinence, naivety and sheer human waywardness threatened to tear a city apart.