A Scandal in Königsberg

by Christopher Clark

First published 2025

Amazon

3.7(61)

In late-1830s Königsberg, an evangelical religious circle gathered around the preachers Johann Wilhelm Ebel and Heinrich Diestel becomes the subject of rumours, accusations and official investigation. Claims of spiritual manipulation and sexual impropriety spread through a city already divided by class, confession and competing ideas of religious authority.

Clark reconstructs the scandal through court papers, private testimony and administrative records, following the men and women whose friendships, rivalries and reputations were drawn into the case. The book uses this confined episode to examine gossip, gender, faith and state surveillance in Prussia during the uneasy decades between the Napoleonic Wars and the revolutions of 1848.