From the Muckers to the Mullahs: Christopher Clark on the Lessons of History

00:00Andrew KeenHello everyone. In our disruptive, uncertain times, we rely on historians, it seems, more and more to make sense of our current predicaments. And there are no better historians than my guest today. Christopher Clark is the author of many wonderful histories, two in particular—bestsellers: The Sleepwalkers, his classic study of the causes of the First World War, and more recently, his brilliant book on 1848, Revolutionary Spring. He has a new book out now—it's a shorter book; it came out last year in the UK, it's out now in the United States—A Scandal in Königsberg. And Christopher Clark, I’m honored, is joining us from his home in Cambridge, where the sun came out briefly. Chris, I know in the introduction to this book, you note that this particular story has relevance or intrigued you because of its relevance to our own age. Is that fair? Do you, as a historian, often tend to write with one eye or half an eye on the present?01:05Christopher ClarkI think that—I mean, that's an interesting question. I think on the one hand, we can't write with any other awareness than an awareness shaped by our present. So the present is going to be in what we write, whatever we do. There's no way we can cancel it out; we are made by our contemporary moment, and our perspective on the past is shaped by that. So there's no way out of that, and I don't think that would be desirable either, because every new moment, every new present, opens up new aspects of the past that we perhaps hadn't looked at before, or at least enables us to see aspects—old things—that we hadn't looked at before.01:47Christopher ClarkOn the other hand, of course, it is important that historians avoid simply updating the past to suit the preferences of the present—you know, politically instrumentalizing the past, actualizing something which is actually quite different from the present and assimilating it to our experience in order to make it work as an argument or as a piece of ideology. So I'm very much against that. The term "presentism" is sometimes used with that kind of approach. So, you know, I suppose what I’d say is that the present is always there; it's part of what we say and think about the past. But on the other hand, we also do strive as historians to understand what's specific to that past, what makes it other and different to the present.02:40Andrew KeenTell us a little bit about Königsberg. We joked before we went live that it's no longer called Königsberg—or at least it's spelled differently. It's a remarkable town, or at least it's a town with a remarkable history. Its history today, or its current situation, is very different from the Königsberg of the mid-19th century that A Scandal in Königsberg is based.03:04Christopher ClarkYeah, well, it's now no longer called Königsberg; it’s called Kaliningrad. It's the capital city of the Kaliningradskaya Oblast, and Kaliningrad means "Kalinin City." It’s named after one of Stalin's most loyal henchmen because the city was overrun by the Red Army at the end of the Second World War against Nazi Germany. It was taken by the Soviets, and that part of what was then East Prussia—Königsberg, in its earlier form, was the capital city of a province of the Kingdom of Prussia called East Prussia—that province was divided in half. Half of it went to Poland, and the other half went to the Soviet Union. It is now, in fact, a Russian enclave, and it's an important enclave for the Russians because Kaliningrad is an important base for naval operations in the Baltic. It's a very special place from the point of view of Russia's strategic preparations for future conflict.04:12Christopher ClarkBut it no longer looks very much like the Königsberg of the period that this book is about, because the city was very seriously bombarded and shelled during the taking of the city. It was at the heart of one of these—they called them in German Kesselschlacht—one of these battles of enclosure where the Red Army came in from all sides and shut the Wehrmacht down. In that process, a great deal of what was the historic face of the city was destroyed or disfigured. Quite a lot of what remained was then destroyed to make way for the new Soviet-era city that emerged afterwards.05:01Andrew KeenWell, you couldn't make that kind of stuff up. Perhaps Königsberg, of course, is most famously associated with the Enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant—1724 to 1804, at least according to Wikipedia. You note in the introduction to A Scandal in Königsberg, Chris, that Königsberg, which was of course called Königsberg then, had seen better days. You look back—I mean, we're kind of looking back doubly, I guess, or triply perhaps in many ways at your story—but that the Königsberg of the time that you write about was nostalgic for that Kantian moment in the sun when Königsberg seemed the center of the world. Is that fair?05:43Christopher ClarkYeah, I think it is fair. And it wasn't just Kant. I mean, Immanuel Kant is the most distinguished global personality of the city's history; there's no question about that. But Hamann and Herder and other important German thinkers and writers were in the city at various points during the later decades of the 18th century. So it's a city that was associated with the memory of the Enlightenment. I mean, I begin the book slightly naughtily by saying that in the 1830s, when my story begins in the 19th century, the city was bathed in the light of the late Enlightenment—at least in the minds of those who'd never been there. So this is a sort of matter of the city's reputation rather than a reality.06:33Christopher ClarkAfter the death of Kant in 1804, and after it had played a rather central role in the events of the Napoleonic—Napoleon launched his invasion of Russia from East Prussia, and hundreds of thousands of French troops passed through the area around Königsberg and through the city itself. When the destroyed remnants of the French Grande Armée returned from Russia after the disasters of 1812—the 1812 campaign—when they returned early in 1813, they were a total mess, and the broken remains of that army came back through the city of Königsberg. So the city had been the theater of great events, and it was remembered for that.07:22Christopher ClarkBut by the 1830s, it had sort of slipped back—I mean, this can happen to towns and also to countries—it had slipped back into a kind of slightly dull provinciality. It was no longer the important theater of events and of thinking and writing that it had been. So it was a little bit down on its uppers and living off its great past by the 1830s when this story started to unfold.07:54Andrew KeenTell me about the bridges of Königsberg, Chris. I know that you have some wonderful anecdotes, and there are some mathematical stories about these famous bridges of Königsberg which stimulated all sorts of interesting thought. It seems to somehow capture the mystery, maybe the romanticism of this town, even if it was, as you note, somewhat past its best by the middle of the 19th century.08:24Christopher ClarkYeah, well, the bridges of Königsberg have to do with the rather peculiar topography of the city. At the heart of the city is an almost rectangular lump of land which forms an island between two arms of the river that runs through the city, the Pregel. Across this river at various points in its extent, there are seven bridges which connect different bits of the island to the mainland—or to the surrounding hinterland—or simply cross the river at various points before it reaches that island area. There are seven of these bridges, and the question that was asked by the Swiss mathematician Euler was: would it be possible—was there a route that you could take through Königsberg such that you could cross all of the bridges only once and not have to cross one of them twice?09:23Christopher ClarkThe answer was no; no one had ever found a way of doing this. But the interesting question for Euler was: was there a mathematical proof that it wasn't possible? How could you prove something that was not simply numerical but had to do with the spatial arrangement of a mass of land and a mass of water? So he came up with something that at the time was called situational geometry—the term they originally used for it—but effectively he founded modern topology, the study of shapes and mathematical geometric study of shapes. So he set up that problem.10:14Christopher ClarkIt was not a problem that the great masses of the people puzzled over. His proof was a very sophisticated and difficult one to follow, and it used a new notation in which you could turn spatial relations into something resembling a mathematical equation. So it's a complex and technical matter, but the seven bridges became known as a kind of mythical attribute of the city.10:46Andrew KeenSpeaking of mythical attributes, Chris, I'm not sure if this is a true story, but it's one that's always stuck in my mind: that the great Kant used to take a morning or late morning or early afternoon walk, and the story goes that the people of Königsberg used to set their watches by Kant. Maybe there's a kind of scientific mythology to this town. Is there any truth to that, or is that just an old wives' tale?11:13Christopher ClarkIt's not just a tale. I mean, we've learned to respect the tales that old wives tell, haven't we Andrew? I hope we have.11:21Andrew KeenAll right. Or old husbands as well, I guess.11:24Christopher ClarkOld husbands as well, exactly. Well, I think that it's not just a tale. I mean, Kant led a fantastically regulated and, in terms of its daily routine, repetitive life. He did indeed leave his house at the same time every day; he lunched at the same time every day. So his lunchings and his comings and goings were so regular that—I mean, if you were foolish enough to do it—you could have set your watch by him.12:02Christopher ClarkIn fact, crowds of gawkers used to come to the pub where he ate and used to gather in front of a window from which you had a view of the table. It's a little bit like Warren Buffett's famous steak at that diner in Nebraska whose name I've now forgotten, but he used to order a particular Buffett steak—it was always made to his specifications at the same time, in the same place, at the same table every day. And Kant was a man like that, a man of habit, a man of routine—except, of course, in his thinking, which was fantastically smart and nimble and innovative and fresh.12:50Christopher ClarkIt's said of Kant—and I'm afraid I can't tell you with any certainty whether this is true or not—that he one day decided it might be a good idea to go and see the seaside. Because although Königsberg was near the sea, it was on this big river which went down to the sea at Pillau; it wasn't actually on the sea. And he thought, "I really should go and see the sea." But he got halfway there and, I don't know, somehow it didn't agree with him and he decided to go back home. That's the story that's told.13:25Christopher ClarkI don't know if that's true, but the fact is that myths are funny. They may not be true, but they're always true in a sense—they're telling us something, they're "mything," they're doing something. And what this myth was doing to the history of Königsberg was associating it with this great symbolic figure of the Enlightenment—and a symbolic figure of regularity.13:58Andrew KeenYou note in the book that one of the sad things about Königsberg is it wasn't quite a port; it didn't have a seafront, which kind of undermined its historical relevance. Let's get to this scandal, which is most un-Kantian, I guess, Chris, in its irregularity—or at least in the characters involved. Given Kant's association and these great stories about people setting their watches by him, one wouldn't have expected the kind of scandal that you write about in this book to have occurred in Königsberg of all places, which I think probably adds to its interest and probably stimulated you to write this book.14:48Christopher ClarkYeah, absolutely. And this is what people at the time—some people at the time—thought as well. They said, "This is supposed to be the city of Kant. I mean, what has happened to this place? You know, all these madcap capers and so on going on. Kant would be turning in his grave." So yes, there is a kind of stressful tension between the scandalous developments and the kind of cool rationalism—the rational regularity and detached, reasonable intellect—of the age of Kant. And there are plenty of people in Königsberg who felt they were the inheritors of that spirit and that that spirit was under attack in the city.15:38Christopher ClarkBut perhaps it might be a good idea to say what this scandal was about.15:44Andrew KeenYeah, well, that was my opportunity. I was giving you an opportunity to talk about the Muckers. You had a great name, the Muckers. I stay in London; we had a rock group called The Muckers, so it particularly resonated with me.15:58Christopher ClarkIs there a rock group called The Muckers? Well, an unknown one, they were based—they were in Hackney, I’m not sure where they are now. Well if I'd known that, I might have included them in my book, at least in a footnote. But yes, the Muckers, who of course in German were the Mucker. Mucker is a funny word; it meant—it's a rather obscure word even in German—but it became very widely known in the 1830s as the word for these people who were supposedly behaving scandalously.16:40Christopher ClarkAnd Mucker meant someone who is zealous in religion but also had connotations of hypocrisy—you know, you're zealous but there's something behind the scenes that you're keeping quiet about. It also suggested hints of sexual impropriety in the term as well.17:10Christopher ClarkAnd yeah, so the interesting thing about this—and I'm not sure whether this qualifies as a spoiler; it's probably not, since I actually acknowledge it in the preface to the book, the very brief one-paragraph preface—this is a very weird kind of scandal. Because scandals normally happen when something that is hidden and transgressive is suddenly revealed and people stand back and take a sharp breath and go, "Oh my goodness, we had no idea! What a shock!" And it's a sort of steep learning curve as everyone discovers the terrible things that a person or a group or an institution has been getting up to. Mostly, this behavior is real—there is a real background, like the Epstein scandal is a very good example of a scandal which has a real background of criminality at its heart.18:15Christopher ClarkBut this scandal is different because, in the case of this scandal—I mean, initially there was a massive media interest in what was going on and there was a trial. And the two men who bore the burden of most of the charges wound up being thrown out of their office; both were clergymen, they were both disqualified from holding clerical office. They were fined and then thrown in prison.18:48Christopher ClarkSo it was a terrible outcome for them. But then an appeal trial took place, and during the appeal, they got some energetic support from a very clever young lawyer who started digging around the people who were making the denunciations. And it was revealed that none of the charges against them relating to sexual impropriety were actually true.19:18Christopher ClarkSo what's interesting about this scandal is that it was a scandal without a sort of true transgression at its heart. It was a scandal made of invented slanders and so on, not one triggered by actual transgressions that had been concealed. Just to sort of clarify what happened: in the mid-1830s, the authorities in Königsberg reported to Berlin that these two clergymen, one called Ebel and another called Diestel, had founded what they called a sect, a sectarian group, within the Lutheran church in the city.20:07Christopher ClarkThey were both clergymen at the two most important churches of the city, the Old City Church and the Haberberg Church. It was alleged that within this sectarian group that they'd created, all kinds of extraordinary sexual misbehavior was occurring. Two women had allegedly already died of the effects of excessive sexual arousal—yes, in those days people believed that was possible, to be killed by sexual arousal. And there was talk of the possibility of unwanted children born out of wedlock.20:53Christopher ClarkAs the story circulated, they got more elaborate; it was said that men who wanted to join the sect had to go through elaborate initiation rituals involving sexual intimacies with adolescent females, that as you went higher up the ranks of the sect, the sexual behaviors or the sexual transactions required to be initiated became more and more, how shall I put it, extreme.21:30Christopher ClarkWe don't know much of the detail, even of the inventions, because it was common for journalists writing about these things to say, "I'd like to tell you more, but I'm afraid merely to write down what goes on inside this sect would contravene the obscenity laws of the kingdom." So there's a lot of that kind of thing—you know, "a chaste pen refuses to insult the paper with the disgusting details of what this circle has been up to."22:04Andrew KeenThe fact that you raise that pen, if Freud was around, Chris, he might have other interpretations.22:11Christopher ClarkI know, but sometimes a pen is just a pen.22:15Andrew KeenExactly, and sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But for you, as someone who writes about this scandal, do you have a psychosexual or psychosocial analysis of this paranoia? What does it tell us about the Königsberg of the mid-19th century, or Protestantism or puritanism or the state of mind of mid-19th century Europe?22:42Christopher ClarkWell, that was why I got interested in this, because if two people really do do some very outrageous and, in the context of their time, atypical and norm-busting things, then the scandal that results isn't necessarily terribly interesting—it's just the working out of the process of public outrage. But if it turns out that the allegations that drive the scandal are actually false, it becomes a lot more interesting for a historian. Because then we want to know: if this wasn't true, why was it invented? What was it about these people? And why were these particular stories about sexual excess so central to their public destruction?23:36Christopher ClarkAnd that was the question that interested me when I got into this, stuck into this. Initially, I have to say, I wasn't sure whether any of these things had happened or not; I thought it was possible, and that struck me in itself as quite interesting. But it got more interesting as I realized that actually, it's very unlikely that any of it ever happened. Then the process of invention became more interesting.24:08Christopher ClarkI think the background is, first of all, that this is an era—it's the 1830s, so the end of the Napoleonic Wars is only 20 or 22 decades away in the past. And that had been a period of extreme disturbance and upheaval, and in many ways, that disturbance and upheaval had not gone away. The societies of Europe, of Western Europe in particular and Central Europe—and this is really central to Central-Eastern Europe—are still stirred up by the events of those years.24:49Christopher ClarkThe Enlightenment had created a sort of tension between rationalist and, shall we say, evangelical forms of Christianity. Everybody's familiar in America with the difference between the more sort of austere, say, Episcopalian forms of Protestantism and the more sort of biblical and evangelical forms of Christianity. It's a very broad spectrum. And in these years, that spectrum was a very stressed spectrum full of political tensions. Because the elite in the city espoused a kind of Kantian rationalist, rather dry form of Protestant religiosity—if they were religious at all, some of them were not—whereas these two clergymen were more at the evangelical end.25:47Christopher ClarkAnd so they were suspect figures just for theological reasons in the eyes of the city's elite. But we have to add to this the fact that these two clergymen were also influenced by a man who had died by the time this scandal happened, a man called Schönherr. I won't go into too much detail about him—he's an interesting fellow; he'd come up with a sort of home-spun theory about how the world was created. And what he argued was: Genesis is very unclear about how the world is made; there's a lot of talk about the spirit of God moving over the face of the waters.26:33Christopher ClarkBut he said if you look closely at what's going on, it's quite clear that there isn't one God, there are actually two: a gigantic sphere of water—when I say gigantic, I mean on a cosmic scale of enormity—and an enormous sphere of fire and heat and light. And that these two spheres had wandered about in the eternal nothingness for a very long period. And when I make this movement, I am quite serious about that; that's how he described it.27:10Andrew KeenAnd for people just listening, Chris is waving his arms.27:14Christopher ClarkI'm waving my arms about, yes; I'm sorry, this is not good for radio and for podcasting. But anyway, the point is that he had this quite left-field theory of cosmogony, of how the world had come about, and it was a theory that very much interested Ebel and Diestel, the two clergymen in question.27:43Christopher ClarkOne of the reasons was that they thought this argument about fire and water sounded to them like a scientific argument. This was, after all, the age of steam, when putting water and fire together was one of the most important and charismatic and interesting technological things you could do. And so I mean, steam was, if you like, the AI of the 1830s. And the Königsbergers—people in the city—only got to know their first steam engines, they only got to see them, manufactured in Britain of course and imported, in the 1820s and '30s. They only saw their first steamboat in the 1830s.28:38Andrew KeenAnd of course at this point Germany was barely industrialized. I mean there isn't a Germany, there's a Prussia.28:44Christopher ClarkYeah, well exactly, Prussia being one of the states of Germany, is really just at the—not even yet at the beginning of the transformative boom in production and so on that will change everything. That really gets going in the 1850s. So, you know, we're still in a very early stage of all of that, and these two clergymen thought, "Well, this is kind of scientific; it's about the observation of science and fire and water and it's got cosmic significance." So they adopted these teachings.29:22Christopher ClarkOf course they were heterodox, they weren't the standard position of the rationalist clergy of the time, and this combination of a sort of evangelical, rather warm mystery and miracle kind of religiosity with a little bit of esoteric spice added in in the form of Schönherr's rather weird doctrine about the gigantic spheres—all of that made them suspect figures.29:55Christopher ClarkBut there was another thing too, and that was that Ebel in particular was very, very interesting to women. He attracted female adherents in great numbers, especially from the very best families of the city. So his church was filled on Sunday mornings with all these very well-dressed women—and a lot of men as well, but in particular, it was notable that women were driving this.30:33Christopher ClarkAnd that they found him very interesting and that he spoke very respectfully to them and that he had a good understanding of their predicament. So a lot of them started going to him for advice on quite intimate questions, such as—one of the things I learned from looking into this book about these events in Königsberg was how many unhappy marriages there were. And people were trapped in them; divorce was very, very difficult.31:13Christopher ClarkAnd so you had no one really to go to; you might talk to your sister or to a very close friend, but apart from that, there were no couples counselors, there were no psychoanalysts. All of that was done by clergymen. And these two clergymen, because they were known for their understanding and non-judgmental approach to women—and incidentally to sexual life within marriage—they became sought-after confidants. And this aroused many of the men associated with them to anger and to prurient interest.32:00Christopher ClarkSo his and Diestel—so the Muckers are the subject of Chris Clark's new book, A Scandal in Königsberg. I can't resist ending with perhaps your best known book, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. Coming up in a couple of days I have an interview with another very prominent historian, the Yale historian Odd Arne Westad. He has a new book, The Coming Storm: Power, Conflict and Warnings from History. He suggests that we are on the verge of another international catastrophe like the First World War. Your book, The Sleepwalkers, is wonderfully titled about how Europe literally sleepwalked into this catastrophe of the First World War.33:04Andrew KeenDo you think that—I'm not sure if you've had a chance to look at Westad's new book. But do you think he's onto something? Is 2026—only off by a couple of years—especially given what's happening now in Iran and Taiwan, Ukraine? Are we sleepwalking, Chris, easy final question, into another catastrophe, international disaster?33:38Christopher ClarkWell, my short answer to that would be "I hope not." I don't think we're sleepwalking, because I think the problem in 1914 was that people felt that there was a generalized inability to place yourself imaginatively in the position of the other party. And I think if I look, for example, at the European response to the invasion of Ukraine by Putin, I don't think it's been a sleepwalking response in that sense, because people have striven to be as thoughtful as possible about what Putin wants.34:26Christopher ClarkIn some ways, they've been too thoughtful—I mean, they've spent too much time trying to understand Putin and perhaps not enough time being absolutely clear about what the limits are of what is tolerable. So I don't think it's the same kind of sleepwalking mechanism where people just don't bother really calculating the risks. I think we're very risk-aware. One reason why we're risk-aware—we're paralyzed, in fact, by our risk awareness—is the presence in the current constellation of nuclear weapons. That's made a tremendous difference to the way geopolitics operates. It sort of irradiates all these questions with the possibility of a total extinction.35:33Christopher ClarkUsing the word "irradiates" is chilling, I think. It really is. And that's the sort of "scared us" into a condition of high self-awareness about risk. I think what's very striking at the moment is: which country did Putin pick? Well, he picked Ukraine, a complexly situated country; the Crimea obviously had only become Ukrainian after the Second World War, the eastern districts are very mixed in their political loyalty. So he picked a weak country that he thought was on an exposed flank. He chose, like bullies do, he chose his victim intelligently and thought that "this is the weak link in the Western chain."36:34Christopher ClarkIn attacking Iran, I think the United States and Israel are attacking a state that doesn't have nuclear weapons—at least it doesn't yet—and the lesson of this conflict so far, one of the lessons is that missile defense actually works. A great number of the Iranian attempted counterstrikes have been blown out of the air before they were able to hit; some have been effective, of course, and have caused fatalities. But at the moment, I think people are testing the system at the edges of its "crumple zone," as it were.37:22Christopher ClarkThe main worry is, of course, about the possibility that we could transition unintentionally to a nuclear exchange. And the danger of that is gradually growing, I think, partly because of changes in nuclear doctrine and because of growing anxiety about—a lot of these questions I don't know the answer to. For example, how good is the missile defense of the United States? How effective would it be against an attempted atomic strike? It's looking better and better. I don't know if the same applies to Western Europe; I very much doubt it.38:15Christopher ClarkBut we have a very open situation; it's very patchy, it's very difficult to appraise. And of course, even the action against Iran—the current action against Iran—is also very hard to appraise because we know so little about why it's been undertaken. We don't know what the reason is for this timing, what's the reasoning behind the advice, what's the plan for the aftermath of the initial strike. So it's really very difficult to say even whether this was a smart decision or not.39:03Christopher ClarkOne thing most people are agreed about is that they don't really regret any damage done to the regime of the Mullahs, which is a regime hated in its own country even more than it is in other countries. I spent some time in Iran, and I had plenty of opportunity to see that this is a society which is more divided, more separate in its awareness from its regime than any other I've ever encountered. So who knows what's going to happen in Iran. We don't yet know what the outcome will be, but we also don't know how this decision was made and whether it was a well-crafted decision or a poorly-crafted one. We just know that it's backed by great power—the power of the United States and Israel. So at the moment, we're still spectators struggling to keep up with the rolling frontier of events.40:07Andrew KeenThere you have it. One thing I think we can say for sure is that the Mullahs weren't or aren't Muckers, which are the subject of Chris Clark's new book, A Scandal in Königsberg. One of our wisest historians reminding us that we should firstly recognize that we mostly know very little and secondly we should try and think about how other people think. Wonderful conversation, Chris, it's an excellent book and as I said it can be read very quickly, but it's a very wise book. Thank you so much.40:53Christopher ClarkThank you so much Andrew, I really enjoyed it.40:57Andrew KeenHi, this is Andrew again. Thank you so much for listening or watching the show. If you enjoyed it, please subscribe. We're on Substack, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, all the places. And I'm be very curious as to your comments as well on what you think of the show, how it can be improved, and the kinds of guests that you would enjoy hearing or listening to in future. Thank you again.