As told by one of our greatest historians, the story of the scandal that took down two Lutheran preachers in the heart of 19th-century Prussia—a chamber piece of cultish esotericism, pseudo-science, and political resistance that conjures up Europe at the end of the Age of Reason and presages our current Age of Misinformation

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.