How neatly persuasive they are, the historical epochs. The Stone Age, the Christian and pre-Christian eras, the Dark Ages, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment – what would we do without such labels? They impose a pattern upon the incoherence of history, and in the process address what the poet Wallace Stevens identifies as humankind’s ‘rage for order’. They sort the unsorted, they corral the wild horses of chaos. And yet they are but labels. Behind them, the world goes on in its wayward way.

After the failure of the French Revolution and the devastation of the Napoleonic Wars, Europe had not so much a rage for order as a hankering after a bit of peace and quiet. And no people hankered more earnestly than the inhabitants of the German lands. ‘In the 1830s, the city of Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment,’ Christopher Clark writes, then crisply adds, ‘at least in the minds of educated people who had never been there.’ Those who lived there knew a thing or two about darkness.

Clark, Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge and one of the great historians of our time, tells us in a prefatory note that for the past thirty years he has been brooding on a ‘small vortex of turbulence’ centred in that renowned but disappointingly shabby city on the Baltic in the years between 1835 and 1842. It is a strange tale he has to tell, of political machinations, religious strife, intellectual faction fighting and ordinary human imbecility.

It was in the summer of 1835 that a report landed, with what was surely an ominous thud, on the desk of Carl Sigmund Franz Freiherr vom Stein zum Altenstein – the book is worth reading for the names alone – the Prussian minister of church affairs, based in Berlin, which was a very long way from Königsberg, capital of East Prussia. Königsberg’s renown derived chiefly from the presence at the city’s university, the Albertina, of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. After his death in 1804, however, the Albertina ‘lapsed into the status of a sleepy provincial college’. The diminution of the intellectual tone in the city may account for some of the religious excesses that Clark recounts.

One of the most excessive figures was Johann Heinrich Schönherr. Although he died in 1826, he was the force that in the following decade set the ‘small vortex of turbulence’ awhirl. The son of a grenadier in the Prussian army, Schönherr was set to learn a trade but yearned for higher things. In time, he became a self-made preacher and religious thinker and developed a theory that all of creation sprang from the conjunction of two primal, egg-shaped entities, one composed of light, the other of water. Clark writes:

Light was the vivifying male principle, water its nurturing female counterpart. These two originary beings, the supreme male and the supreme female, bound in eternal and necessary union, explained everything. 

Laugh if you like, but remember that the dominant religion of the Western world is founded on the premise that the Son of God was born to a virgin in a village in Palestine a couple of thousand years ago.

Among Schönherr’s followers was Johann Wilhelm Ebel, pastor of Königsberg’s Old City Church. Ebel was a personable young fellow much fancied by the ladies of the city, one of whom wrote of him, ‘His large dark eyes, his pale complexion and long, shiny black hair made a particular impression.’ Soon the charismatic Ebel had gathered a following, which included, naturally, a number of highly strung young women; he was also, Clark writes, ‘a welcome guest at the homes of the province’s best families’.

And then, with awful inevitability, came the split. One of the defectors from Ebel’s circle was a country squire with another memorable name, Count Finck von Finckenstein. When Finckenstein learned that a cousin of his, Zelina von Mirbach, had been ‘seduced’ into joining the Ebelians, he wrote to warn her off, claiming that Ebel had encouraged his followers to engage in sexual shenanigans so extreme that two young girls had died from the effects of excessive erotic stimulation. Zelina showed the letter to another preacher in the city, the excitable Pastor Heinrich Diestel, a close associate of Ebel. Diestel wrote a thirteen-page screed to Finckenstein, threatening, among other things, to ‘destroy and crush him as a miserable scoundrel’.

An account of all this was contained in the 1835 report sent to the minister, Altenstein, in Berlin. Altenstein was a remarkably reasonable man, who wanted a quiet life for himself and especially for the province of East Prussia and its capital city, where Ebel was locked in battle with a range of opponents. 

Most of the accusations against Ebel involved sex. It was said that he was preaching that copulation between the men and women of his following, like the conjunction of Schönherr’s balls of water and fire, was free of sin and led to a deeper understanding of eternal verities. The report, written by Theodor von Schön, president of the province of Prussia, spoke of the matter as ‘so repellent, so horrifying, that one can hardly find words enough to express one’s disgust’.

The affair dragged on into the 1840s and became a national scandal. Legal action was brought against Ebel and his rambunctious supporter Diestel, and in the ensuing court cases both men lost their reputations and their places in the religious and social hierarchy of Königsberg. One of Ebel’s weaknesses, when he appeared before the courts, was his disturbingly androgynous quality – his gentleness and fine features, his long hair, his slender fingers, his quiet tone of voice.

And then there was all that favour he found among women. A story circulated in the press by his doctor, Ludwig Sachs, tells of Sachs calling on Ebel to treat him for a skin complaint and being told the preacher was off at a nearby lake. There, Sachs found him in the water, not in the men’s area but in the women’s. ‘And sure enough,’ the scandalised Sachs wrote, ‘ten or twelve younger and older women had gone with this man into the lake and were vying with each other to irrigate the saint.’ Such goings-on – and in Prussia!

A Scandal in Königsberg is a splendid exercise in historical recuperation. It illustrates the confusions, uncertainties and prejudices of a period when the horrors of revolution and warfare were still vivid in the European memory, and men and women were desperately searching for ordinary, lower-case enlightenment and spiritual guidance. And as a drama, the tale of Johann Wilhelm Ebel is every bit as entertaining as one of Heinrich von Kleist’s darker comedies.