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

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“I don’t think we’re sleepwalking, because people have striven to be as thoughtful as possible. In some ways, they’ve been too thoughtful. We’re paralysed, in fact, by our risk awareness.” — Christopher Clark

It’s 1830 in East Prussia. The city of Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment—at least in the minds of people who’d never been there. But that glow, it goes without saying, is illusionary. The greatest of all Königsberg citizens, the illustrious 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant is dead. Napoleon’s shattered army limped west back through the city two decades earlier after its failed invasion of Russia. The place had slipped into a sad provinciality, living off 18th century nostalgia. And then two Lutheran preachers, so-called “Muckers”, get accused of running a sex cult.

Christopher Clark—Regius Professor of History at Cambridge, author of the brilliant The Sleepwalkers and Revolutionary Spring—has been brooding on this story for thirty years. His short new book, A Scandal in Königsberg, is a Prussian microhistory with global ambition. The scandal, he says, was entirely fabricated: no sexual transgressions ever occurred. The two Muckers were convicted, stripped (so to speak) of office, and imprisoned, then exonerated on appeal – giving this case more historical significance than a mere sex scandal.

What made them targets? They were evangelical in a city that prized Kantian rationalism. They followed a dead mystic who believed creation was born from two cosmic spheres—fire and water—which sounded like dangerously mystical in the scientific age of steam power. And the lead preacher, Johann Ebel, committed the unforgivable sin of listening to women confess their unhappy marriages. In a pre-Freudian central Europe, Ebel became the confidant the men of Königsberg couldn’t abide.

And then there’s Iran — far from 19th century East Prussia, but on all of our minds right now. At the end of our conversation, I couldn’t resist asking Clark if he thinks we are sleepwalking into another catastrophic world war. He doesn’t think so. The problem in 1914 was a failure of imagination, he says. Today, Clark argues, we’re actually paralysed by a fear of risk. The Iran invasion is certainly stress testing the international system. But the one thing most people agree on, Clark notes with characteristic dryness, is that nobody much regrets any damage done to the regime of the Mullahs. Even if, as he warns, we still don’t know whether decision to invade Iran was smart or reckless. The Mullahs, at least, aren’t quite Muckers.

Five Takeaways

• This Was a Scandal Without a Transgression: Most scandals expose something real. The Mucker scandal was different: the sexual allegations were entirely invented. Two clergymen were stripped of office, fined, and imprisoned—then exonerated on appeal when a sharp young lawyer proved the charges were fabrications. The process of invention, Clark argues, is more interesting than any transgression could have been.

• Steam Was the AI of the 1830s: The two preachers at the center of the scandal were followers of a dead mystic who believed creation was born from two cosmic spheres—fire and water. In the age of steam, that sounded like science. Königsbergers only saw their first steam engine in the 1820s. New technology makes old ideas feel prophetic—a pattern we might recognise.