A Scandal in Königsberg, 1835–1842
Christopher Clark
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In memory of Jonathan Steinberg (1934– 2021)
Between 1835 and 1842, scandal tightened around two clergymen in the Baltic port city of Königsberg. It destroyed their reputations, drove them out of their jobs and into prison, and banished them from public life. Their legal exoneration of the most serious charges against them came too late to reverse the damage. I have been thinking about this small vortex of turbulence ever since I happened on the relevant files in the early 1990s. The campaign of denunciations and rumour that took down the Lutheran preachers Johann Ebel and Heinrich Diestel belongs to an age before the advent of paparazzi, radio, television and digital social media, but that is precisely what endows their story with fabular power. Resemblances to present- day persons and situations, though not intended, cannot be ruled out.
The City of Almost
In the 1830s, the city of Königsberg still bathed in the amber glow of the late Enlightenment, at least in the minds of educated people who had never been there. Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had lived, studied, written and taught here for most of his life, the clocklike regularity of his daily routines attracting small crowds of gawpers. His remains lay in the professors’ crypt of the city’s cathedral and a monument consisting of a bust by Johann Gottfried Schadow on a plinth of grey Silesian marble stood in the main lecture theatre of the university. The former house and garden of the great man had been taken over by a bathing facility, but the new owner of the house had fixed a marble tablet above the door with the inscription: ‘Immanuel Kant lived and taught here from 1783 until 12 February 1804’.1 All three sites counted among the city’s principal tourist destinations.
The intricate geography of the city was etched into the memory of at least some by the ‘Königsberg Bridge Problem’, one of the world’s most famous mathematical puzzles. Seven bridges crossed the three arms of the River Pregel. Was it possible, the Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler asked in 1735, to walk a route through the town by crossing each bridge once and only once? And if it was not, could this impossibility be mathematically proven? The ‘geometry of position’ Euler
Bird’s-eye plan of Königsberg, showing the seven bridges over the Pregel river, Kneiphof Island in the centre. Engraving by Matthäus Merian, 1652.
devised to prove that it was not possible laid the foundations of modern combinatorial topology.2
Königsberg was the capital city of East Prussia, the easternmost province of the Prussian kingdom. This was the provincial descendant of the Duchy of Prussia, a Baltic principality that had been controlled by the Teutonic Order until its secularization in 1525. By means of complex marital manoeuvring, the Hohenzollern Electors of Brandenburg in Berlin secured the right of succession to this far-flung territory. Seventeenth-century Ducal Prussia, which was roughly as large as Brandenburg itself, lay outside the Holy Roman
The City of Almost
Empire on the Baltic coast, surrounded by the lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and subject to the sovereignty of the Kings of Poland. It was a place of windswept beaches and inlets, cereal-bearing plains, wide lakes, marshes and sombre forests. Over seven hundred kilometres of roads and tracks, virtually impassable in wet weather, lay between Berlin and Königsberg.
Only in 1657 did King John Casimir of Poland cede full sovereignty over Ducal Prussia to the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg, an event of enormous importance for the dynasty’s future. In 1701, during the reign of Elector Frederick III of Brandenburg, the Ducal Prussian sovereignty would be used to acquire the title of king for the House of Hohenzollern. In due course, even the ancient and venerable name of Brandenburg would be overshadowed by ‘Kingdom of Prussia’, the name increasingly used in the eighteenth century for the totality of the lands ruled by the dynasty. The peripheral location of East Prussia thus belied its centrality to the history of the kingdom. No wonder East Prussians thought of themselves as the inhabitants of a ‘country’ (Land ), rather than of a province.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Prussians from across the Hohenzollern lands also remembered Königsberg as a theatre of the struggle against Napoleon and the rebirth of the Kingdom of Prussia. After the destruction of the Prussian armed forces at the hands of Napoleon in 1806–7, the court had fled to Memel on the border of the Russian Empire. Königsberg was occupied by the French army and subjected to exorbitant requisitioning and contributions. The resulting war debts would not be paid off until 1900.3 From the autumn of 1807, the city became the headquarters of a remarkable cohort of statesmen and officials – Stein, Hardenberg, Scharnhorst, Clausewitz, Gneisenau, Wilhelm von Humboldt and Boyen,
not to mention Theodor von Schön and Carl von Altenstein. These men formed the embryo of a new kind of administration, tightly organized around thematic administrative and decision-making centres, and focused on seizing the opportunities offered by the Prussian defeat in order to rationalize decision-making structures and channel the dormant energies of state and society.
It was also from here that Napoleon launched his doomed campaign against the Russian Empire. By June 1812, some 300,000 men – French, Germans, Italians, Dutch, Walloons and others – were gathered in east Prussia. It soon became clear that the provincial administration was in no position to coordinate the provisioning of this vast mass of troops. The previous year’s harvest had been poor and grain supplies were quickly depleted. Hans Jakob von Auerswald, Provincial President of West and East Prussia, reported in April that the farm animals in both provinces were dying of hunger, the roads were strewn with dead horses, and there was no seed corn left. The provincial government’s provisioning apparatus soon broke down under the pressure, and individual commanders simply ordered their troops to carry out independent requisitioning. It was said that those who still owned draught animals ploughed and sowed at night, so as not to see their last horse or ox carted off. Others hid their horses in the forest, though the French soon got wise to this practice and began combing the woods for concealed animals. There were numerous reports of excesses by the French troops, especially extortion, plundering and beatings. One report from a senior official spoke of devastation ‘even worse than in the Thirty Years War’.4
Throughout the province, the mood gradually shifted from resentment to a simmering hatred of the Napoleonic forces. Vague early rumours of French setbacks in Russia
As the last stragglers of the French Grande Armée entered Königsberg on 20 December 1812, the city became the backdrop for a world-historical moment. The once-invincible army of Napoleon was a ravaged remnant of its former self. Johann Theodor Schmidt, the President of Police in Königsberg, recalled the sight of the French limping westwards out of Russia:
The noblest figures had been bent and shrunken by frost and hunger, they were covered with blue bruises and white frostsores. Whole limbs were frozen off and rotting [. . .] they gave off a pestilential stench [. . .]. Their clothing consisted of rags, straw mats, old women’s clothing, sheepskins, or whatever else they could lay hands on. None had proper headgear; instead they bound their heads with old cloth or pieces of shirt; instead of shoes and leggings, their feet were wrapped with straw, fur or rags.5
The City of Almost 5 were greeted with excitement and heartfelt schadenfreude . The first sketchy reports of the burning of Moscow (razed by the Russians to deny Napoleon winter quarters) arrived in Königsberg at the beginning of October. There was particular interest in reports of the appalling destruction inflicted on the Grande Armée by irregular forces of Cossacks and armed peasant partisans. On 14 December, the 29th bulletin of the Grande Armée put an end to any further doubts about the outcome of the Russian campaign. Issued in the Emperor’s name, the bulletin blamed the catastrophe on bad weather and the incompetence and treachery of others, announced that Napoleon had left his men in Russia and was hastening westwards towards Paris, and closed with a remarkably brutal expression of imperial self-centredness: ‘The Emperor’s health has never been better.’
The slow-burning anger of the peasantry now ignited into acts of revenge as the rural population took matters into their own hands. ‘The lowest classes of the people,’ District President Theodor von Schön reported from Gumbinnen, ‘and especially the peasants, permit themselves in their fanaticism the most horrific mistreatment of these unhappy wretches [. . .] in the villages and on the country roads, they vent all their rage against them [. .]. All obedience to the officials has ceased.’6
For several weeks it seemed that the French might be intending to defend the walled city of Königsberg against the pursuing Russians, a decision that would have exposed the city to bombardment and devastation – this was an era in which the populations of besieged cities often paid a terrible price for their refusal to submit. But at ten o’clock in the evening of 4 January 1813, as the skies over Königsberg glowed red with the reflected light of the Russian campfires, the chief of police and his staff discovered that the French had simply disappeared from the city and stolen off westwards. By midnight, the first Cossack scouts could be seen riding quietly on unshod horses to confirm that the French had gone.7 Königsberg now became the place where Prussia changed from being a reluctant ally of the French to a member of the coalition that would drive Napoleon and his armies out of Germany and restore the integrity and independence of Prussia. It was here on 5 February 1813 that the East Prussian Estates, widely known at the time as ‘representatives of the nation’, convened under a Russian interim occupation to take control of the new situation. Contemporaries experienced and remembered these events as a new point of departure in the history of the kingdom.
Yet for first-time visitors in the 1830s, the experience of arriving in Königsberg was usually a disappointment. Since 1828,
City of Almost
‘Reichsstraße Nr. 1’ had connected Berlin with Königsberg via 565 kilometres of government-built all-weather roads. The ‘Express Mail Coach’, introduced on this route in 1821, could cover this distance in only five or six days. (Not until 1857, when the railway link was completed, did it become possible to make the journey in one day.) The sight that greeted weary travellers as they descended from their coaches was not especially inspiring. There were seven gates in the city walls. These were not objects of great beauty and most of them, a contemporary noted, were ‘of mediocre construction’. There had been plans afoot since 1834 to demolish and rebuild the Sackheim Gate through which Prussian troops had passed in 1813 to join the struggle against France; this would have supplied the city with at least one presentable entrance, but as late as 1840 work on the proposed improvements had not yet begun.8 Even friends of the city conceded that it lacked distinguished public and private buildings. There were no splendid residences in the style of Potsdam and Berlin.9 And the houses of Königsberg were narrow. ‘Most of them,’ wrote one son of the city, ‘are only three windows wide; indeed I know of a few which are only one window in breadth’ – in such houses, he added, ‘there is never enough light’.10
The finest houses could be found along the Langgasse, but their colours and design were too varied to compose an attractive streetscape. The thoroughfares of the East Prussian capital had once been quite broad, but thanks to lax building regulations almost every property owner in the central districts had filled the space in front of his house with a staircase, an outbuilding, or some other structure, so that by the beginning of the nineteenth century, only the middle part of the street, which was just wide enough for two carriages, was still free. The first purpose-built paved footpath was laid in 1816 on the Fließstraße, but it was
a long time before other streets received the same treatment.11 Pedestrians were forced to walk in the deep muck and dung stirred up by so many vehicles and often found themselves in mortal danger, because there was nowhere to take shelter when two carriages happened to pass each other. The various sheds and porticos gave such a messy and chaotic general impression, one citizen reported, that he could scarcely believe he was walking on the main streets of a major European city.12
The most disappointing feature of all was the riverfront. Everyone agreed that the city was well situated on a fine, broad river that almost never flooded. The River Pregel approached the city in two parallel arms that in joining formed an island, known as the Kneiphof, which was an almost perfect extended rectangle. The river’s right bank rose gently and from several pretty ponds there flowed streams whose strong current drove many mills. The quay along the Pregel could have been one of the finest in Germany if the houses along it had not been built with their rear ends, ‘which are even uglier than the fronts’, facing towards the water. To make matters worse, the banks of the watercourse were not lined with stone quays or tiled embankments but secured with wooden stakes. The rotten, wet wooden palisades along the Pregel struck an unhappy contrast with the stately quays of the Spree in Berlin or the Seine in Paris. The suburbs of Königsberg were better laid out, because there were fewer outhouses and obstructions, but they were also scrappy and chaotic, with streets running between the picket fences of gardens and many individual patches of unbuilt space, even on the main thoroughfares. ‘One could find awful hovels between some of the finest buildings’.13
None of this meant that the city lacked charm. It just meant that the best views of Königsberg were not of the city itself but from its houses and bridges onto the river or into the