Christopher Clark in conversation with The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize
How does it feel to be shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize?
It’s a delight and a great honour to be shortlisted for the Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize. Everything about it exciting and excellent, from the list of the judges who have adjudicated it over the last seventy years to the quality of the past winners. Above all, this is a literary prize, focussed not on a specific genre but on good writing, as one would expect of a prize named for Duff Cooper, whose wonderful memoir, Old Men Forget, I read with delight as a young man.
What drew you to the subject of A Scandal in Königsberg?
I sort of bumped into this subject matter by accident in the late 1980s. I was researching a book on the efforts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Prussian Protestants to convert the Jews of central Europe to Christianity and happened to notice some very bulky files with the strange title: “Concerning the Schönherr-Ebel Sect at Königsberg”. One day as the end of a particular stint in the Berlin archives drew near, I ordered one of these files and spent an afternoon skimming through the contents. It was like leafing through a few years of The News of the World. I had never imagined that the inner life of a provincial city like 1830s Königsberg could be so thrillingly interesting, And I resolved to come back to these materials and give them some serious attention. As usual, other things got in the way, and it has taken me nearly forty years to reach the point where I was ready to write this book.
How did you plan, research and write A Scandal in Königsberg?
With time, I came to feel that this story needed a novella-length treatment. The setting, an East Prussian city whose renown was in eclipse, was small and intense. There was a compact list of dramatis personae. And thanks to the controversial nature of the events, the enlivening effect of a media scandal and the fact that a criminal investigation had taken place, the archival materials were rich in narrative energy. I wanted to write a book that would not displace the voices of the protagonists, but weave them into a polyphonic account of the events. I began the preparation for the book by transcribing the most relevant parts of the archival record and then, having experimented with various structural designs, I found the sequence that I thought best allowed the story and the people in it to breathe and speak.
What were the surprises you encountered along the way?
I was surprised by how contemporary this drama felt as it unfolded on the pages I was writing. The book began as a deep dive into a rather alien world, the world of a Baltic city between the enlightenment and the revolutions of 1848. But the passionate misunderstandings, the malicious destruction of reputation, the cyclonic energy of a scandal engineered by politicians, clergymen and newspaper editors kept prompting reflections on the public life of our own time. It is often observed that the contemporary social media have enabled processes of rapid fragmentation and polarisation. This is doubtless true, but the story told in this book reminds us that urban societies could generate such vortices of turbulence without the help of X or Facebook.
Tell us how A Scandal in Königsberg can be seen as a continuation or a departure from your earlier books?
The story told in A Scandal in Königsberg unfolds in a city in the eastern periphery of the nineteenth-century Kingdom of Prussia, a place that has interested in me since the beginning of my life as a working historian. In that sense, it is a continuation. But the compact format is a departure for me. In the past, I have tended to write big, synoptic books on large questions: The rise and fall of Prussia, the outbreak of the first world war, the 1848 revolutions across Europe and in the world. This book examines a microcosm, seeking the answer to large questions in a very small setting.
What advice would you give a writer of non-fiction starting out today, given the current publishing climate?
Play a long game. Don’t try or expect to have your entire career in one book. Think about form as well as content. Always be reflecting on the next project as you are writing out this one. People will endlessly tell you that non-fiction is dead, that no one is reading anymore, that your subject has been done already and requires no further treatment, that the printed book is a thing of the past or that AI has rendered your work meaningless – they are wrong on all points: don’t listen to them! If they persist, tell them politely to go away and keep writing.
What’s next for you as an author?
I’m working on a book about the Europe that emerged from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars. At its heart is the question: how do you put together a world that has been so comprehensively disturbed and broken?
