Christopher Clark is Regius Professor of History at Cambridge and a fellow of St Catharine’s College. His books include Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, a biography of Kaiser Wilhelm II, The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914 and Revolutionary Spring: Fighting for a New World 1848-49. In 2019 he gave one of the LRB Winter Lectures on the subject of the 1848 Revolutions. He has also written for the paper on Himmler, Hitler, Angela Merkel, and on Perry Anderson’s book about histories of the First World War, which considers his own study, The Sleepwalkers.
This summer, a new monument appeared in Budapest’s Liberty Square. Amid a copse of truncated white marble pillars stands the metal figure of a slender young man. Wrapped from hips to feet in windswept drapery, he opens his arms to the sky. In his right hand he bears the orb of political authority surmounted by the Hungarian double-barred cross. Wings sprout from his shoulder blades....
The European continent was at peace on the morning of Sunday, 28 June 1914, when Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the Austrian heir to the throne, and his wife, Sophie Chotek, arrived at Sarajevo railway station. Thirty-seven days later, it was at war. In its complexity and the speed with which it escalated, the ‘July Crisis’ of 1914 is without parallel in world history. Franz Ferdinand...
The ascent (if that’s the right word) of Heinrich Himmler to become the chief architect of Nazi genocide is one of the strangest strands of the regime’s story. There have been several studies of this enigmatic man, but Peter Longerich’s massive biography, grounded in exhaustive study of the primary sources, is now the standard work and must stand alongside Ian...
In the autumn of 1862, the Kingdom of Prussia was paralysed by a constitutional crisis. Wilhelm I and his military advisers wanted to expand and improve the army. The liberal-dominated Prussian parliament refused to approve the necessary funds. At issue was the question of who had the right to determine the army’s character. The liberal view was that the parliament’s...
David and Helen talk to historian Chris Clark about the 1848 revolutions and what they teach us about political change. What explains the contagiousness of the revolutionary moment? Is it possible to combine...
Christopher Clark explains why the revolutions of 1848 weren’t failures, and why we should think about them now.
Franziska Augstein, Norbert Röttgen, Neal Ascherson and Christopher Clark discuss how Germany sees itself and how the world sees it, with Nicholas Spice.
David and Helen talk to historian Christopher Clark about whether German politics is as stable as it seems.
The revolution was significantly different in each country it visited. The fearsome events unfolding in Vienna can’t be understood without taking into account the simultaneous eruptions in Hungary....
Some saw the collapse of the German Empire as a decisive and traumatic break in the historical continuity of the state. Nothing, in Christopher Clark’s view, more profoundly exemplified this revolt against...
The weakness and unreliability of the alliances, and the lack of certainty about who would be on whose side, exacerbated the crisis of summer 1914.
Too much history can be bad for you. ‘The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living’ – that was Marx’s famous comment on...
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