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.
On 30 July 1914, it suddenly dawned on Kaiser Wilhelm II that Germany was on the threshold of a war with three great powers. Panicking, he grabbed a recently arrived dispatch from St Petersburg and committed his agonised thoughts to paper in a frenzy of marginal scribbles. England was the author of Germany’s predicament, he scrawled. Over the years, it had gradually tightened a net of...
As the American scholar Jonathan Petropoulos observed in his study of the princes of Hessen, if princes had constituted a profession, ‘they would have rivalled physicians as the most Nazified in the Third Reich (doctors’ membership peaked in 1937 at 43 per cent)’.
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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