Christopher Clark

Sir Christopher Munro Clark (born 14 March 1960) is an Australian historian living in the United Kingdom and Germany. He is the twenty-second Regius Professor of History at the University of Cambridge. In 2015, he was knighted for his services to Anglo-German relations.

Education and academic positions

Clark was educated at Sydney Grammar School from 1972 to 1978, the University of Sydney (where he studied history) and the Freie Universität Berlin from 1985 to 1987.

Clark received his PhD at the University of Cambridge, having been a member of Pembroke College from 1987 to 1991. He is Professor in Modern European History at the University of Cambridge and, since 1991, has been a fellow of St Catharine's College, where he is currently Director of Studies in History. In 2003, Clark was appointed University Lecturer in Modern European History and, in 2006, Reader in Modern European History. His Cambridge University professorship in history followed in 2008. In September 2014 he succeeded Richard J. Evans as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge. In the birthday honours of June 2015, Clark was knighted on the recommendation of the foreign secretary for his services to Anglo-German relations.

Professional career

As he acknowledges in the foreword to ''Iron Kingdom'', living in West Berlin from 1985 to 1987, during what turned out to be the last years of the divided Germany, gave him an insight into German history and society.

Earlier work

Clark's academic focus started with the history of Prussia, with his earlier researches concentrating on Pietism and on Judaism in Prussia as well as the power struggle, known as the ''Kulturkampf'', between Bismarck's Prussian state and the Catholic Church. His scope has since broadened to embrace more generally the competitive relationships between religious institutions and the state in modern Europe. He is the author of a study of Christian–Jewish relations in Prussia (''The Politics of Conversion. Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728–1941''; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).

''Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947''

Clark's best-selling history of Prussia (''Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947''; London: Penguin, 2006) won several prizes. Its critical reception gave him a public profile that reached beyond the academic world. The German-language version of the book, ''Preußen. Aufstieg und Niedergang 1600–1947'', won Clark the 2010 , an award normally given to historians nearing the end of their careers. Clark remains (in 2014) the youngest-ever recipient of the triennial prize and the only winner not to have approached his work as a mother-tongue German-speaker.

In 17 chapters covering 800 pages, Clark contends that Germany was "not the fulfillment of Prussia's destiny but its downfall". Although the 19th-century ''Kulturkampf'' was characterised by a peculiar intensity and radicalism, Clark's careful study of sources in several different European languages enabled him to spell out just how closely the Prussian experience of church-state rivalry resembled events elsewhere in Europe. In that way, the book powerfully rebuts the traditional ''Sonderweg'' bandwagon by which throughout the 20th century, mainstream historians placed great emphasis on the "differentness" of Germany's historical path before and during the 19th century. Clark downplays the perceived uniqueness of the much-vaunted reform agenda, which was pursued by Prussia between 1815 and 1848, and believes that the political and economic significance of the German customs union, established in 1834, came to be discovered and then overstated by historians only retrospectively and in the light of much-later political developments.

''Kaiser Wilhelm II''

With his critical biography of the last German Kaiser (''Kaiser Wilhelm II''; Harlow: Longman, 2000, series "Profiles in Power"), Clark aims to offer correctives to many of the traditional positions presented in J. C. G. Röhl's three-volume biography of Wilhelm.

''The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914''

Clark's study of the outbreak of the First World War, ''The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914'', appeared in English in 2012; the German version (''Die Schlafwandler: Wie Europa in den Ersten Weltkrieg zog'') followed in 2013. The book challenges the imputation, which had been widely accepted by mainstream scholars since 1919, of a peculiar "war guilt" attaching to the German Empire. He instead maps carefully the complex mechanism of events and misjudgements that led to war. There was in 1914 nothing inevitable about the war. Risks inherent in the strategies pursued by the various governments involved had been taken before without catastrophic consequences, which now enabled leaders to follow similar approaches without adequately evaluating or recognising those risks. Among international experts, many saw the presentation by Clark of his research and insights as groundbreaking.

In Germany itself, where the book received much critical attention, not all reactions were positive. Volker Ullrich

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