Christopher Clark

Clark's best-selling history of Prussia, Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600–1947 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 German Historians' Prize, an award normally given to historians nearing the end of their careers.

Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia, 1728–1941''.

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.

With his critical biography of the last German Kaiser, Kaiser Wilhelm II, Clark aims to offer correctives to many of the traditional positions presented in J. C. G. Röhl's three-volume biography of Wilhelm.

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.

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 contended that Clark's analysis largely disregards the pressure for war coming from Germany's powerful military establishment.

According to Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Clark had diligently researched the sources covering the war's causes from the German side only to "eliminate [many of them] with bewildering one-sidedness".

Wehler attributed the sales success of the book in Germany to a "deep-seated need [on the part of German readers], no longer so constrained by the taboos characteristic of the later twentieth century, to free themselves from the burdensome allegations of national war guilt".

However, Clark observes that the current German debate about the start of the war is obfuscated by its link to their moral repugnance at the Nazi era.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since 1998, Clark has been a series-editor of the scholarly book series New Studies in European History from Cambridge University Press.

He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities and a prominent member of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft zur Preußischen Geschichte (en: Prussian History Working Group).

In 2003, Clark was appointed lecturer in Modern European History and, in 2006, reader in Modern European History.

Clark is also the co-editor with Wolfram Kaiser of a transnational study of secular-clerical conflict in 19th-century Europe (Culture Wars. Catholic-Secular Conflict in Nineteenth-Century Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and the author of numerous articles and essays.

Professor Clark presented the BBC Four documentary programme "Frederick The Great and the Enigma of Prussia".

His Cambridge University professorship in history followed in 2008.

Since 2009 he has been a member of the Preußische Historische Kommission [Prussian Historical Commission], and since 2010 a senior advisory (non-voting) member of the German Historical Institute London and of the Otto-von-Bismarck-Stiftung [Bismarck Foundation] in Friedrichsruh.

In 2010, Clark was elected a member of the British Academy.

In September 2014 he succeeded Richard J. Evans as Regius Professor of History at Cambridge.

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".

In the birthday honours of June 2015, Clark was knighted on the recommendation of the foreign secretary for his services to Anglo-German relations.

He also presented and narrated the 2017 ZDF documentary The Story of Europe.

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.