John Banville at Literary Review:
It was in the summer of 1835 that a report landed, with what was surely an ominous thud, on the desk of Carl Sigmund Franz Freiherr vom Stein zum Altenstein – the book is worth reading for the names alone – the Prussian minister of church affairs, based in Berlin, which was a very long way from Königsberg, capital of East Prussia. Königsberg’s renown derived chiefly from the presence at the city’s university, the Albertina, of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. After his death in 1804, however, the Albertina ‘lapsed into the status of a sleepy provincial college’. The diminution of the intellectual tone in the city may account for some of the religious excesses that Clark recounts.
One of the most excessive figures was Johann Heinrich Schönherr. Although he died in 1826, he was the force that in the following decade set the ‘small vortex of turbulence’ awhirl. The son of a grenadier in the Prussian army, Schönherr was set to learn a trade but yearned for higher things. In time, he became a self-made preacher and religious thinker and developed a theory that all of creation sprang from the conjunction of two primal, egg-shaped entities, one composed of light, the other of water.
more here.
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