On 28 September 2025, Wiepersdorf fellow Lukas Zittlau gave a lecture in German commemorating Wolfgang Heise on the occasion of his 100th birthday, offering an introduction to his life and thought.

“For me, Wolfgang Heise was part of a network of friendships that will never be mentioned in any future history book, but that stretched across the entire country and helped us to live.” This is how the writer Christa Wolf remembered Wolfgang Heise. The philosopher - today almost forgotten - led a fascinating life in the GDR, finding his intellectual productivity in the tension between communist belief and socialist disillusionment.

Interned in Hitler’s camps as a youth and, as an adult, a friend to many of the country’s leading artists and writers, he remained, until his early death in 1987, a central figure in the subversive intellectual life of the GDR. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, we would like to reconstruct some of these relationships and also make their ruptures visible—ruptures that often followed lines drawn by Romanticism and that unfolded here in Wiepersdorf as well.

Since 2023, Lukas Zittlau has been pursuing his doctorate at the Faculty of Literary Studies at Humboldt University in Berlin, focusing on the intellectual biography of the philosopher Wolfgang Heise. In his dissertation, he seeks to trace the movement of Heise’s thought within the tension between communist conviction and practical disillusionment.