100 Years of Wolfgang Heise: The Forgotten Philosopher of the GDR

Wiepersdorf fellow Lukas Zittlau commemorates Wolfgang Heise on the occasion of his 100th birthday, offering an introduction to his life and thought.

“For me, Wolfgang Heise belonged to that network of friendships which will never be mentioned in any future history book, but which stretched across the whole country and helped us to survive.” - This is how the writer Christa Wolf remembered Wolfgang Heise. Today, the almost-forgotten philosopher is remembered for a fascinating life in the GDR, a life shaped by the tension between communist faith and socialist disillusionment.

Interned in Hitler’s camps as a youth, and later a close friend of some of the country’s greatest artists and writers, he remained until his early death in 1987 a central figure of the GDR’s subversive intellectual life. On the occasion of his 100th birthday, we seek to reconstruct some of these relationships and highlight their fractures - fractures that often followed the lines of Romanticism and, in fact, played out here in Wiepersdorf.

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

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Wiepersdorf - Bettina-von-Arnim-Straße 13, 14913 Niederer Fläming

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