Lukas Zittlau was born in Berlin in 1995. After longer stays abroad in Ecuador and Tajikistan, he began studying political science in Marburg in 2015, which he continued at the University of Roma Tre. In 2018, he startet a Master's degree in Religion and Culture at Humboldt University Berlin. During this time, he worked on the assembly line in Wolfsburg, as a drinks vendor in a football stadium and as a ticket collector at the Volksbühne theatre on Rosa Luxemburg-Platz. Most recently, he also published and produced for jungle world and rbb. Since 2023, he has been working on his doctorate at the Faculty of Literature on the intellectual biography of the philosopher Wolfgang Heise.

In his dissertation, Lukas Zittlau attempts to trace Heise's intellectual movement from the tension between communist conviction and practical disillusionment. Above all, however, he pursues the goal of using Heise's philosophical and literary-historical production to reopen his circular thinking, which constantly integrates new contradictions.

Heise's perpetual search for truth in art also took place in Wiepersdorf: Here, the philosopher and aesthetician came across a ‘network of friendships that will not be mentioned in any future history book, but which stretched across the whole country and helped us to live’, as Christa Wolf put it. Visualising this network is the task that Lukas Zittlau has set himself for his stay in Wiepersdorf.