born in 1955 in Leipzig and raised in Cologne, he is a literary critic, editor, and author. He has worked as a literature editor at the \u00bbFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung\u00ab, an editor at S. Fischer Verlag, co-editor of the literary magazine \u00bbNeue Rundschau\u00ab, culture editor at the daily newspaper \u00bbDie Welt\u00ab, and until 2017 head of the literature section at the news magazine \u00bbFocus\u00ab. Since then, he has been working as an independent writer. He has published biographies of Franz F\u00fchmann, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, and Karl Marx. In 2021, his book \u00bbFebruary 33: The Winter of Literature\u00ab was released, recounting the first six weeks of Hitler\u2019s regime from the perspective of writers and intellectuals. \u00bbFebruary 33\u00ab has been translated into 13 languages. The writer Pankaj Mishra called it \u00bba masterfully constructed kaleidoscope \u2026 it reads like a fast-paced novel\u00ab in the \u00bbNew York Review of Books\u00ab. In 2024, he published \u00bbMarseille 1940\u00ab, which tells the story of German exiles fleeing through France and the rescue networks led by the American Varian Fry in the south of the country. The book remained on the \u00bbSpiegel\u00ab bestseller list for more than six months, including 14 weeks in the top five. Florian Illies wrote in \u00bbDie Zeit\u00ab: \u00bbWittstock\u2019s book impresses with its precision. He has studied countless refugee memoirs and carefully compared and interwoven them day by day.\u00ab<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":88201,"template":"","jct-role":[1080],"jct-origin":[495],"jct-ilb-years":[957],"class_list":["post-41576","authors","type-authors","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","jct-role-author","jct-origin-germany","jct-ilb-years-2025-en"],"yoast_head":"\n