born in 1955 in Wiesbaden, German writer and essayist. He has published around twenty books, including The Invention of the Red Army Faction by a Manic-Depressive Teenager in the Summer of 1969 which won the German Book Award in 2015 and has been translated in several languages. Witzel has written several radio plays for the Bavarian, Hessian, and West German Radios, including the radio play Stahnke (Bavarian Radio, 2018), for which he also composed the music. His latest publications are among others a metaphysical diary Non-Genuine Despair (2019) and with the philosopher Marcus Steinweg, Humour and Grace (2019).