The market town of Kirchstetten in the Mostviertel, located in the western foothills of the Vienna Woods, has 2,300 inhabitants, a train station from which you can get to Vienna in half an hour, the western motorway that cuts through the municipal area, and two famous sons, both of whom are immigrant sons in the strict sense – the Austrian poet Josef Weinheber (1892 to 1945) and his British-American colleague W. H. Auden (1907 to 1973).Weinheber, who was on the National Socialists’ list of “God-given people”, has a bridge here that crosses the highway, his house on the outskirts is a museum, and he is also buried there in the garden. Because he took his own life in the last days of the war, he was denied access to the God’s Field. Not so for the Anglican Auden, who is commemorated by a wrought-iron grave cross on the cemetery wall (“Poet and Man of Letters”). Chronicler of the Age of Fear We will ignore Weinheber at this point and concentrate on Wystan Hugh Auden from York, the world-class gay poet who lived with Christopher Isherwood in Berlin, was on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War, fought fascism, and married Erika Mann to get her an English passport. After emigrating to the United States, he took on citizenship and received the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 for his major work “The Age of Anxiety”. Much of his late work was created in Kirchstetten, where Auden bought a house in 1957 and where he spent almost every summer from then on with his partner Chester Kallman – and where he remained an outsider despite the Austrian State Prize for European Literature awarded to him in 1966. In the fall of 2025, he was for a moment taken away from the twilight sleep of the modern classic because a hundred postcards, letters and telegrams emerged that Auden wrote over more than ten years to the Viennese Hugo Kurka, known as Hugerl, who was thirty years his junior and whom the “Kronen” newspaper introduced as a “mechanic, burglar, hustler.” That was enough for a state of academic excitement. A new one, it has to be said, because Charles Osborne had already made the relationship public in his 1979 biography “W. H. Auden: The Life of a Poet” and described Hugerl as a “sex worker”. Auden met the half-witted car mechanic because he was caught after breaking into Auden’s apartment. A friendship developed in which Auden even forgave his lover for using his VW Beetle as a getaway car during burglaries. And if necessary, he arranged for a lawyer for Hugerl. The sole heiress donated the letters to the state of Lower Austria. Hugo Kurka often came to Kirchstetten from Vienna with his fiancée and later wife Christa. Sex in the attic while Chester and Christa had coffee parties downstairs. This is how the Germanist Helmut Neundlinger from the Danube University Krems describes it, who also heads the Archive of Contemporaries located there, a literary archive that now also houses Auden’s correspondence after it was digitized by the Austrian Academy of Sciences. It was Neundlinger who indirectly triggered the discovery: He had mentioned Kurka in a television interview two years ago, whereupon a woman came forward who knew Hugo and Christa and who had inherited the letters as sole heir after the couple’s death, which she then handed over to the Lower Austria State Collections. W. H. Auden was perceived by his neighbors in Kirchstetten as an old-school poet who probably still used goose feathers. When he withdrew to the upper floor of his house, however, not only the sounds of writing could be heard. Carmen AuerLocal inspection in Kirchstetten. Anyone arriving by train will come across Auden’s last car, a rusted, cream-colored VW Beetle, in the parking lot next to the train station and opposite the municipal office. Next to it is a historic gas pump with a built-in information screen. The front of the carport consists of a wall of writing that quotes the poem “I, a transplant” in the original language. Translated it goes like this: “I, a transplant / from overseas, am finally the ruler of / three acres of land and a flourishing / concentration of rural existences with whom / I will hardly interact, let alone / have a conversation.” Through the village center we go to Haus Hinterholz 6. On a hillside, just a few hundred meters away, the motorway rushes behind a sound barrier. On the upper floor, which is reached via a wooden external staircase, two rooms have been converted into a museum; the rest of the house is privately inhabited. The museum, which opened in 2015, is financed by the state of Lower Austria and the municipality of Kirchstetten and is looked after by Neundlinger. He reports that Auden found the property with the help of the daughter of his former lover Hedwig Petzold. In addition to German, she taught nineteen-year-old Auden something else in Kitzbühel in 1926. Auden bought the house in 1957, and from the following year he lived there almost every summer until his death.A strict daily schedule, even without an Excel spreadsheetAuden lived according to a strict daily schedule; in the village, as foreseen in the poem, he only socialized with the teacher and doctor couple and the priest. He was addressed as “Mr. Professor”, which was really the minimum given Austrian standards. Auden’s written German was and remained fragmented but courageous, his accent murderous, but he was a famous poet. That much was known in the village and that gave him status. And the toleration of the fact that he lived with a man. It also helped that he attended mass but refrained from taking communion. Neither lovers nor housemaids are welcome in the study room without the secrets of a bedroom: excerpt from Auden’s poem “Thanksgiving for a Habitat”.Carmen AuerThe study with a raised writing place, portable typewriter, sofa and bookcases is followed by a slightly larger, light gray and white attic room in which display cases hanging on steel cables show books, photos, manuscripts and letters, a quick tour through Auden’s dazzling life. At the foot of a Cinzano bottle – “6.30 p.m. time for (really strong!) Martinis”, that was his daily plan – an out-of-fashion wrought iron wine server as a reference to the alcoholic poet neighbor. In a film, Auden says: “I feel comfortable in Austria, I am always fascinated.” He doesn’t say exactly what it is about. It remains to be seen what research impulse the letter discovery will bring. The literary historian Sandra Mayer, who digitized Auden’s post at the Austrian Center for Digital Humanities of the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) together with Timo Frühwirth, expressed euphoria in the “Standard”: This relationship was about much more than just sex, it was “central to Auden – “long-lasting, profound, friendly”. And Frühwirth recognizes a “tone that is characterized by intimacy, trust and exchange at eye level”. The dedication of the posthumously published poem “Glad” shows that his lover meant a lot to Auden.Greetings from Christ ChurchThe first surviving postcard from Christ Church College in Oxford is dated October 25, 1960 and is addressed to “Hugo and Christa Kurka VIENNA IX Mühlnergasse 14/4”. Auden and Kallman sent them together: “Greet me everyone on Saturday! Hello – Chester / I live here. / Unfortunately you are not / Greetings / Wystan”. The vast majority of letters, cards and telegrams are messages, regulate arrival times, announce the joy of seeing each other again, ask to reserve a hotel room, Auden sends tickets, checks, sometimes it’s about the car, sometimes it’s about an insurance claim, then it’s about one Death in Kirchstetten. On November 14, 1967 he wrote from New York: “Dear Hugo and Christa: A catastrophe. On November 4th, Mrs. Emma died of a heart attack. Between other difficulties, that means I think our cats had to be killed. And now, how am I supposed to find other farmers? Everything is going well here. I have a lot of work. Always your Wystan.” Auden, who had other love affairs besides Hugerl, doesn’t skimp on affection (“I can hardly Wait until I see you again. Always your friend” or “Less than a month, thank God, before we meet again. All the best, always your friend”). To what extent this will shed light on homosexuality, which was still stigmatized at the time – it only became unpunished in Austria in 1971 – is still an open question. The Center for Queer History (QVienna) will be involved in processing the finds.More on the topicThe digital edition of the letters can be accessed at https://auden.acdh.oeaw.ac.at/kurka.html; you can find out more about the museum and its offerings at www.audeninkirchstetten.at.W. H. Auden died on the night of September 29, 1973 in a hotel on Walfischgasse in Vienna after a reading. The funeral on October 4, 1973 in Kirchstetten was accompanied by press photographers and filmed for television. Hugo and Christa Kurka can be seen prominently in the funeral procession.
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