Josef Weinheber from 1936. Part of his house there, located on Josef Weinheber-Strasse, has been preserved as a museum in his honour. The English poet W. H. Auden, who spent summers in Kirchstetten from 1958 until 1973, wrote a moving poem about Weinheber called "Josef Weinheber." Auden acknowledges Weinheber's support of Nazism but also records his reply to Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels' offer to enrich Austrian culture: "in Ruah lossen" (leave us alone). Auden's poem appears in his "Collected Poems." Josef Weinheber "Translated from German Wikipedia" Josef Weinheber (9 March 1892 in Vienna – 8 April 1945 in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria)
Epilogue For W. H. Auden writing in a 'holiday' spirit, its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing every day more powerful and a world-war more inevitable. Indeed, the prologue to that war, the Spanish Civil War, broke out while we were there." Edna Longley, in her study of Louis MacNeice, comments that "Epilogue For W. H. Auden" is "MacNeice's most integrated use of Iceland as an imaginative focus, perhaps because retrospect has clarified the tension defined in 'a fancy turn, you know / Sandwiched in a graver show'." Michael O'Neill and Gareth Reeves