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)
W. H. Auden good artist must be "more than a bit of a reporting journalist". In 1936, Auden spent three months in Iceland where he gathered material for a travel book "Letters from Iceland" (1937), written in collaboration with Louis MacNeice. In 1937 he went to Spain intending to drive an ambulance for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, but was put to work broadcasting propaganda, a job he left to visit the front. His seven-week visit to Spain affected him deeply, and his social views grew more complex as he found political realities to be more ambiguous and troubling than he