Long-lost Auden letters reveal poet's friendship with his burglar

A "once in a century" discovery of a cache of long-lost letters has revealed how the English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the Funeral Blues author's home and was put on trial.

- Philip Oltermann European culture editor

York-born Auden, a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Louis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unconventional arrangement with the man he affectionately called "Hugerl" in the posthumously published poem Glad.

"Our life-paths crossed," it reads, "At a moment when / You were in need of money / And I wanted sex".

But little was known about the life and full criminal history of Hugo Kurka until the Auden scholar Helmut Neundlinger mentioned his name in an Austrian TV programme occasioned by the 50th anniversary of the poet's death in 2023.

The next morning, Neundlinger received an email from a woman who had grown close to Kurka and his wife, Christa, after they settled in the Lower Austrian countryside in the 1990s and had inherited their belongings after they died of cancer within a year of one another, in 2012 and 2013.

She showed Neundlinger 100 letters that Auden had sent to his lover, some of them also addressed to his spouse. "It's a once in a century find, the kind of thing a literary historian can only dream of," says Sandra Mayer, a cultural historian at the Austrian Academy of Sciences who has spent the past two years digitising the letters with her colleague Timo Frühwirth, and went public with the discovery this week.