Unseen letters revealed that WH Auden had formed a “strong friendship” with the sex worker whom WH Auden had robbed

The ‘once in a century’ discovery of a cache of lost letters reveals how English poet WH Auden developed a deep and lasting friendship with a Viennese sex worker and car mechanic after the latter burgled the home of the Funeral Blues author and was put on trial.

York-born Auden, who was a prominent member of a generation of 1930s writers that also included Christopher Isherwood, Lewis MacNeice and Stephen Spender, described his unorthodox arrangement with the man he affectionately called ‘Hugerl’.” In the poem published after his death, Said.

“Our lives crossed paths, at one point/I needed money/and I wanted sex,” the letter read.

But little was known about Hugo Kurka’s life and full criminal history until Oden University researcher Helmut Neudlinger mentioned his name on an Austrian television program marking the 50th anniversary of the poet’s death in 2023.

The next morning, Noendlinger received an email from a woman who had become close to Korka and his wife, Christa, after they settled in rural Lower Austria in the 1990s and inherited their property after they died of cancer within a year of each other, in 2012 and 2013.

She showed Neudlinger 100 letters that Auden had sent to his mistress, some of which were also addressed to his wife. “It’s a once-in-a-century discovery, the kind of thing a literary historian can only dream of,” says Sandra Mayer, a cultural historian at the Austrian Academy of Sciences. She spent the past two years digitizing the letters with her colleague Timo Frowirth, and announced her discovery last week.

These works span a period of approximately 10 years between the early 1960s and 1970s, and are written in enthusiastic colloquial German – albeit often with spelling and grammatical errors.

Auden spent some time in Berlin in the late 1920s, then entered into a marriage of convenience with novelist Thomas Mann’s bisexual daughter, Erika, to help her obtain British citizenship and escape the Nazis. After a period in the United States, he settled in the Austrian city of Kirchteten, where he lived until his death in 1973.

The public-school-educated poet was in his mid-fifties when he met a working-class woman in her twenties. “Glad that our enchanted worlds / are so many / that neither is inclined to touch them,” Auden later wrote in his poem. “I can’t tell the difference between a Jaguar and a Bentley / And you never read.”

Their relationship seems reminiscent of the famous bond between the painter Francis Bacon and his lover George Dyer, a small-time crook affiliated with the East End gang in London. But while Dyer’s break-in into Bacon’s apartment is a modern myth that was exacerbated by the biopic Love Is the Devil starring Daniel Craig, in Auden’s case it was true.

Although Kurca had completed his vocational training and was in work, he was struggling to make money. When Auden lent him his Volkswagen Beetle before embarking on a trip to the United States, the young man and two accomplices used the car to carry out a series of car robberies, culminating in a break-in at the poet’s home.

They were arrested after a police chase, found in possession of stolen goods worth 34,000 Austrian shillings (the equivalent of about 20,000 euros today) and were put on trial.

Since the car was registered in Auden’s name, the court case risked exposing the relationship between the young criminal and the writer.

Auden had a special status in Austria at the time, says Noendlinger, curator of the WH Auden Museum in Kirchteten. “He never hid his homosexuality. But unlike Christopher Isherwood, he was never a gay rights activist.” Highly respected as a professor, the English writer regularly visited the local church. “He blended in and tried to live a normal life.”

Since homosexual acts remain a criminal offense in Austria, Korka’s trial risked sparking controversy over the poet, who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1948 and was in close contention for the Nobel Prize in Literature at the time.

An innuendo-laden article in the Austrian newspaper Kurier on October 16, 1962 did not mention the name of Auden, who had become a dual American-British citizen in 1946, but referred only to “one of those Americans stuck in old Europe with its different, freer way of living and letting live.”

Instead of testifying against Kurca, Auden asked his old lawyer to recommend a good lawyer to defend him. Kurka was sentenced to 15 months in prison, and his wife to eight months.

“The whole episode was a turning point in their relationship, a positive point,” Noendlinger says. “Auden did not know whether Kurca would reveal intimate information when he was questioned by police – the fact that he did not seem to have strengthened their relationship.”

“Both learned a lesson,” Auden wrote in his book Said. “But we still could be Stretch and Freire” – translates to “Walker and John.” None of Korka’s letters to Auden have been found, but in those letters the poet wrote from trips to New York or Berlin back to Vienna, he is warm and frank. The older man sent Korka and his wife money to pay for flights to visit him, as well as English lessons, and he complained of feeling abandoned by his partner, the American poet Chester Kallman. “I feel a little lonely,” he wrote in November 1964. “I wish you were here.”

“There may have been an idea that their relationship was of a purely sexual or transactional nature,” Noendlinger says, but “these letters show that they enjoyed a long and intense friendship.”