Josef Weinheber (9 March 1892 in Vienna – 8 April 1945 in Kirchstetten, Lower Austria) was an Austrian lyric poet, narrative writer and essayist.
Brought up in an orphanage, Weinheber was, before his authorial career, a casual labourer, and from 1911 to 1918 a postal service worker. In 1919 he made contributions to the newspaper The Musket. In 1918 he left the Roman Catholic Church became agnostic. In 1927 Weinheber became Protestant, however on October 26, 1944 he became Roman Catholic again.
In 1920 his first volume of lyric poetry appeared, Der einsame Mensch (The Solitary Man). Weinheber was principally under the literary influence of Rainer Maria Rilke, Anton Wildgans and Karl Kraus. He was on friendly terms with his author-colleagues and Robert Hohlbaum. From 1931 until 1933 and from 1944 until his death, Weinheber was a member of the Nazi Party. He had strong anti-Semitic beliefs, and thought the Jews were responsible for his lack of recognition. An example is a letter in 1933 to Jelusich, an Austrian Nazi culture official: "It's not my fault that the Jews keep silent about me... that for 20 years they have prevented me from coming into prominence and making a name for myself.”[1] In the same letter he offered to make his "talents as an artist available to the [Nazi] movement," and asked Jelusich to find an appropriate place for him in it. Weinheber held positions in various Nazi cultural organizations designed not only to communicate the ideology but also to help the career of Nazi artists.
With the publication of his volume of poems Adel und Untergang (Nobility and Ruin), he became one of the most distinguished poets of his time. Especially admired was the volume Wien wörtlich (Vienna Verbatim), which is partially written in Viennese dialect. However, the forty odes comprising the cycle "Zwischen Göttern und Dämonen" (Between Gods and Demons) of 1938 are considered his poetical masterpiece.
The NSDAP publishers Langen-Müller introduced Weinheber to the lucrative German market, and he was invited on extensive reading tours in the Altreich and awarded a prize for foreign German writers. After 1938 he wrote numerous Nazi propaganda poems, such as "Hymnus auf die Heimkehr" ("Hymn to Austria's return"), "Dem Führer" ("To the führer"), and "Ode an die Straßen Adolf Hitlers" ("Ode to the streets of Adolf Hitler"), and became the most-read contemporary poet in Nazi Germany. He received numerous honors and awards, and was included by Adolf Hitler on the list of 1,041 Gottbegnadeten or "divinely gifted" Nazi artists who were exempt from war service on account of their cultural importance.
Falling prey to alcohol during the later events of the War, he committed suicide in April 1945 by taking an overdose of morphine[2] at the time of the advancing Red Army and Germany's impending defeat. He was buried in the village of Kirchstetten, Austria, where he lived 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 poem titled "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").[3] Auden's poem appears in his Collected Poems.
Composer Mimi Wagensonner set 13 of Weinheber's poems to music.
Weinheber was friend to the Austrian writer Carl Julius Haidvogel.