Josef Weinheber

It was my grandmother who first introduced me to the poetry of Josef Weinheber. Then, in my early teens, I found it a bit too provincial and soppy but upon reviewing it recently I came to realize and appreciate its intrinsic quality. It surely sometimes has a pronounced local Viennese note to it, often charmingly so, at other times it is decisively anti-modernistic even classicistic, evoking old eternal truths. Oskar Werner reading a few of Weinheber’s poems.