“Beloved, great and unspeakably beautiful. I am on fire!”

They are united in large format on the façade of the Werner Berg Museum in Bleiburg for the current exhibition - a couple, a picture that never existed. There has been much speculation about their relationship. Few knew what actually connected the poetry giant from the Lavanttal and the painter of the century from the Rutarhof. It is the stuff of which Greek tragedies are woven.

In 2023, literary doyen Klaus Amann made an eye-opening start with Wallstein and compiled the poet's correspondence into the grandiose Lavant biography "Ich bin maßlos in allem".

Berg's grandson Harald Scheicher has now followed up "Über fallenden Sternen" and published the correspondence between Lavant and Berg, which was kept under lock and key for decades, for the first time in a 1000-page edition. It reveals only five "shared" years (1950 - 1955), but a "love to the death" beyond convention and mediocrity - full of desire and strength, tragedy and struggle, fulfillment and happiness, tears and despair. A love like a primal force!

How lightning once struck Saul outside Damascus
It begins on November 10, 1950 at the three-day literature festival in St. Veit, where they collide. Immediately afterwards, the first two letters leave no doubt about the fateful nature of their encounter. And Berg enthuses: "Three of your poems have penetrated the center of my heart and almost want to drive it apart. From the first sight of you, however, I was struck by your beauty, strength of soul and greatness in the same way that Saul was struck by lightning outside Damascus. I have never suspected a force of shock such as that which threw and throws me this time." Lavant, who, "as a sick and deformed child, has always been infuriated by mine", this woman of fire who burns with such boundless emotion, replies: "Since you asked me to remember you seriously, and since I find in myself an almost trembling willingness to do so, it is of course unavoidable that a certain closeness to you arises."

Just a month later, just before Christmas, his letters, "which come like daily bread", are indispensable to her and she feels "nothing but: Happiness! Happiness! Happiness!" Even then, Berg's wife "Mauki" is spoken of appreciatively. Next Sunday, exhibition organizers Harald Scheicher and Arthur Ottowitz will tell you why she went from being the knowing supporter of this amour fou to its gravedigger and how Lavant's husband Josef Habernig reacted.

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