Viktor Matejka

Viktor Matejka (4 December 1901 – 2 April 1993) was a Viennese politician and writer.

He spent most of the Hitler years as a detainee at one of two concentration camps.

Early on he had read "Mein Kampf", the autobiographical manifesto produced during the 1920s by the man who in 1933 took power in Germany and five years later extended his self-conferred mandate to Austria.

Having digested the book, Matejka became committed to unpicking the destructive political polarisation which the fascists were bringing to Austria.

Along with Ernst Karl Winter he joined up with the circle of intellectual pacifists around Franz Kobler.

Others group members included Oskar Kokoschka, Stefan Pollatschek, Rudolf Rapaport and the artist Georg Merkel.

It was also Hartmann, as his "Doktorvater", who supervised him for his doctorate in international law, which was awarded by the university in 1925.

After that he embarked immediately on a career as a journalist.

His passionate faith in education never left him, however.

Matejka was introduced to the world of Adult Education by his university tutor Ludo Hartmann.

From as early as 1926 he combined his regular written contributions to various Vienna newspapers with work delivering numerous lectures at various adult education institutions across Vienna.

He employed a geopolitical approach in his classes and encouraged free discussion of economic and political issues in ways which have encouraged commentators to hold him out as a pioneer of open socio-political education in the context of "Popular Education" ("Volksbildung").

The Great Depression was followed by a retreat from democratic government across much of the western world.

As early as 1932, in his capacity as a journalist, Viktor Matejka was warning readers against the risk of another war.

He was nevertheless at this stage a member of the proto-fascist Fatherland Front (political party) established during 1933 by Chancellor Dollfuss, as one of a series of changes whereby the country now quickly became a one-party-state.

In 1934 Viktor Matejka was appointed to two important jobs which for the next two years he carried out simultaneously.

In the aftermath of the February uprising, with a new "Popular Front" government installed under Engelbert Dollfuss, he was appointed to the post of "Bildungsreferent" (loosely, "chief education officer") of the Vienna "Abeiterkammer" ("Chamber of labour").

The new government had mandated a major purge of government employees at the start of 1934, and this was the context in which Matejka now also found himself appointed executive deputy chairman of Vienna's Ottakring Adult Education Centre.

Despite his party membership, there was some surprise at the time that this left-wing journalist should have obtained such sudden promotion, given the right-wing instincts of the government, and in both his important government roles he did what he could to maintain the most open educational system possible, subject to the constraints imposed by the government.

He saw to it that students could still benefit from hearing lecturers who were not government supporters, such as Leo Stern who was widely known to have been a left-wing activist member of the (subsequently outlawed) Social Democratic Party before 1934.

In the summer of 1935, he organised readers by left-wing worker intellectuals such as Benedikt Fantner at the Vienna Workers' Riverside Bathing Facility ("Arbeiterstrandbad").

Still in 1935 he made no secret of his decision to become a member of the pacifist "Weltvereinigung für den Frieden!" organisation, viewed by many government backers as a thinly veiled front organisation for Soviet foreign policy.

Despite working in a prominent position for the government of a one-party state, Matejka also pushed during this period for the reinstatement of employees who had been dismissed from their posts on political grounds.

Within the ruling Fatherland Front complaints surfaced that the Ottakring Adult Education Centre was becoming "anti-state".

As the responsible executive head, Viktor Matejka was accused of allowing socialist propaganda to take hold in the college.

A series of "scandals" ensued at Ottakring until on 17 July 1936, probably in response to a critical article in the catholic-conservative newspaper Reichspost, Mayor Schmitz had Matejka removed from his post.

Matejka was a prodigious reader with an insatiable appetite for political information.

In the summer of 1943, inmates at Dachau presented a satirical focusing on Adolf Hitler, watched by the camp's SS guards.

The episode was described in his obituary, half a century later, as "probably the most dangerous stage performance in the world, as well as the most absurd".

The leader of the improvised performance group was Viktor Matejka.

Later he liked to assert that he had survived Nazism through a blend of cunning and skill, which only the malicious and ignorant would have called "collaboration".

Viktor Matejka was born the third of his parents' children into a lower middle-class Catholic family at Korneuburg, a small town a couple of hours' walk up-river of Vienna.

His father was a former "tavern singer" who subsequently worked as a court bailiff.

His mother was a former domestic servant.

Matejka grew up in nearby Stockerau under conditions of some poverty.

Obsessed even as a child with the importance of education, and encouraged by his mother, he saved up the money he received for serving as an altar boy and used the resulting savings to pay the fee necessary to sit the entrance exam for admission to an academically oriented secondary school ("Gymnasium").

As his school career progressed he continued to take jobs where he could find them in order to supplement the family income, taking on tutoring work and, on at least one occasion, working as a film-extra.

He concluded his school career by passing his Matura exam with distinction, which opened the way for university admission.

At the University of Vienna, having enrolled to study Chemistry, Matejka very soon switched to History and Geography.

The switch may have been inspired by his admiration for Ludo Moritz Hartmann who became his tutor and, it appears, an important influence.