34 Facts About Viktor Matejka

Viktor Matejka was a Viennese politician and writer.

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

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.

Viktor Matejka's father was a former "tavern singer" who subsequently worked as a court bailiff.

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

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

Viktor Matejka 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".

Viktor Matejka was nevertheless at this stage a member of the proto-fascist Fatherland Front 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.

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

Viktor Matejka 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 Social Democratic Party before 1934.

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

The invaders had arrived with a list however, and Viktor Matejka's name was on it.

Viktor Matejka was arrested on 12 March 1938 and, on 1 April 1938, delivered to the Dachau concentration camp which had opened just outside Munich a few years earlier to hold political prisoners.

The camp was originally intended for "criminal" and "asocial" prisoners, but sources are silent over whether or how Viktor Matejka might have fallen into those categories.

Viktor Matejka had evidently succeeded in having himself listed among the trustworthy prisoners, and following his return to Dachau he was assigned to work as a library assistant, and then to take charge of the camp book-binding workshop.

One Sunday afternoon during 1943 Viktor Matejka organised a production of Rudolf Kalmar's satirical "stage" show, "Die Blutnacht auf dem Schreckenstein oder Ritter Adolars Brautfahrt und ihr grausiges Ende - oder - Die wahre Liebe ist das nicht".

On 7 July 1944 Viktor Matejka was released from the camp and returned to Vienna.

Viktor Matejka managed to get himself admitted to hospital as a patient in order to avoid the risk of recruitment into the German army.

Viktor Matejka then "disappeared underground" till the war ended.

Almost immediately Viktor Matejka used the new political freedoms to become a member of the Austrian Communist Party.

For surviving party comrades emerging from the illegality which had been their lot since 1933, Viktor Matejka became something of an intellectual figurehead; and he seems during the later 1940s to have succeeded in living beyond the party discipline that constrained comrades without his robust intellectual hinterland and record of fearless public service during the 1930s.

On 20 April 1945 there had not yet been time for any elections to be held, and it was accordingly through nomination by his party that Viktor Matejka joined the Vienna senate, which was a coalition administration dominated by the Social Democrats and led by Theodor Korner.

Viktor Matejka became the city senator with special responsibility for Adult and Further Education, along with The Arts.

Viktor Matejka was at this point one of three Communist Party members appointed to the Vienna city senate.

Viktor Matejka remained the KPO senate member, and retained the arts and education portfolio, till 7 December 1949.

Viktor Matejka backed the establishment in Vienna of the Institute for Arts and Humanities as an information exchange between academic institutions and the wider world and worked effectively to revive Vienna's cultural life more generally.

Viktor Matejka successfully opposed plans to tear down of Schloss Hetzendorf, an elegant albeit relatively small Baroque palace located behind the vast gardens of Schonbrunn Palace.

Viktor Matejka resigned his seat in the senate, but represented the party as a Vienna councillor and member of the regional parliament till 1954.

Viktor Matejka continued to serve as a member of the party central committee till 1957, and only resigned from the Communist Party itself in 1966.

Keen both to build the readership and reduce the publication's financial dependency on the Austrian Communist Party, Viktor Matejka did what he could to extend circulation to neighbouring states that were still undergoing significant political turbulence, notably Hungary, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania.

Viktor Matejka sustained a high public profile through his old age as an exceptionally prolific contributor, notably in the letters pages, to serious newspapers and news magazines.

Viktor Matejka specialised in collecting portraits and paintings of roosters.

Viktor Matejka married the artist Gerda Matejka-Felden on 23 June 1932.