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