Commentators suspect that it may have been on account of Schweitzer's friendship and influence that after his daughter grew to adulthood, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, Emil Felden entered mainstream politics committed to social democracy and pacifism.
She was enrolled at an all-girls secondary school in Bremen and two years later, aged 11, began to receive supplementary drawing lessons privately, with the support and encouragement of her mother.
In Vienna she worked as a graphic artist-designer, producing drawing for Das Kleine Blatt and other newspapers and magazines along with book covers, notably for Ullstein Verlag, and posters.
[2] On 23 June 1932 Gerda Felden married, as her second husband, the Viennese politician-writer Viktor Matejka, a man of strong views and principles who later came to prominence as a committed antifascist.
He was also a Roman Catholic, and the divorced daughter of a Protestant pastor in Bremen now converted to Catholicism in order to facilitate their union, solemnised in a church ceremony on 23 June 1932.
For ten years, till 1955, the city was divided into occupation zones under military administration by one of the four formerly allied powers in question, while governments in Washington, Moscow and London failed to reach agreement over spheres of future influence.
[7] On 5 May 1948 the marriage of Gerda Matejka-Felden and Viktor Matejka ended in divorce, though the two remained in frequent contact and close relations were sustained till they were more completely separated by death in 1984.
Conservatives identified in one source as “bureaucratic culture monopolists” launched disciplinary proceedings against her in 1949, and she faced a teaching ban at Fine Arts Academy the till 1951.
She fought back, determined to provide the necessary artistic education to those who deserved it, based on merit, whom the official examination board of the time would have denied the appropriate study opportunities.
With Vienna split into differently controlled sectors, each under foreign military occupation, and the mayoral office under the political direction of the socialist Theodor Körner, opponents were unable to thwart Matejka-Felden's commitment to adult arts education.
In 1960 she travelled to Moscow, at the invitation of a section of corresponding members of the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences, in order to deliver a series of lectures on modern arts teaching and adult education in Austria.
Her applications to take leave in order to accept education-related engagements at other institutions were regularly rejected by the rector with the justification that her invitations came not from her work for the Fine Arts Academy but on account of her “community college activities”.