She had dreamed of working as a journalist since childhood, and following her dismissal was able to focus on building a successful career producing "cheerful stories about dogs and babies" for magazines.
Literary success and the passing of the years brought her a measure of official respectability: in 1996 she was a recipient of the Order of Merit ("Bundesverdienstkreuz am Bande").
[2] Her childhood ambition to embark on a career as a journalist proved unrealistic under Hitlerism during the war or indeed, with the centre of Berlin reduced to rubble and life a daily battle for survival, during its immediate aftermath.
There was, however, a desperate shortage of working-age population and of teachers, which was recognised as an important social issue by the military administrators responsible for Berlin.
[4] In the case of Gerda Szepansky, at least one source refers to her dismissal having resulted from "aktiver Betätigung im Sinne der SED", a convoluted but widely requoted expression referencing her involvement with the East German Socialist Unity Party.
Needing a job following her exclusion from the teaching profession, in or before 1951, she took charge of the "Kulturclub" ("Arts and culture club") of the West Berlin section of the Society for German–Soviet Friendship ("Gesellschaft für Deutsch-Sowjetische Freundschaft" / DSF), and the management of the Majakowski Gallery, an exhibition space operated under the auspices of the DSF along the Kurfürstendamm (avenue).
[5] At around the same time, following a lengthy period of unemployment, her husband became club house manager at the West Berlin terminus-offices of the (East German) "Reichsbahn" (national railway service).
During the 1970s, she was involved in the political campaigns of the time, demonstrating with comrades against the locating of nuclear weapons and U.S. military bases in West Germany, Section 218 of the West German penal code (concerning abortion),[7] and what she and her husband (and others) saw as the collective amnesia of the political establishment concerning the Hitler years and their legacy.
In 1996, Wolfgang and Gerda Szepansky, who had both lost their jobs in the teaching service at the behest of German government agencies in (West) Berlin forty-five years earlier, were both recipients of the Order of Merit ("Verdienstkreuz am Bande").
[1] Following an exceptionally well attended funeral celebration then urn containing what remained of her body was buried in the presence of her immediate family at the Marienhof II protestant cemetery, close to her home.