By the time she received and accepted her professorship she was a few months short of her fifty-second birthday, reflecting a somewhat indirect career trajectory, her having grown up in a country where the educational system was not set up to enable women either to study or teach at any university.
On 17 December 1928 she married her uncle, the leading scholar and internationally respected papyrologist, Wilhelm Schubart (1873-1960), whose first wife had died the previous April.
Gertrud Fikenscher had known her uncle and his wife since moving to Berlin twelve years earlier, and it is likely that it was only on account of Schubart's encouragement that she had pursued her legal studies with such persistence.
[4] Between 1935 and 1941 she established and led a working group in order to gather and catalogue "Bibliographical evidence on the legal status of women in the German Empire and Austria".
[5] The resulting book, for which she received a prize from the Royal Prussian Academy of Arts and Sciences, was published in 1942 and became, according to at least one source, a "standard work" on the topic.
[11] Her gender and evident lack of enthusiasm for the National Socialists was held against her, but Schubart-Fikentscher's record of academic research, following the publication of her doctoral dissertation in 1942, was nevertheless - at least in part - a matter of public record, and she enjoyed strong backing from Alfred Schultze (1864-1946[11] who, despite his age and virtual withdrawal from formal academic duties during the Hitler years, remained influential behind the scenes with members of the Leipzig University Law Faculty.
[10] In May 1945 war ended and the Hitler dictatorship collapsed: after July 1945 Leipzig and the surrounding region were administered as part of the Soviet occupation zone.
In May 1946, having joined the newly formed SED (party), Schubart-Fikentscher received from the University of Leipzig the habilitation (higher academic degree) that had not been available to her during the previous twelve years.
[10] German universities were by this time seriously run down, while the slaughter of war and mass emigration had left the entire region desperately short of working-age population.
[10] She took up her new appointment on 1 September 1948,[1] becoming in the process the first female in German speaking Europe to occupy a professorial teaching chair in a university law faculty.
[2] Between 1948 and 1950 the university authorities at Leipzig now made strenuous efforts to persuade her to return and accept an equivalent position there, but Schubart-Fikentscher preferred to stick with her Halle professorship.
[10] During the years till her retirement in 1957 Gertrud Schubart-Fikentscher had a successful teaching career at University of Halle, also taking her turn with administrative duties.
Although the slaughter of war forced East Germany to become a European pace setter in terms of the number of married women in full-time employment, it was highly unusual for both partners in a marriage to be as well paid as the Schubarts, and during the 1950s she wrote to second-hand bookshops across the country in search of books on topics that interested her.
It was, in the judgment of one commentator, a risky move,[5] which she explained as follows: At least one source also makes mention of her having stood up for students and other members of the university who were persecuted on political grounds.
[1] Her status as Germany's only female law professor, combined with the assessment that she was not a dissident activist by temperament, seem to have protected her even after her party resignation, and she continued to teach until she reached retirement age in 1956.