Love, marriage, career

Shortly afterwards the two began to exchange letters about their relationship, recorded in a notebook entitled ‘Wir’ (We). This epistolary notebook opened up an intimate space for dialogue in which the young couple could exchange their thoughts about their feelings, their relationship and their future together.

By 1907 Mathilde Hübner and Ottokar Hanzel were thinking about marriage, but the death of Mathilde’s father and the deferral of Ottokar’s studies meant that these plans had to be shelved for the time being.

Ottokar Hanzel completed his teacher training in mathematics and descriptive geometry three years later in 1910, practising this profession until the outbreak of the First World War. Now that he had gained his degree and had the guarantee of an adequate income, nothing more stood in the way of the couple getting married.

On 2 March 1910 Mathilde Hübner, lower secondary school teacher and guest auditor at the Vienna Technische Universität, married her former private tutor Ottokar Hanzel. The couple’s first child, a daughter, was born in March 1911, to be followed by a second daughter in May 1914.

Once married, the couple moved into an apartment in Vienna’s twelfth municipal district, where Mathilde Hanzel lived with her two daughters throughout the war. She continued to work as a teacher, until the beginning of 1917 at the Feldmühlgasse Lower Secondary School in Vienna’s thirteenth municipal district, and after that as a supply teacher at a school on Steinbauergasse, which was very close to the family’s apartment. In July 1918 she was seconded to the girls’ lower secondary school at 27 Steinbauergasse, where she was given a permanent position.

Shortly before the birth of her second child Mathilde Hanzel resigned from the board of the Allgemeiner Österreichischer Frauenverein. She nonetheless continued to champion the cause of improving women’s opportunities for education and campaigned for peace initiatives from the outbreak of war, as attested by her letters.

Translation: Sophie Kidd