From 1946 till 1950 he worked as a professor at the Technical University of Berlin. In 1949 he was an early recipient of the National Prize of East Germany (Class 3) for his "Victims of Fascism" ("Opfer des Faschismus") memorial in Berlin's Weissensee quarter. As a recipient of the East German national prize during an intense phase in the Cold War he also became a member of the (East) German Arts Academy as a result of which he lost his teaching posts at the Technical University and at the Berlin University of the Arts (which were located in West Berlin). Having lost his teaching income in West Berlin, and finding himself adulated in the east, in 1950 he relocated to an apartment in the Treskow Street, in the Pankow district of what after 1949 had increasingly come to be known as East Berlin. In 1950 he succeeded Edwin Scharff at the Fine Arts Academy in Hamburg, triggering a widespread "east-west" debate at the time. During the 1950s he produced much of his best remembered work which was exhibited extensively across both "halves" of Germany and beyond and he was evidently able to travel freely. It was only in 1958 that he relocated his home base from East Berlin to Hamburg.
