By the time Stelzmann was grown up the slaughter of war and subsequent large-scale emigration from East Germany had left the country increasingly short of working-age population and after 1961 the government created an increasingly sophisticated set of systems and controls to prevent its remaining citizens from escaping. Travel privileges based on his artistic status nevertheless gave Stolzmann the opportunity to "escape" in 1986 when he returned from an exhibition in Oberhausen (in West Germany) not to the German Democratic Republic but to the enclave of West Berlin which was outside the control of the East German government. Remaining in the west, between 1987 and 1988 he held a guest professorship at the Städelschule (fine arts academy) in Frankfurt am Main. In 1988 he was appointed Professor for Painting at the Berlin Fine Arts Academy (as it was then called). This prompted a protest from the painter Georg Baselitz who now resigned his own teaching position at the university, condemning Stelzmann as a "party-line East German artist"."linientreuen Staatskünstler" (Baselitz, like Stelzmann, had begun his artistic career in the German Democratic Republic, although he had made his own "escape to the west", after falling foul of the country's political rulers, back in 1958.) Stelzmann retained his professorship at the Berlin University of the Arts (as the Fine Arts Academy had by now become) till 2006.
