This was followed by a period of study at the Technical School for Wood-art at distant Empfertshausen, in the south-west of the Soviet occupation zone of what remained of Germany, an area now in the process of becoming the stand-alone German Democratic Republic, politically separated both from what the west and from the lands to the east of the Oder-Neisse line, now mostly incorporated into Poland and the Soviet Union as part of a larger post-war redrawing of the frontiers in northern-central Europe.

[5] In 1956 he joined the East German Visual Artists' League (VBK / Verband Bildender Künstler der DDR), and in 1974 he became the organisation's regional chairman for the Rostock District.

In 1975 he was President of the International Committee of the Biennale of Baltic States,[3] a cultural forum held in Rostock, and involving participants from the Scandinavian countries and Finland along with the Soviet Union (of which Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania were then constituent territories).

[1] In 1981 and again in 1983 he undertook working visits to Ethiopia and he returned to Addis Abeba in (and after) 1988,[3] while study tours within Europe later in the 1980s took in Sweden and even Great Britain.

An end to the (west facing) isolationism that had characterised the German Democratic Republic now meant that his work now became known to a wider audience across Germany and internationally.

He created a wall frieze in 1971 for the prestigious Hotel Neptun in Warnemünde, and in 1991 he produced a statue of Mendelssohn for the Gewandhaus (concert hall) in Leipzig.

His last work for a public space is a group of figures entitled "The Circus is coming" ("Der Zirkus kommt") produced with Susanne Rast (his daughter) and installed on the shoreside promenade at Ribnitz in 2009.