He was also influential as a university level teacher and as deputy director at the Academy for visual arts ("Hochschule für Bildende Künste" / HfbK) in the city at that time known as West Berlin.
[7] They constructed their printing press using timber recovered from panelling previously forming a part of a destroyed railway station building.
[7] Once Kaus as able to return to Berlin in 1918 he purchased his own lithography equipment, which provided a basis for an important part of his subsequent artistic output.
[7] Other important members of the Bridges Group with whom Kaus was associated during the war years included Ernst Ludwig Kirchner[8] and Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.
Max Kaus was one of a large number of modernist artists, including his longstanding mentor Heckel,[7] who had enjoyed commercial and critical success in the 1920s, and who now found their work officially (and more widely) dismissed and despised as "degenerate".
[6][11] However, he found himself under intensifying pressure to abandon teaching entirely as the dictatorship became more uncompromising in its approach to manifestations of non-standard thought patterns.
The Hitler years delivered other personal disasters and tragedies to Max Kaus who during the early 1940s continued to live in central Berlin at an address in the Mommsenstraße.
Later, two days before the "end of the war",[1] the island came under attack from the Soviet military and many of the graphic prints carefully salvaged from the earlier fire were destroyed.
[6] He subsequently, in 1949, gained a full professorship at the academy and then took charge of the department for "Freie Kunst" (loosely, "free, or non-applied arts").
[3] Despite the forty year age difference and one or two other unusual elements in their situation, Sigrid Kraus later recalled that her mother surprised her by unreservedly endorsing the marriage, evidently believing that the two were "right" for each other.
In 1958 Max and Sigrid Kaus had relocated from the Wilmersdorf "artists' colony" to Potsdamer Straße 44 in Berlin-Lichterfelde where they lived together for almost twenty years.
The forty year difference in their ages had always made this a likely outcome: after the death of Max Kaus his widow was able to facilitate exhibitions and other projects involving his work.
[3] Since 1987 his literary estate has been held at the German National Arts Archive (Deutsches Kunstarchiv) in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum at Nuremberg.
[12] The physical event marking the suppression was the DKB's final exhibition (till after 1945) which was held in Hamburg, and at which Kaus participated with his "Porträt Frau im Spiegel" ("Portrait of a woman in the mirror").