By his second year Förster was already establishing contacts with representatives of the officially forbidden "classical modern" art movement. By this time the division of Germany agreed between the Americans and the Soviets at Yalta at the beginning of 1945 had crystallised into a permanent frontier, but the border between the two Germanies was still relatively porous, especially between West Berlin and the surrounding territories governed as East Germany, and Förster took the opportunity to visit Bernhard Heiliger in the west. Walter Arnold, himself a consummate hands-on craftsman, helped a few of his students, whom he regarded as politically reliable, to deepen their understanding on the essential elements in figurative sculpture, by gaining experience with the works of the westerners Hermann Haller and Charles Despiau. In his third year, required to produce a "portrait from a 'photo", Förster chose as his subject Bertolt Brecht, a long-standing icon of the German intellectual left but nevertheless at this stage ostracised by the authorities. In order to accomplish his course objective he was permitted, a few weeks before Brecht's death in 1956, to attend a rehearsal of Life of Galileo, being staged by the Berliner Ensemble (theatre company).