With the defeat of the German Empire in 1918 and the ensuing economic crisis, many art academies were forced to no longer focus solely on the exclusive genres of fine art—painting and sculpture. Education in the economically more important arts and crafts was fostered, and the merging of art academies and arts and crafts schools was accelerated. In this way, the new state wanted to save money on the one hand, and on the other, to achieve greater flexibility and a higher level of design productions that had long since been industrialized. This forced unification succeeded in some cities, such as Berlin, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt am Main, Karlsruhe, and Weimar, but not in Kassel.
In Kassel, students had successfully resisted the call to merge the Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Applied Arts into a single art school in a protest letter in 1920 5/9. However, the Prussian Ministry of Culture still wanted the subjects of architecture and arts and crafts to be taught at the Academy of Fine Arts. To this end, it appointed a new director in 1923, the architect Hans Soeder