For the German industrialist and art collector, see Georg Schäfer.
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Georg Schafer (Georg Johannes Schäfer) was a German painter, poet and author who also lived in Guatemala and the United States. He was born on March 25, 1926, in Leinefelde Germany, and died of heart failure on January 11, 1991, in Chatham, Massachusetts. He often used the pseudonym Oma Ziegenfuss ("Grandma Goat-Foot").
At the age of 12, he was pressured into joining the Hitler Youth Organization. In 1943 he was stationed in Denmark with the occupation forces. His fondness for the Danish people and his disdain for the Nazi movement led him to risk his life, working with the Danish Resistance under the leadership of Damgaard Hansen. He was betrayed , captured by the Gestapo, found guilty of espionage, and sentenced to death. He was jailed for six months, awaiting execution, and was interrogated and tortured. Twice, he was placed in front of firing squads in an effort to coerce him into betraying members of the Resistance. He would not betray anyone, and instead began to starve himself to death rather than to reveal the names under torture. "From this time, I eat nothing more", he said. He was 17 years old. On March 16, 1945, Heinrich Himmler wrote the order to exchange his death sentence to 15 years. He never knew why. His father had written consistently to the prison commanders begging for his son's life. By the time the Allies liberated Berlin, he had spent 18 months at hard labor as a political prisoner at the concentration camp in Grabow, Mecklenburg, Germany.
After the war, Schafer entered the Theological College at Fulda {Hessen}, but soon realized that he was not fitted for an ecclesiastical career in the Catholic Church. He was invited to accompany a group of Romani Gypsies who,like himself, had been victims of the concentration camps. He traveled with them for two years, learning to transform conflicts in a group experience through dance, music, storytelling and art. In 1947, he returned to Fulda. Not having means to pay for his education, he had to content himself with personal studies. He began to write, completing his autobiography and submitting articles to various publications. On April 18, 1950, he corresponded with Dr. Albert Schweitzer, sending him a manuscript of his Autobiography. That same year, he was given position with a weekly newspaper: Die Zeit. Now employed, he entered the University at Fulda to pursue his studies in philosophy and the natural sciences. As a reporter for Die Zeit, he met Imgard Carmen Heinemann, a photographer of German and Mayan descent, employed by the same newspaper. They began to work on assignments together and on December 23, 1950, were married. Through his studies, reportage, and his keen interest in human science, he had met Dr. Albert Hoffmann who had discovered LSD. They worked together on experiments with LSD. Continuing his clinical research, he experimented with Mescaline. [The vision that he now experienced was the dream that he had as a child. He had been burned from a pot of boiling water over his entire plexus solaris, through the muscle tissue. He was one year old. The shock, and "near death" experience, gave, 23 years later, the vision of the fairytale: "In the Kingdom of Mescal". Through the horror of the war, and the concentration camps, waiting for his execution; these painful memories gave birth to a Cosmic vision. Painting after painting was flowing from his brush. He created over one hundred illustrations, and wrote the poetic story of a journey into timelessness. Georg Schafer made the decision with his wife, to name her as the artist, Nan Cuz, "To give us a magical vision of the American Indian world." 1. He did not realize then that the decision to not sign his own name to the paintings would later cause him and others much suffering. To this day, there appears to be confusion over who created the paintings of Nan Cuz. It was in truth, Georg Schafer. Everyone who lived and worked with him, knows that is true. "behind Nan Cuz is Ziegenfuss" 2.]
In 1951, Mr. Schafer was invited to work with a number of Doctors; in particular, a Professor H. Bender. He also wrote to a Dr. Hubert Urban. Their correspondence, led to an invitation in 1953 for Mr. Schafer to work on experiments with mescaline and consciousness in dreams, at the University Clinic of Psychiatry and Neurology in Innsbruck, Austria. His experiments were over: "The Problem of Time and Space". His findings were published on September 1953 in a psychiatric journal: 'Oesterreich'. With the publication of the article, Schafer was given the opportunity to send the manuscript of his experiment to Dr. Carl Jung and Dr. Albert Einstein. Correspondence followed with both. Mr. Schafer did not meet either of them. In 1952, Schafer had used his writing skills and contacts in the field of Journalism to defend the survival of the Buddhist people and their cultures, writing an expose of the tragedy in the systematic destruction of the Mahayana Buddhism within the Mongolian Territories of the Soviet Union. With the publication of these articles, he had a correspondence with Nyanaponika Mahathera in Ceylon and Lama Anagarika Govinda, a Mayahana Buddhist monk. Correspondence and personal affiliation continued for the three men over the next thirty years.
In 1979 he met Sherry Munson of the Munson Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, who he called "Mani". They were married in 1979 and they traveled to Sri Lanka to work together on repainting a Buddha story in the temple of Nyaniponika Mahathera. They had their first child in Sri Lanka. They later returned to Guatemala where they settled amongst the native Mayan people, taking on the life and art of the culture, adding it to the art and culture Schafer had absorbed in Sri Lanka.
After several years Georg and Mani began to feel that they needed to do something to stop what he felt was a destruction of an aboriginal culture by the boots of progress. His experience in Hitler's Germany led him to feel that this destruction of the Mayan culture was too much like the old nightmare come back to life, an ethnic cleansing in which commercialism was the weapon of choice. He found all forms of ethnic intolerance abhorrent.
In 1989 Georg, Mani and their 3 children moved to America where he hoped to find an audience that could be mobilized to slow or stop this destruction of cultures. He was also looking for a stepping stone to a new life where he could concentrate on the art he called "The Visionary Art of the Cultures". Now going by the name Oma Ziegenfuss all the time, he settled in Chatham, Massachusetts with Mani, where she had family, searching for a new home for the art and vision of aboriginal culture's power.
This was a difficult transition for Schafer, isolating after the community culture of Guatemala, and he was in poor health. Eighteen months after settling in their new home, Oma suffered his first heart attack. He recovered and prepared an exhibit in Seattle, Washington which was a success, but too stressful. Upon returning to Chatham he suffered a second and final heart attack, January 11, 1991, just 2 weeks after the birth of a son he named after Lama Govinda.
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Nan Cuz did sign her paintings, and even painted the entire art in the book which Oma Schafer wrote, "In the Kingdom of Mescal." While living in Hamburg, Germany, the artistic couple made their masterpiece while Nan painted inside the house, Oma Schafer was outside typing the story.
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