Georg Schafer
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Georg Schafer, formerly Georg Schaefer a.k.a. Oma Ziegenfuss and Georg Shepherd (born March 25, 1926 in Leinefelde; died January 11, 1990 in Chatham, Massachusetts from heart failure) was a German painter and author.
During World War II he was a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. After World War II he was a freelance journalist working for Der Spiegel and Die Welt magazines, and worked with such notables as Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Albert Hoffman and Lama Anagarika Govinda. He met and married a Guatemalan woman by the name of Nan Cuz (she was working as an assistant photographer at Die Welt) and they moved to Guatemala in 1973 where he further developed himself as an artist. After creating a art center in Panajachel, Guatemala he left Nan Cuz in 1978. He came to America to exhibit his art, painting under the name Oma "Ziegenfuss" which was his mothers maiden name. In 1979 he met Sherry Munson of the Munson Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico who became his wife in 1979. He renamed her "Mani" and they traveled to Sri Lanka to work together on repainting the story of a Buddha in the temple of Nyaniponika Mahathera and had their first child. After this they returned to Guatemala where they settled amongst the native Mayan peoples taking on the life and art of the culture, adding it to the art and culture found in Sri Lanka. After several years and 2 children later, Georg felt with Mani it was time to do something to stop what he felt was a destruction of a aboriginal culture by the boots of progress. His experience in Hitler's Germany where he was part of the Danish resistance, 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. Ever since Georg was caught by the SS and sentenced to death in front of a firing squad back in the war, he found all forms of ethnic intolerance abhorrent.
In 1989 they left for America where he hoped to find an audience that could be addressed to slow or stop this destruction of cultures. Perhaps even a stepping stone to a new life where he could concentrate on the art he called "The Visionary Art of the Cultures". So, going by the name Oma Zigenfuss, he went to Chatham, Massachusetts with Mani, where she had family, to search out a new home for the art and vision of aboriginal culture's power. It was isolating for Oma 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 for a 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 his last son he named after Lama Govinda.
His book "Im Reiche des Mescal" is an adult fairy tale based on Indian folklore and "The Tibetan Book of the Dead" was translated into English, "In the Kingdom of Mescal" and Spanish, "En el Reino de Mescal". The paintings in the book were by his own hand using his wife's name Nan Cuz. He not only interviewed Carl Jung but Jung was his personal psychiatrist for a period of time.[citation needed] The phrase, "So fast the light so slow the matter follows behind" was written in a letter to his life long friend Albert Einstein.[citation needed] It was this simple phrase that gave birth to the theory of relativity. While working with Dr. Hoffman experimenting with synthetic mescaline, was when Georg remembered a traumatic event early in life leading to first, The Kingdom of Mescal and second, the visionary art he was known for in his later years. While working with Lama Govinda in Sri Lanka, Georg was sent to Russia to research their study in levitation telekinesis and telepathy.
