Georg Schafer
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Georg Shäfer, Anglicized as "Georg Schafer" and "Georg Schaefer" a.k.a. Oma Ziegenfuss, Oma Ling Pa and (occasionally) Georg Shepherd, was a painter and author who worked in Germany, Sri Lanka, Guatemala and the USA. He was born March 25, 1926 in Leinefelde, Germany and died from heart failure January 11, 1991 in Chatham, Massachusetts, USA.
As a young man during World War II, Shafer was part of the Danish resistance and later a prisoner in a Nazi concentration camp. He was sentenced to death but the sentence was not carried out. After the war he worked as a freelance journalist for Der Spiegel and Die Welt magazines, and also followed a career path that allowed him to meet or correspond with such notables as Carl Jung, Albert Einstein, Albert Hoffman and Lama Anagarika Govinda. He not only interviewed Dr. Carl Jung but was Jung's 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 and, according to Schafer, was reflected in Einstein's writings on relativity.[citation needed] While working with Lama Govinda in Sri Lanka, Georg was sent to Russia to examine Russian research into levitation telekinesis and telepathy.
While working with Dr. Hoffman and experimenting with synthetic mescaline, Schafer recalled a traumatic event in his early life and this recollection eventually led to his various philosophical writings, in particular to his book "Im Reiche des Mescal", and to the visionary art he was known for in his later years. "Im Reiche des Mescal" is an adult fairy tale based on Central American Indian folklore and "The Tibetan Book of the Dead". The book was translated into English as "In the Kingdom of Mescal", and into Spanish as "En el Reino de Mescal".
Schafer met and married a German woman of Guatemalan descent who went by the adopted name of Nan Cuz (sometimes misspelled as "Cruz"), who was working as an assistant photographer at Die Welt. They moved to Guatemala in 1973 where they had two children, Maya and Thomas. In Guatemala they created an art center in Panajachel and Schafer further developed his distinctive artistic style. Schafer always claimed that the paintings in "Im Reiche des Mescal" were by his own hand but signed "Nan Cuz" in an effort to enhance their "ethnic" authenticity. He separated from Nan Cuz in 1978 and they divorced. Nan Cuz continued to paint and is well respected today. Some of the paintings executed during their period together, including the illustrations in the book, are now attributed to her. These conflicting attributions have not been investigated.
Schafer came to America to exhibit his art under the names Oma Ziegenfuss and Oma Ling Pa. Oma means "granny" and "Ziegenfuss" was his mother's mother whom he loved. Also the name "goats foot" amused him. He signed many of his later works with a split-hoof image.
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.
