Hans Helfritz

Hans Helfritz (25 July 1902, Chemnitz – 21 October 1995, Duisburg) was a German composer and photographer.

[1] Owing to pressure from his parents, Helfritz originally began an apprenticeship as a banker, a career path he soon gave up in order to study music and composition in Berlin and Vienna.

Inspired by his teacher Erich von Hornbostel in 1930, he travelled to Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Iraq to collect samples of folk music for his research.

In these films he deliberately evaded the right-wing line of Joseph Goebbels of presenting foreign ethnicities as culturally inferior.

[2][circular reference] In 1939 Helfritz fled Germany because of his homosexuality and political beliefs which meant he was labelled an enemy of the Nazi state.