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 1935 he continued his travels to
India,
Sri Lanka,
Malaysia, the
Republic of China and
Singapore. Helfritz also made films about
Yemen and
Mexico as an assignment for
Ufa. In these films he deliberately evaded the right-wing line of
Joseph Goebbels of presenting foreign ethnicities as culturally inferior. In 1939 Helfritz fled
Germany because of his homosexuality and political beliefs which meant he was labelled an enemy of the
Nazi state. He fled first to
Brazil and
Bolivia, before settling in
Chile. He continued to work, taking part in the
Chilean Antarctic Expedition as the official photographer. At the end of the 1940s he received Chilean citizenship. Throughout the 1950s Helfritz explored
Central America and
West Africa from an archaeological perspective. Later he changed profession, working first as a tour guide in these regions, then as travel lecturer. In 1959 he settled down in
Ibiza. ==References==