Ernest Bornemann

Life and work

Born and raised in Berlin—back then "one of the most relaxed, sane, open, cosmopolitan cities in the world"— as the son of "the happiest couple I have ever known", Borneman says he was "sexually mature at fourteen, politically mature at fifteen, and intellectually mature between fourteen and sixteen". As a pupil he made the acquaintance of Bertolt Brecht and also worked at the counselling centre for workers established by Wilhelm Reich's Socialist Association for Sexual Counselling and Research, an organisation Reich had moved from Vienna to Berlin in 1930.

Another important influence in Borneman's early life was music, especially from overseas. As a ten-year-old, at the world's fair in Paris, France, he had seen musicians from Congo who had fascinated him. He went to concerts in his native Berlin as soon as they would let him in, listening, among others, to Marlene Dietrich, the Weintraub Syncopators and jazz saxophonist Sidney Bechet. A distant relative, the ethnomusicologist Erich von Hornbostel, introduced him to his field of study, and after school Borneman attended Hornbostel's lectures and on weekends helped out in his archive. It was Hornbostel who finally initiated Borneman into the world of jazz.

A member of the Communist Party of Germany, Bornemann was forced to leave the country in 1933, after the Nazis had come to power. He was smuggled out of the country posing as a member of the Hitler Youth on his way to England as an exchange student. On arriving in England, where he sought, and was granted, political asylum, he anglicized his first name to Ernest and, by dropping the second n, his family name to Borneman. At the time he hardly spoke one word of English.

A quick learner, Borneman did not just pick up enough English to be able to survive but also to live by his pen. In 1937, Gollancz published Borneman's "detective story to end detective stories" (Julian Symons), a novel entitled The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, which he had completed before turning twenty. By 1968 Borneman had written six novels, all of them in English, five under his anglicized name and one using the pseudonym Cameron McCabe.

In London Borneman met the anthropologist and psychoanalyst Géza Róheim, through whom he became interested in anthropological problems. He also took personal analytic treatment under Roheim.

During his London years Borneman was preoccupied with jazz, both theoretically and practically. He went to the concerts of famous musicians touring Britain, such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, He played the piano, the double bass and the drums, and even went to sea playing in dance bands on transatlantic cruise ships. He spent countless hours in the British Museum Reading Room and at other institutions of learning. His notes on the origins and development of jazz grew steadily, and in 1940 he sent the first version of his study, a 580-page typescript entitled "Swing Music: An Encyclopaedia of Jazz" to Melville J. Herskovits, then the most prominent U.S. anthropologist specializing in African American studies.

In 1940 Borneman was deported to a detention camp in Canada as an enemy alien. He was later released to work for the BBC and on miscellaneous film projects, including one with Orson Welles.

In 1960 Borneman moved to West Germany, at the invitation of Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, to build up a state-owned television station called Freies Fernsehen Gesellschaft (FFG, Free TV Company). However, following a decision of the German Federal Court the station was prevented from broadcasting. Bornemann then began studies in scientific sexology, a subject that had interested him ever since his time with Wilhelm Reich and later Géza Roheim. He received a doctorate in 1976 for a comprehensive study of the origin and future of patriarchy, published as Das Patriarchat. He went on to publish many more psychological and analytical studies of sexuality, language and power, and later was appointed to a professorship at the University of Salzburg in Austria. The Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung (German Society for Social-Scientific Sexuality Research) honoured him in 1990 as the first-ever recipient of the Magnus Hirschfeld Medal for Sexual Science.

During the final decades of his life Borneman lived in Scharten, Upper Austria, where he committed suicide at the age of 80 after the collapse of a love affair with a younger colleague.