Ernest Borneman's career rightly gives scholars chills of fascination. Detlef Siegfried's page-turner of a scholarly biography does full justice to the extraordinary embranchments of Borneman's life and work. Deftly weaving into his thematically shaped chronological account just the right amount of reflection on the intellectual-theoretical scaffolds that not only shaped Borneman's work but also allow us to view it with a fully adequate range of cross-disciplinary scholarly optics, Siegfried's work is a model of successful interdisciplinarity. Sufficient mastery of the vocabulary and methods of multiple fields (here history as read through musicology, ethnology, film and media studies, the history of science and medicine, and gender and sexuality studies) allows us to bridge the gaps of interpretation and interpretability between the fields. Borneman has found a scholar adequate to the always fragmentary but constantly emergent nature of his life and work. Siegfried's accomplishment, despite his modesty about having provided only a “preliminary account . . . from a specific perspective” (2), is nothing short of brilliant.
The Nazi regime chased Borneman—born Jewish in Berlin in 1915 and committed to socialism and Brechtian theater—from Germany in 1933, just shy of his Abitur. Within weeks of arriving in London, he anglicized his name from the stolid Ernst Bornemann, speaking and writing almost exclusively in English, frequenting jazz clubs, engaging in discussions with Black and radical figures shaping the rapidly morphing jazz scene, and beginning a career as an often-polemical critic and scholar of jazz. Borneman systematically argued that appreciating jazz required recognition of its Black roots in African-American (including West Indian/Caribbean) folk-cultural forms. At the same time, he initiated a process of self-fashioning that left his biographical traces in a fascinating and revealing tangle of self-promotion and situational exaggeration. He even began writing novels, several of which were notably successful. Siegfried's narrative sets up the first parts of the interpretive structure that comes together at the end of the book: Borneman's efforts, despite their vertiginously divergent appearance, represent convergent streams of “imagined community” a la Benedict Anderson (117) across the morphology of cultural production, bodily and sensory practices, ethnicities, nations, and empires.
After the outbreak of World War II, Borneman was interned by the British and quickly shipped to an internment camp in Quebec. He was soon plucked from internment by the “British documentary film pioneer” John Grierson (111) to assist on the staff of the new National Film Board of Canada. Borneman's work was considered so strategically important in countering Nazi propaganda that he was exempted from military service and naturalized as a Canadian citizen in 1945. He then followed Grierson to UNESCO in Paris for a few years.
He subsequently returned to Britain and continued both his jazz and film work (even working closely with Orson Welles) and subsequently ended up at Granada TV Network, Britain's new “second” channel in 1955, and obtained a British passport in 1959. An invitation to bring his Granada TV innovations to Germany's short-lived Freies Fernsehen (semi-secretly conceived as a political campaign tool for the Adenauer government) resulted in a move to Frankfurt and re-naturalization in the Federal Republic in 1961. Borneman's pugnacious, even confrontational approach to disagreements—and his socialism—did not go over well among the many ex-Nazis there, however, and he spent much of the 1960s working in advertising. He also did foundational work with Radio Bremen's TV station on the jazz show Beat-Club. He nonetheless realized that he was no longer able to speak and write about popular music to young people of the 1960s with much credibility.
These two career acts would have been enough for most. But Borneman's intellectual peregrinations and ceaseless self-fashioning led him to a dramatic third act, one that weaves together streams of his work on jazz in the media in the 1970s, 1980s, and early 1990s. Bornemann moved to rural Austria (yet again changing his citizenship in 1976) and became, in West Germany and Austria, the “sex pope” (294). He wrote about patriarchy, sex and daily life, and childhood sexuality, not only achieving a doctorate from the new leftist University of Bremen (without a day of officially documented university study) but also the honorary title of professor bestowed by the Austrian Ministry of Science in 1977. He spent these decades writing furiously, appearing on television and radio talk shows, writing sex advice columns in the tabloid Neue Revue (at a very lucrative DM2500 per week), and engaging in wide-ranging polemics with major German-language scholars and commentators on sexuality and feminism, including Marieluise Jurreit, Volkmar Sigusch, and Rotraud Perner. Borneman perceived himself as an advocate for women and for non-violent “reciprocity” in sexual relations (264). Feminists did not always return his professed admiration, especially when he advocated, in his 1975 book Das Patriarchat (never translated into English), a future decline and even medically induced elimination of gender–sexual dimorphism. Feminists reasonably saw this as patriarchal thinking in the service of a claim to its opposite. This section of Siegfried's narrative contains, despite its focus on German-language debates and sources, revealing reflections on the transatlantic flow of ideas.
Siegfried's fine writing (and the generally fluid and elegant translation) allows the theoretical scaffold to emerge subtly but clearly. One additional interdisciplinary moment perhaps could have enriched Siegfried's account without weighing it down unnecessarily: more attention to recent work on the history and practices of the body from foundational North American scholars of gender, sexuality, and queer theory like Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Siegfried also might have focused more on the consequences of Borneman's own self-fashioning as a kind of gender-performed correlative of his interpretive approach to cultural life and the politics of bodily practice, than on the narrative of “imagined communities.” But asking that would require a brilliant Continental work of history also to be a North American-style work of theory. That this reviewer can conclude that this would be unnecessary is testament enough to the lasting interdisciplinary and international importance of Siegfried's achievement—and to the justification for theoretically informed biographical methods like these.
