Ernest Bornemann - Life and Work

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 grew up in relative wealth and 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. In all, until 1968, Borneman wrote six crime novels, all of them in English, under 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 a personal analytic treatment under Roheim.

During his London years Borneman was preoccupied with jazz, both theoretically and practically. He went to all concerts of famous musicians touring Britain such as Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. He played the piano, double bass and drums himself and even went to sea playing in dance bands on transatlantic cruise ships. At home in London, he spent countless hours in the British Museum Reading Room and at other institutions of learning. His notes on the origins and the 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 Canadian prisoner of war camp as an enemy alien. He was later released to work for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation), and on miscellaneous film projects including one with director Orson Welles.

After the war in 1960 Borneman was called back to Germany through German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to build up a state-owned television station called Freies Fernsehen Gesellschaft (FFG, Free TV Company). However this television station could not go on broadcasting upon a decision of the German federal court. After this breakdown Bornemann began studies on scientific sexology, a theme that interested him from his earlier days with Wilhelm Reich and later Géza Roheim. He received a doctorate in 1976 for a comprehensive study of the origin and future of Patriarchy ("Das Patriarchat"). The study, later published as a book, is regarded as perhaps the most important book about this subject. Borneman made many more important psychological and analytical studies about sexuality, language and power and later was appointed to a professorship at the University of Salzburg (Austria). In the 1980s Borneman was regarded as one of the most important and influential sexologists in the German speaking part of the world. The well known German Society for Social-Scientific Sexuality Research (DGSS, or Deutsche Gesellschaft für Sozialwissenschaftliche Sexualforschung) honored 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 due to a tragic love-affair.