Moderne Lüste

Detlef Siegfried’s excellent biography fills a historiographic hole by devoting sustained attention to a figure who was prominent in several important cultural fields—jazz criticism, film and television, fiction writing and sexology—in a variety of locations from his native Germany to Britain and North America, through to Austria, but who is now, two decades after his death, forgotten. Ernest Borneman has not been subject to a scholarly biography until now, and his own Die Ur-Szene (1977) is a type of ‘semi-autobiography’ or ‘ Wunschautobiographie ’, influenced by a tendency to exaggerate and fabricate, as well as leave out the so-called ‘bodies by the wayside’ ( Leichen am Wegrand ). The reasons for the scholarly neglect are several. First, there is Borneman’s status as autodidact and ‘freelance’ ( Freiberufler ) mostly peripheral to academia. Second, there was his tendency to polarize and provoke disputes with other social critics and public intellectuals, including younger feminists and sexologists, who would have had the expertise properly to examine his role, at least in their own area, but not the inclination. There is also the sheer thematic and geographic breadth of his activities, as well as the volume of his literary estate ( Nachlass ), housed at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin. Yet Siegfried demonstrates well the extent to which a detailed examination of Borneman’s career, including the impassioned disputes, the Leichen and the ambivalences can contribute to our knowledge about important developments in twentieth-century cultural-political thought and practice, across a range of fields. Many of these fields have been concerned in some way or another with a desire for authenticity, which Borneman sometimes followed, but with his migrant, intercultural background, was mostly interested in questioning.

Art · Art history · Biography · Criticism · Jazz · Literature · Political science · Politics · Subject (documents) · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · European history and politics · German History and Society · History · Law