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As a jazz musician, filmmaker, anthropologist, sexologist, and crime novelist, the boundlessly curious German autodidact Ernest Borneman exemplified the conflicting cultural and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. In this long-awaited English translation, acclaimed historian Detlef Siegfried chronicles Borneman’s journey from a young Jewish Communist in Nazi Berlin to his emergence as a celebrated (and reliably controversial) transatlantic polymath. Through an innovative structure organized around the human senses, this biography memorably portrays a figure whose far-flung obsessions comprised a microcosm of postwar intellectual life.
“Detlef Siegfried, in his informative, well-written, and reader-friendly biography of Borneman, separates Borneman’s “biographical illusion” … from the undeniable practical heroism of this paradoxical figure.” • Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“Excellent … [Siegfried’s] meticulously researched and entertaining biography will be of great value to those with an interest in the German history of sexology and feminism in the revolutionary phase of 1968 and thereafter, in media and communication history, in jazz and cultural history generally, and in the twentieth-century history of the senses.” • German History
“Detlef Siegfried’s latest book is an exciting and thoroughly readable biography… Following along with the author is a pleasure, as he relates the life of this ‘jack of all trades’ … without hiding behind dull scholarly prose. Such a book is rare.” • H/Soz/Kult
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1. “In me You have Someone on Whom There Is No Relying”: Constants and Constructs
Chapter 2. Hearing: The Ethnology of Jazz
Chapter 3. Seeing: Life on the Big Screen
Chapter 4. Touching: Sex and Society
Conclusion: Bodies along the Roadside
Bibliography
Index