Zygmunt Bauman, being Jewish in the 20th century

Minimized by what life would teach me years later, the drama of my childhood seems to me more like a grotesque experience. A kind of small-scale anti-Semitism [...] In any case, the most traumatic encounter with my designated persecutors did weigh heavily on the rest of my childhood and once and for all tore away the veil of false security behind which I lived. Once, my mother, after shopping, came to pick me up from school. Those who had the privilege of hunting me down at the time—two unemployed teenagers—were there. The four of us walked back home and [...] all along the way, they dedicated the usual succession of sounds and insults so familiar to me. I looked at my mother. She was holding me very close to her, but she kept her head down, her eyes fixed on the cobblestones [...] My mother, the omnipotent and omniscient, was powerless to defend me; she didn't know what to do! She felt humiliated, she was afraid! From that day on, and for many years, I lived in fear.”

These are lines from My Life in Fragments (Paidós)/ My Life in Fragments (Arcàdia), a book that functions almost as an autobiography in which the Polish sociologist Izabela Wagner, a great biographer of Zygmunt Bauman (Poznan, Poland, 1925-Leeds, 2017), brings together texts written by the father of liquid modernity about his ideas and his eventful life, sometimes to transmit them to his daughters and granddaughters, in such a way that they resemble an autobiography. A biography as shaken by history and political and social forces as the one his theories would later describe.

As a Jewish child in a city, Poznan, where there were hardly any Jews, but which would become a bastion of National Democracy, whose utopia was a life free of Jews, Bauman soon experienced discrimination, insults, kicks and fear and saved his life fleeing the Nazi invasion of 1939, first on a train that was followed by bombing and under which they had to hide, and later fighting against his father's idea of ​​choosing the Jewish village of Izbica to settle in the midst of a strong community where they would help each other: Izbica would be one of the first where a mass murder of the population would take place.

With his parents, they would end up in the USSR, and there Bauman would embrace the communist dream and enlist in the Polish army that fought with the Soviets, where he would remain as a commander in an intelligence unit until being expelled in 1953 again due to the Jewish question, which would end up driving him away from Poland in 1968 in the midst of another purge.

“When I was working on the Bauman biography, I didn't have access to the most private material, but during its development, he died, and months later his family gave me these documents. There was a 54-page manuscript from 1987 titled The Poles, the Jews, and Me . An Investigation into What Made Me What I Am, ” recalls Wagner, who would eventually assemble it with other Bauman texts into this collage, which has appeared in France as an autobiography.

A collage that impacts from a childhood that is almost terrifying. “It was the reality of the Jewish population in Poland. It’s a fairly hidden story because under communism it wasn’t supposed to be talked about, but antisemitism at some point in the 1930s was much greater than in Germany. Exclusion of university students, harassment, and very harsh persecution at all levels of social life, and Bauman suffered even more harassment because his mother chose to live in a non-Jewish Polish district, because pogroms never occurred there. So he lived in a very hostile environment with only the protection of his small family, but thanks to that, he mastered Polish literature and school and was among the best in the entire region. The risk his mother took was intelligent.”

Upon his return to the USSR, to Belarus, fleeing the Nazis, he saw in school “that the promises of equality and the end of discrimination were true, and for the first time he became the best student despite being Jewish and Polish. It wasn't empty propaganda. He felt free for the first time,” says Wagner. He would soon enlist as a soldier to fight against the Nazis in a Polish unit within the Red Army. “When I met him, he even told me 'I'm a soldier,'” Wagner recalls with a smile, a response from Bauman to his dark side. “But his decisions, in my opinion, were the right ones. He ignored the existence of the Gulag, and he was also fighting against fascism.”

Between liquid modernity and liquid love

In his later decades, Zygmunt Bauman became a pop star of sociology with concepts like liquid modernity, liquid society, and liquid love to define the current moment in which the solid realities of our grandparents, such as lifelong work and marriage, have vanished. And they have given way to a more precarious, provisional, eager for novelty, and often exhausting world. “Being flexible means not being committed to anything forever, but rather ready to change your tune, your mind, at any moment. That creates a liquid situation. Like liquid in a glass, where the slightest push changes the shape of the water. And that's everywhere,” he emphasized.

He soon saw that even within the Communist Party, being Jewish was a problem—“he recounts the enormous pressure to change names”—although “he was protected by his superior officer, a hero of the International Brigades. Once his superior was deployed to Korea, he was dismissed from his unit in 1953. They couldn't trust him because he was Jewish, and his father had gone to the Israeli embassy interested in making aliyah.”

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“Since it was impossible to be unemployed in Poland at the time, they sent him to university. There, he was going three times faster than everyone else, but his career stalled when his protector there, his doctoral thesis supervisor, died, and they started sending him messages that he might not be very welcome. He would eventually leave in 1968, the same year that January protests at the University of Warsaw against authoritarianism began. The powers that be feared workers and students uniting, and antisemitism seemed to them a very effective way of pitting people against each other, and they presented a Trotskyist movement as something with a Zionist core. And they mentioned him as a key figure. They told everyone: 'If you feel Zionist, leave, we will help you.' Obviously, they stripped them of everything, and they had to renounce their citizenship. And as soon as Bauman left, they completely silenced his activity, his entire legacy.”

And, Wagner concludes: “He said he was pessimistic when speaking about humanity in the short term and optimistic in the long term. We miss him. And perhaps we should admit that in the current crisis, we intellectuals blame politicians, workers, and others, and perhaps we should admit that we intellectuals aren't looking at ourselves closely enough. He did.”