22 June 2013: Wrocław

The location is a 600-seat university lecture hall in Wrocław, a picturesque city built on twelve islands in the meandering Oder River that has fully recovered its glory after utter and almost complete destruction during World War II. The hall is packed beyond capacity with university students and faculty, with young people crowding the steps or standing along the walls next to TV cameras covering the lecture. The globally renowned intellectual Zygmunt Bauman is today’s distinguished speaker. This tall, slim 88-year-old sits on the stage between the organizer and the Wrocław Mayor, Rafał Dudkiewicz, with two bodyguards hired by the university standing nearby. The tension is high. Two months earlier, the French-German leftist politician Daniel Cohn-Bendit had cancelled a lecture here due to death threats. Again, today, the organizers fear disruption by xenophobic nationalistic groups.

Bauman is an excellent speaker. Several of his books (of the more than fifty he has published) are bestsellers, written in a style accessible to a wide public. His vision of the world is an inspiration to engaged youth and social movements. Bauman is the rare intellectual who has become a celebrity, and his talks attract thousands of people when he’s travelling, from Italy to Brazil and from Greece to Portugal. He also, of course, has a public in Poland. The topic of today’s lecture is the ideals of the Left, old and new, and the challenges faced by leftist movements in the current configuration of capitalism.¹

As the mayor takes the microphone to say a few words, he is drowned out by people at the back of the lecture hall who have entered at the last minute, as well as others planted in the crowd – about 100 in total. They yell abuse, wave their arms, making fists and threatening those onstage. ‘Dudkiewicz, why did you invite him?’, they shout. ‘Communism out! Nuremberg for communists!’ ‘The communists will hang!’ Some of the protesters ‘raise their hands in the Nazi salute’, event organizer Adam Chmielewski will recall later.² Bauman looks concerned – nervous, though not panicked. The astonished university public seems unable to believe what they see with their own eyes.

One of the slogans screamed by the protesters is ‘NSZ – National Armed Forces!’ They are referring to the radical nationalist military underground group that fought the Nazis and also the Polish Left during and after World War II.³ As a young man, in the immediate aftermath of the war, Bauman had been an officer in the KBW, an intelligence unit of the Polish Army that chased down the remnants of the NSZ. That story is old – more than sixty-five years old – but these right-wing radicals act as if it happened yesterday. They have reclaimed the mantle of the NSZ and its radical nationalist, xenophobic anti-Semitism. Some wear T-shirts with the acronym of the NOP (National Rebirth of Poland),⁴ the party that organized the protest with the ONR (National Radical Camp).⁵ Both groups use the symbol of the falanga which anti-Semitic and fascist groups employed on their flags in the interwar periods (Cała, 2012). They carry banderoles – narrow banners of the type used by groups that organized anti-Semitic riots at Polish universities in the 1930s.

After several minutes, the police arrive, to applause from the university audience. The aggressive group leaves the hall, promising to return. They leave Bauman sitting alone, completely folded upon himself. He will give his talk, but no one will remember it. They will only remember the thugs, who show that fascism still has the power to seduce young people, and that there are those who refuse to accept the right of people like Zygmunt Bauman to identify themselves as Poles.

In the remaining years of his life, Bauman would not comment publicly on the incident. But the slogans and symbols employed by the protesters were familiar to him from his childhood in Poznań, where he suffered from anti-Semitic bullying and racial laws that forced him and other Jews to sit on the ‘ghetto bench’ at school (Tomaszewski, 2016: 206–19). Perhaps he felt that his life had made a complete circle, or that the old forces were coming back again. The twentieth-century utopia he had hoped for – an end to wars, the disappearance of racial and ethnic conflicts and the possibility of an equal society – all these seemed to be gone. The world was confronting an old ghost, the xenophobe’s hate of the ‘other’.

Why was Bauman such a target of hate? Why did these young people want to put him in jail? What had he done that made him such a scapegoat for part of Polish society? And how could the same person be acclaimed and admired by millions of people and hated by others?

Who was Zygmunt Bauman?

Bauman, who died in 2017, was a sociologist, philosopher and public intellectual. He became known to other sociologists in the 1960s, when, as a young Polish scholar, he gave presentations at international conferences, and became well known among a wider academic community with the publication of Modernity and the Holocaust (1989). This book won awards and was recognized as an important contribution to understanding the Shoah, and as an important critique of modernity. Bauman, a remarkably disciplined scholar and writer who learned about communication on the front lines as a messiah of socialism to illiterate Polish soldiers, went on to become a key figure in the development of post-modernist theory; his eclecticism and humanist approach inspired Bauman’s colleagues to call him the ‘modern Simmel’ (after the eminent German sociologist Georg Simmel).

After his retirement, Bauman stepped out of the confines of academic writing and pursued a larger, younger audience. It was an unconventional step for a 75-year-old scholar, but a remarkably successful one. A retired British professor, a Polish Jew by birth, he was embraced by readers around the world following the publication of his groundbreaking book Liquid Modernity (2000), which became an almost overnight bestseller. The books that followed popularized Bauman’s vision further, and his analysis of contemporary Western societies struck a chord with millions of readers, making him one of the most prolific, widely read and influential intellectuals in the twenty-first century. Bauman presented his vision of the world in a way that spoke to people. He was cited by journalists, writers, activists, artists and also scholars and public intellectuals. He captured the speed and permanent modifications of the world and was seen as an oracle, although Bauman never pretended to predict the future. He would say that the world filled him with pessimism, but the remarkable creativity of humans provided some reserve of optimism. This was the voice of an elderly intellectual whose experiences of war and escape, discrimination and persecution made him particularly attentive to the processes that led to war and dictatorship.

Bauman was discreet about his private life. In our interviews for this book, he would often say that his biography was typical for his generation and had not particularly influenced his work.⁶ But, after learning the details of his life, I was convinced of the opposite – his work is deeply grounded in personal experience, especially the series of traumatic events that began in his childhood and lasted into his  forties. In an unpublished manuscript (Bauman, 1986/7) addressed to his children and grandchildren, Bauman revealed the interstices of this life and, in the process, acknowledged as much.

Bauman sought to build a better world. In the different phases of his adult life, he was never a passive observer of society, but rather an activist who lived by his ideals. He was a witness to and a participant in many of the tragic events that fundamentally transformed our world – experiencing anti-Semitism as a youth in Poland, a flight from the Nazis, an exiled life in Soviet Russia, hunger, the soldier’s life of combat, the life of a communist propagandist in the implementation of a pro-Soviet regime in Poland, the collapse of Stalinism, and the interplay between authoritarianism and partial democratization in postwar Poland. Bauman was twice a refugee, in 1939–44 and in 1968. He did not choose a nomadic life, but it was thrust upon him. For most of his life, Bauman tried his best to be a good Pole, but Poland did not accept him as one. His Polish identity was contested by anti-Semitic rules, laws and persecution – Bauman’s perception of his identity was not accepted by those who controlled it from the outside.

The feeling of identity (Who am I?) and master status (How do others perceive me?) are two axes that cross in the book you are reading.

Here, I am thinking with Everett Hughes (Chicago’s leading sociologist), who presented in 1945 the concept of master status. With this term, he defines the social identity imposed by others.⁷ Contradiction of status occurs when someone tries to play a social role while lacking the necessary features expected by society. This situation occurs often when people from discriminated groups occupy prestigious positions, or try to.

Already, as a child, Bauman could not be accepted as first in his school class, despite his superior results, because he was a Jew, and the top spot was reserved for a non-Jewish Pole. Master status in this case was a major factor in determining and limiting his social roles. This continued through much of Bauman’s life in Poland: the tension between his self-identity – Pole – and the master status imposed by those around him – Jew. His experience was a common one in Poland. Bauman had many other roles: student, soldier, officer, scholar, academic, father, emigrant and immigrant. But the status that dominated was his ethnic-cultural origin, which imposed perceptions and strongly influenced his interactions with others.

On a personal level, he learned how the tribal behaviour of societies divides people into ‘us’ and ‘them’ – the ‘conflict’, as Bauman wrote, ‘about whose blood is redder’. Bauman wrote constantly about this issue, seeing it as the origin of humanity’s problems. Certainly, his own life would never be entirely free of the torments of tribalism.

In the first part of Bauman’s life, he was affected by extreme forces that stripped agency and the sense of empowerment from individuals. This dynamic probably shaped his conviction that life consists of hazardous situations, that a person’s control over his or her life was severely limited, and that individual character may enable possibilities for adjustment to a given situation, but the situation is determined by history and politics. This vision of human beings entrapped by a powerful world outside their control is contrary to the ideology popular in the second part of the twentieth century, which presents the individual as the shaper of his or her fate. While the neoliberal world was claiming ‘If you want you can get it’, Bauman stated the opposite. He described a society whose ideology leads its citizens to believe their agency is confirmed by consumption – an omnipresent illusion of the power of the individual.

His books, addressed to readers in Western society, stated that, while capitalism promised that happiness could be achieved through purchases and consumption, instead it destabilized everything that civilizations had created: social relations, love, rules, morality, values – in Bauman’s terms, it ‘liquified’ them. The once-solid processes and rules of the ‘modern’ era, with its sense of constant development and progress, were now liquid, characterized by a taste for the new, the next and best solutions, innovation for its own sake. The feeling of ‘liquidity’ – its temporality and lack of stability – characterized our times. The previous mode of life, perceived as solid, fixed and clear, was giving way to something new, not yet really established – a kind of work in progress. Our own times were an in-between period, during which each member of a developed society had to be flexible, because previous frameworks, rules and values were no longer available. Precarity was the consequence of our societies’ modifications.

In the Liquid World, everything changes so quickly that it brings the feeling that life is provisional. Liquid Times are defined by uncertainty. If, in previous generations, large numbers of people spent their whole lives in the same workplace, with the same occupation, and frequently the same partner and family living in the same house, residents of the Liquid World were obliged to change their workplace and occupation, adapting themselves to the dynamic environment. This contextual instability is related to a high degree of geographic mobility. The liquidity dynamic modified social relationships, which became fragile. Social ties became brittle, increasing people’s solitude. The persistent belief that buying the latest product in fashion would make us happy was a powerful illusion. This is the Baumanian deconstruction of our Western societies.

Bauman knew a lot about illusions, beliefs, belonging and engagement. He was a former missionary for socialism, who learned lessons from engagement in seeking to build a new society during the first part of his life, then spent the second part of his life telling people about the danger of inhuman engagements and beliefs. His transformation was different from that of colleagues who, criticizing their earlier belief systems, jumped headlong into new, opposing ones (from communism to capitalism). Bauman kept his values and dreams about social justice, but critically analysed the systems that were being produced, ostensibly to achieve noble goals.⁸

This book, the first extensive biography of Bauman, places his work in the context of his life, and hopefully will enable readers of his work to revisit his books with deeper insight into their messages, which emanate not only from Bauman’s voluminous scholarship and thought, but also from his iconic life experiences.