Bauman

A Biography

Izabela Wagner

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781509526895
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Sociologia

Global thinker, public intellectual and world-famous theorist of 'liquid modernity', Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a scholar who, despite forced migration, built a very successful academic career and, after retirement, became a prolific and popular writer and an intellectual talisman for young people everywhere. He was one of those rare scholars who, grey-haired and in his eighties, had his finger on the pulse of the youth. This is the first comprehensive biography of Bauman's life and work. Izabela Wagner returns to Bauman's native Poland and recounts his childhood in an assimilated Polish Jewish family and the school experiences shaped by anti-Semitism. Bauman's life trajectory is typical of his generation and social group: the escape from Nazi occupation and Soviet secondary education, communist engagement, enrolment in the Polish Army as a political officer, participation in the WW II and the support for the new political regime in the post-war Poland. Wagner sheds new light on the post-war period and Bauman's activity as a KBW political officer. His eviction in 1953 from the military ranks and his academic career reflect the dynamic context of Poland in 1950s and 1960s. His professional career in Poland was abruptly halted in 1968 by the anti-Semitic purges. Bauman became a refugee again - leaving Poland for Israel, and then settling down in Leeds in the UK in 1971. His work would flourish in Leeds, and after his retirement in 1991 he entered a period of enormous productivity which propelled him onto the international stage as one of the most widely read and influential social thinkers of our time. Wagner's biography brings out the complex connections between Bauman's life experiences and his work, showing how his trajectory as an 'outsider' forced into exile by the anti-Semitic purges in Poland has shaped his thinking over time. Her careful and thorough account will be the standard biography of Bauman's life and work for years to come.

1
A Happy Childhood ‘Under Such Circumstances’

Poznań (1925–1932)

A significant birth place, a critical time …

Zygmunt Bauman was born on 19 November 1925 in Poznań in Poland. The morning edition of the most popular local newspaper, Kurjer Poznański, carried news that day direct from Rome. ‘Enthusiastic ovations in honour of Mussolini’, it reported. ‘Fantastic speech by the Prime Minister at the opening session of Parliament. Today’s session of the chamber of deputies began in an ambiance of extreme excitement, full of enthusiasm and cheerful guests in honor of Mussolini’ (Kurjer Poznański, R. 20, 19 November 1925; evening edition, p. 2).

The evening edition of the Kurjer contained Part Seven in a series of articles entitled ‘Society of Poznań District and Pomerania in Reconstructed Poland’,¹ written by the well-known nationalist politician Roman Dmowski.² The first part of the text was published on 12 November, the day after the seventh anniversary of the independence of the new Polish state, following 123 years of partition by Russia, Prussia and the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Dmowski underlined the importance of the nationalistic awareness of the masses. There was a matter of great importance, that of uniformly closing ranks against the Jews, a task in which Poznań could be said to lead (R. 20, 19 November 1925; evening edition, p. 2). This was the world into which Zygmunt Bauman was born.

It was a less than auspicious day for those who belonged to this ‘ethnic minority’ – a term that was not in use at the time. Jews had lived on Polish soil for over 1,000 years, but the majority considered them ‘outsiders’, ‘others’ – less than full members of Polish society. The situation of Polish Jews differed from that of Jews in France or Germany, where from the late eighteenth century there was a greater degree of assimilation. In Poland, Jewishness was not only a religious status; Jews were portrayed as distinct in many categories – culture, nationality, ethnicity – to demonstrate that, although they had lived for centuries on the same ground as Catholic Poles, they were a distinct people.

In a private essay addressed to his daughters years later,³ Bauman explained the situation of the Polish Jew in its historical context:

I cannot avoid history. History decreed that the state of ‘being Polish’ has been through centuries a question of decision, choice and action. It has been something one had to fight for, defend, consciously cultivate, vigilantly preserve. ‘Being Polish’ did not mean guarding the already well formed and marked frontiers, but rather drawing the yet-not-existing boundaries – making realities rather than expressing them. There was in Polishness a constant streak of uncertainty, ‘until-further-noticeness’ – a kind of precarious provisionality that other, more secure nations know little about.

Under such circumstances one could only expect that the besieged, incessantly threatened nation would obsessively test and re-test the loyalty of its ranks. It would develop an almost paranoiac fear of being swamped, diluted, overrun, disarmed. It would look askance and with suspicion at all newcomers with less-than-foolproof credentials. It would see itself surrounded by enemies, and it would fear more than anybody else the ‘enemy within’.

Under such circumstances one should also accept that the decision to be a Pole (particularly if it was not made for one by the ancestors so distant that the decision had time to petrify into rock-solid reality) was a decision to join in a struggle with no assured victory and no prospect that victory would ever be assured. For centuries, people did not define themselves as Poles for the want of easy life. Those who did define themselves as Poles could rarely be accused of opting for comfort and security. In most cases, they deserved unqualified moral praise and whole-hearted welcome.

That the same circumstances should lead to consequences pointing in opposite directions, clashing with each other and ultimately coming into conflict – is illogical. Well, blame the circumstances. (Bauman, 1986/7: 21–2)

Defining oneself as a Pole was an individual decision, but one that had to be confirmed by the host society. To speak of the ‘assimilation’ of Jews, or an identity that fused Polish and Jewish culture, was not only a matter of personal identification but one that inevitably involved Polish society as a whole. In this case, ‘the circumstances’ Bauman spoke of were different from those that enabled the assimilation of Jews in France and Germany before the arrival of Nazism. There was a saying, popular in the twentieth century – and still today – that, while one could be a French Jew or an American Jew, there was no such thing as a Polish Jew. You had to choose – one or the other!⁴

Bauman explained this specific case of the Polish identity from the longue durée perspective:⁵ ‘It is one of the mysteries of social psychology that groups that ground their identity in will and decision tend to deny the right of self-definition to others; by questioning and denigrating the validity of self-determination they wish perhaps to suppress and forget the frail foundation of their own existence. This is what happened in the inter-war Poland’ (Bauman, 1986/7: 21–2).

Historian Paweł Brykczyński in Ready for Violence: Murder, Anti-Semitism and Democracy in Interwar Poland, argues that anti-Semitic nationalism was a major force in culture and politics to a greater extent than some Polish historians are ready to admit:⁶ ‘Certainly, it was not a hegemonic force. Anti-Semitic nationalism faced strong competition, led by gifted and charismatic political leaders such as Piłsudski,⁷ created by strong socialist, radical, liberal and moderate conservative camps who gathered around him’ (Brykczyński, 2017: 28–9). Brykczyński suggests that the essence of the conflict between Dmowski and Piłsudski’s supporters – paraphrasing Benedict Anderson⁸ – involved different ways of constructing imaginary communities (Brykczyński, 2017: 36–7). While for Piłsudski Polish society included all Polish citizens, without regard to religion or ethnicity, for Dmowski, Polish status was reserved for Catholics. Thus, the problem of anti-Semitism played a key role in the conflict between supporters of Dmowski and of Piłsudski.

In interwar Poland, relationships between the two neighbouring communities were dynamic, with strong distinctions from region to region, based on which of the tripartite powers had ruled in each. Under partition, the rules of housing and access to the professions and occupations were different under the tsars and kaisers, and the demography of the Jewish populations also differed. Poznań – the capital city of the Wielkopolska region – in 1921 had 169,422 inhabitants, of whom only 1.2% were Jews.⁹ This demographical situation was exceptional for Poland’s larger cities, where, after the rebirth of the independent state (1918), Jews made up around a third of the population (1921 data showed Warsaw was 33.13% Jewish; Łódź, 34.6%; Kraków, 25%). It is apparently why Dmowski was so enthusiastic about Poznań, with its modest proportion of Jews and ‘patriotic attachment to the Polish nation’.¹⁰ The language of the period included a word zażydzenie (Jew-infestation, or Jewification).¹¹ The Warsawian Dictionary from 1927 defines the term as ‘polluting by Jews … filling a territory with Jews, to overcrowd with Jews’. As an example of usage, the authors of the dictionary cite the novel Marzyciel (Dreamer), by Władysław Reymont, the 1924 Nobel Prize-winner, whose hero states: ‘I will die there and forget about this stinking, Jew-infested country.’ It was frequently noted in newspapers and magazines that Poznań was one of Poland’s less ‘Jew-infested’ cities.

In an earlier section of Dmowski’s Kurjer Poznański series, he refers to Poznań’s advance in the ‘process of civilization … Wielkopolska, as the oldest and most occidental part of Poland, was more civilized than the other parts. Before it had even more Germans and fewer Jews [than today]’ (R. 20, evening edition, 13 November 1925). Once again, the prevalence of Jews is associated directly with the progress of civilization. ‘Economic development’ was the scientific camouflage for well-developed, widespread anti-Semitism.

Anti-semitism was strong in Poznań in 1925, although the presence of Jews in the city was much lower than it had been only a decade before. In the late nineteenth century through to 1918, Jews were an important part of Poznań’s economic and political life. In those years, the Jewish population identified strongly with Germany and its situation was similar to that of other Jewish communities in Prussia. Three ethnic groups – Prussian Germans, Poles and Jews – co-existed in a city whose business language was German. Polish was spoken at home, but the Germanization policy imposed by Bismarck discriminated against the use of Polish in public places. Unsurprisingly, National Democrats looked back on this period with disgust:

In 1853, naturalized Jews were elected to the city council for the first time; their number exceeded the number of Polish delegates, worsening the far-from-perfect relationship with the Polish population … For Poles striving to regain their lost independence, Germanized Jews who flaunted their Prussian loyalty and servility became in some cases a more hostile group than the Germans themselves. Jews of Poznań would experience this hostility particularly poignantly after WWI. (From the official site of the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews)¹²

At the end of World War I, Germans and Poles struggled for control of the territories around Poznań, culminating in the Wielkopolska Uprising of 1918–19. The strongly Germanized Jewish population of the region supported the Weimar Republic in this confrontation, believing that Poland’s newly independent state would not last. When Poland definitively took control of Wielkopolska, most Jewish families left the city for German-controlled territories – these were Jews who had ‘betrayed’ the Polish state by supporting Germans in Poznań. At the same time, the 1917 October Revolution brought ‘Eastern Jews’ – often bourgeois families fleeing the Soviet Union – to Poznań, where they supported the Polish state. Despite this, anti-Semitism increased, an artefact of Polish nationalistic muscleflexing in the interwar years. Poznań’s Polish-Catholic inhabit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction
• 1 A Happy Childhood ‘Under Such Circumstances’: Poznań (1925–1932)
• 2 A Pupil Like No Other: Poznań (1932–1939)
• 3 The Fate of a War Refugee (1939–1944): Poznań–Molodeczna
• 4 Russian Exodus, 1941–1943: Gorki and the Forest
• 5 ‘Holy War’: 1943–1945
• 6 Officer of the Internal Security Corps: 1945–1953
• 7 ‘A Man in a Socialist Society’: Warsaw 1947–1953
• 8 A Young Scholar: 1953–1957
• 9 Years of Hope: 1957–1967
• 10 Bad Romance with the Security Police
• 11 The Year 1968
• 12 Holy Land: 1968–1971
• 13 A British Professor
• 14 An Intellectual at Work
• 15 Global Thinker
• Conclusion: Legacy
• Appendix: Working on Bauman
• Bibliography
• Index
• Ebook plates
• End User License Agreement