The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017), inventor of the concept of "liquid modernity," had a vital resilience of diamond-like solidity, like crushed stone. His life was extraordinary. My life in fragments (Arcadia in Catalan and Paidós in Spanish), his biographer Izabela Wagner recovers the author's complete unpublished texts about his childhood and youth in anti-Semitic Poland before the Nazi invasion and in Russia at war with Germany. Today, when hatred of difference has returned to the world stage with crudeness and bravado, Bauman's testimony once again makes perfect sense. What would he think, as a Central European Jew, of what is happening in Ukraine and Gaza? Of Trump, Putin, and Netanyahu? He would certainly stand on the side of freedom and human decency, just as the Talmud says: "A man should always be of the persecuted and not of the persecutors," and it is better "to be cursed than to be the one who curses."
Despite being persecuted as a child for being Jewish and having to flee with his family as a teenager during the Nazi invasion, a very young Bauman enlisted in the Free Polish Army to liberate his contradictory homeland. The most Polish of all was a Polish Jew who, exiled in the land of the Soviets, had internalized the utopia of a free and egalitarian society. He believed it could become a reality in Poland, from where, despite his commitment to reconstruction, disappointed and persecuted, he ended up fleeing in 1968, expelled from the University of Warsaw and becoming the target of a relentless witch hunt. His brilliant academic and essay career continued, first in Tel Aviv and Haifa and then, during a long and fruitful old age, in Leeds.
From his effervescent and vital mother, he inherited the habit of facing reality head on; from his father, taciturn, with strict morals and a lack of practical life, the intellectual zeal. They lived in Poznan in humble conditions. He had a childhood as a fat, Jewish boy, without toys, with few friends: "I didn't ride a bike, I didn't swim, I didn't skate. I didn't even consider playing ball: no one would have accepted me as a member of their team." He devoted himself to reading at the neighborhood library. Poznan, he writes, "managed to combine an almost total lack of Jews with the most insulting anti-Semitic sentiments [...] it became the driving force and bastion of National Democracy," the nationalist right. On his first day of high school, he was hit by "an avalanche of kicks and punches." But he was a brilliant student... And then the Nazis arrived. On the very day of the invasion, the family grabbed four belongings and boarded a train under a hail of bombs. Everything happened to them until they entered Russia.
In the Land of the Soviets, for two and a half years, he suffered from extreme hunger, "twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week," but he was able to continue studying, now in Russian and at university: physics and mathematics. Until he was accepted into the Polish army, brought from Ukraine by veterans of the Spanish Civil War. The day they entered Warsaw victorious, he cried. The next twenty years were a slow transit of hope in the face of defeat. From his position as a philosophy professor, he struggled to accept the evidence of the failed communist ideal. "What is the difference between a communist and an apple? An apple falls when it is ripe, a communist ripens once it has fallen," the joke goes. Years later, famous and respected, he would also distance himself from capitalist freedom and continue to declare himself a socialist.
Bauman's fluid outlook was forged over a slow fire through principles as solid as they were antidogmatic, placing the individual above the system and the nation. A voracious and addicted reader, endowed with an extraordinary memory and a great capacity for work—every day he sat in front of his computer writing from six in the morning until noon—his memories serve as a warning to us today against the authoritarian and xenophobic trend that is taking a world where they are spreading like wildfire. "Drawing the line between us and them blurs the line between good and evil."
