Book review: My Life in Fragments

After Zygmunt Bauman’s death in January 2017, Mark Featherstone wrote that Bauman ‘was one of the final representatives of this tradition steeped in European history and the horror of utopian projects gone awry’ (Featherstone, 2017: 285). His ‘profound humanity and sense of ethics developed over the course of living through most of the 20th century’; he ‘came from a different age, but it was precisely this difference that gave him perspective, and that made him great’ (Featherstone, 2018). Then in 2020 Izabela Wagner made this ‘different age’ come alive in her landmark Bauman: A Biography in which she masterfully describes Bauman’s early life story from pre-war Poland through wartime Russia to Poland’s post-war reconstruction and construction of communism. To tell this story she drew on extensive historical literature, her own research in the archives, personal interviews and unpublished autobiographical texts that Bauman wrote for his daughters. Now these texts have been edited by Izabela Wagner and published by Polity Press under the title My Life in Fragments. In it, we encounter a Bauman who reflects on his Polish-Jewish identity, on his family history and life story, on his choices, his maturation, his responsibility, his hopes and disappointments. In these personal reflections we do not encounter the public sociological voice of Liquid Modernity or Retrotopia but an intimate reflexive voice and a tone similar to the more personal comments of some of the pages in This Is Not a Diary, Of Gods and Men or On the World and Ourselves, the Bauman who said that as a youth he had burned his fingers on the flames of the deification of man and had to blow on the burns of the bonfires kindled in the encampment of Prometheus (Bauman and Obirek, 2015: 42).

Those who have already read Bauman: A Biography will encounter many parts in My Life in Fragments, which have already been cited by Wagner, though this time not intertwined with her rich historical analysis and political contexts but in the continuous flow of Bauman’s own personal narrative. The reader first finds a short introductive reflection on the sense of narrating one’s life (‘that “something more” that the beads acquire when you string them all together’) (Bauman, 2023: 9) and the possibility of communicating his story to a younger generation that has known a different world (‘they don’t have burnt fingers; and if they do have some blisters, it is not from those fires…How can they grasp those hopes, those dilemmas, those disappointments? We cannot fault them for it. But how are we to talk to them?’) (Bauman, 2023: 29). Then the narration of his family history, growing up as a Polish Jew, the antisemitism, the formation of the image of a just world in the Zionist youth league (for him ‘Zion was a curious world without bullies…There were no Jews and Gentiles, no rich and poor, no haves and have-nots…I emerged determined to change the world. And a socialist’) (Bauman: 2023, 75). The bombs falling on Poznań on the first day of the Nazi invasion, the occupation, his mother sewing a yellow triangle on the back of his coat; then escape and the flight east, becoming a political officer in the Soviet’s Polish Army, the hope of building a different, better Poland after the war (‘within me and all around me, everything was just beginning: beginning anew…the time had come for plans, and thus, also for words – but finally, powerful ones, words that, as never before, could, should and ought to become flesh’) (Bauman, 2023: 114-115).

When writing this, Bauman asked himself whether he could explain that world to younger generations, those hopes, those disappointments, those burnt fingers. Thankfully, we have the fortune of being able to better read and understand his recollections since we already have Bauman: A Biography. It is in that sense fortunate that these autobiographical texts are now published after the biography, so that reading them we know what is at stake in the central chapters in which Bauman takes responsibility for his slow but steady maturation from Stalinist orthodoxy to humanist Marxism and in which he reflects on his Polish-Jewish identity and its stubborn contestation by others. Citing some phrases here would not do justice to these precious pages, which need to be read in their entirety. And with patience, the same patience and understanding of the complexity of reality that are so strikingly absent in the accusations that have been hurled against him by the foot soldiers of simplistic judgements on history.

There are some lighter parts, including a gem of a footnote with long critical reflections on the ‘Kathedersozialismus’ of Žižek and the Leninist impatience of his followers ‘whose fingers have never been burned’ (‘if lady Žižek had not birthed a son, the intellectuals would have had to have invented him’) (Bauman, 2023: 223-224). But the great value of this publication is to sit down with Bauman’s own words and let him recollect, share, take responsibility and explain as we had never been able to witness before. It is indeed discovering and appreciating Bauman all over again. We knew already that Bauman’s sociological writing, as Mark Davis has written, ‘captures what it feels like to live in the human societies of the twenty-first century’ (Davis, 2013: 4); with My Life in Fragments, we get to read what Bauman himself felt like coming from another world, his reflections to take responsibility for his life – his many lives? – in that world, and his continuous commitment to take responsibility in this world, our world.