My Life in Fragments

Zygmunt Bauman was one of the great social thinkers of our time: inventor of the idea of liquid modernity, he transformed our way of thinking about the social conditions shaping our lives today. His own life was shaped by the great social forces that scarred the second half of the twentieth century – war, communism, antisemitism, forced migration. His work bears the traces of an outsider who knew all too well the enormous impact that social and political forces can have on personal lives.

Bauman never wrote a full biography, but he wrote extended letters to his daughters in which he recounted the details of his life – his childhood and schooling; his experiences during the war and its aftermath; his forced emigration from Poland in 1968 and his subsequent life in exile, first in Israel and then in the UK, where he eventually settled at the University of Leeds. This book makes available for the first time these fragments of a life recounted, woven into a compelling autobiographical narrative that is laced with the broader reflections of a master thinker on some of the great issues of our time: identity, antisemitism and totalitarianism.

Notes

1 The Story of Just Another Life?

3 January 1997

4 January

5 January

6 January

9 January

11 January

12 January

16 January

28 January

30 January

31 January

7 February

Notes

2 Where I Came From

Notes

3 The Fate of a Refugee and Soldier

Notes

4 Maturation

Notes

5 Who Am I?

Notes

6 Before Dusk Falls

Notes

7 Looking Back – for the Last Time

Notes

Appendix: Source Material

“Brilliant, witty, sometimes moving autobiographical texts by Zygmunt Bauman, comprehensively annotated by Bauman’s accomplished biographer. Fascinating reading for all interested in Bauman’s scholarly writings.”
Jan Tomasz Gross, Princeton University

“When I read certain authors on war, I find myself engaged in a kind of vastness of complexities. Some wars are simply wars. But other, often less-known wars are devastating in their capacity to alter an epoch, even if this is not immediately evident. In his own way, I find that Zygmunt Bauman invites us to enter what appears as something familiar but opens up gradually to worlds that can transform our understanding of the familiar.”
Saskia Sassen, Columbia University

“a sharp, rewarding insight into one of recent history’s most renowned thinkers… The value of [Bauman’s] books will not last an eternity – but they will continue to be read long enough. My Life in Fragments is among the best of them.”
Danny Dorling, LSE Review of Books

“This chronicle of a soul in relation to society affords a fascinating glimpse into how deeply [Bauman’s] personal experiences inflected both his ideas and the controversies they still excite… this hopeful book is both a beautifully narrated memoir and a reflection on memoir.”
Books and Ideas

“a rich­ly tex­tured series of essays that’ve been gath­ered togeth­er for the first time … My Life in Frag­ments offers rich infor­ma­tion that deep­ens our sense of the bio­graph­i­cal con­text of Bauman’s core ideas.”
Jewish Book Council

Zygmunt Bauman (1925–2017) was Professor of Sociology at the University of Leeds and the author of many influential works, including Modernity and the Holocaust, Liquid Modernity, Strangers at Our Door and Retrotopia.

Izabela Wagner is Professor of Sociology at the Collegium Civitas in Warsaw and the author of Bauman: A Biography.