Zygmunt Bauman built his fame writing in his third language
Forced out of Poland in 1968 and made to surrender his citizenship, Zygmunt Bauman restarted his career abroad, settling at the University of Leeds. Writing almost entirely in English, his third language, he became one of the most widely read social theorists of his era, famous for describing modern life as liquid.
Bauman was born in Poznań in 1925 to a non-observant Jewish family. When Germany and the Soviet Union invaded Poland in 1939, the family fled east into the USSR. He joined the Soviet-controlled First Polish Army as a political instructor, fought at Kolberg and in the Battle of Berlin, received the Military Cross of Valour in May 1945, and became one of the army's youngest majors.
His postwar record is more uncomfortable. Poland's Institute of National Remembrance says he served from 1945 to 1953 as a political officer in the Internal Security Corps, a military intelligence unit, though what he actually did there is unknown. Bauman told The Guardian he had been an open, committed Communist, called joining the service at 19 a mistake, and described a dull desk job in which he recalled informing on nobody. In 1953 he was abruptly discharged after his father approached the Israeli embassy about emigrating, a move Bauman, a firm anti-Zionist, resented, causing a temporary rift between them.
Academia followed. He completed a master's degree, began lecturing at the University of Warsaw in 1954, and in 1956 defended a doctorate on the political doctrine of Britain's Labour Party. His Polish book Everyday Sociology found a large audience and later became the English textbook Thinking Sociologically. Influenced by Georg Simmel and Antonio Gramsci, he grew critical of the regime and was never made a professor, although he inherited his mentor Julian Hochfeld's chair in 1962.
During the purge driven by security chief Mieczysław Moczar he quit the ruling party in January 1968 and lost his chair on 25 March. Like many Polish Communists of Jewish descent, he was pushed out of the country. After teaching at Tel Aviv University he took the sociology chair at Leeds in 1970. His work ranged from modernity and the Holocaust to consumerism, and from the late 1990s it influenced the alter-globalisation movement. He died on 9 January 2017.
Source: Zygmunt Bauman
