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.

Introduction 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