[ecrea] Zygmunt Bauman dies at age 91

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2017/01/09/world/europe/ap-eu-poland-obit-bauman.html?_r=1
Polish-Born Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman Dies in UK at Age 91

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESSJAN. 9, 2017, 12:24 P.M. E.S.T.

WARSAW, Poland — Zygmunt Bauman, one of the most prominent and prolific 
European sociologists of recent decades, has died at the age of 91. The 
Polish-born left-wing thinker's works explored the fluidity of identity 
in the modern world, the Holocaust, consumerism and globalization.

Bauman died at his home in Leeds, England, on Monday surrounded by his 
family, according to Anna Zejdler-Janiszewska, a Warsaw-based philosophy 
professor and friend of Bauman's who was informed of his death by his wife.

Renowned for an approach that incorporated philosophy and other 
disciplines, Bauman was a strong moral voice for the poor and 
dispossessed in a world upended by globalization. Whether he was writing 
about the Holocaust or globalization, his focus remained on how humans 
can create a dignified life through ethical decisions.

He wrote more than 50 books, notably "Modernity and the Holocaust," a 
1989 release in which he differed with many other thinkers who saw the 
barbarism of the Holocaust as a breakdown in modernity. Bauman viewed 
the mass exterminations of Jews as the very outcome of such pillars of 
modernity as industrialization and rationalized bureaucracy.
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"It was the rational world of modern civilization that made the 
Holocaust thinkable," Bauman wrote.

In the 1990s, Bauman coined the term "liquid modernity" to describe a 
contemporary world in such flux that individuals are left rootless and 
bereft of any predictable frames of reference. In books including 
"Liquid Times" and "Liquid Modernity" he explored the frailty of human 
connection in such times and the insecurity that a constantly changing 
world creates.

"In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we 
take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied 
again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances 
change," Bauman wrote.

In informing friends in Poland of his death Monday, Bauman's wife wrote 
that he had gone "to liquid eternity."

In Poland, he was a controversial figure in some circles. In 2006, a 
right-wing historian uncovered documents showing that Bauman served as 
an officer in a Stalinist-era military organization, the Internal 
Security Corps, which was helping to impose communism on the nation by 
killing resisters to the regime. Bauman acknowledged belonging to that 
unit, but he insisted that he only had a desk job. No evidence has 
surfaced linking him to any killings.

Some nationalists saw him as an enemy of the country.

In 2013, supporters of a far-right organization disturbed a public 
debate with Bauman in the western Polish city of Wroclaw, whistling and 
shouting "Shame!" and "down with communism!" and holding up photos of 
Polish resistance fighters killed by the communists.

After that he stopped visiting his homeland.

Beyond Poland, Bauman's theories were a major influence on the 
anti-globalization movement. He focused on the outcasts and the 
marginalized, describing how many people have seen their chances of a 
dignified life destroyed by the new borderless world. As a result, he 
found a following in Spain and Italy, where young adults were hit 
especially hard by economic dislocation in recent years.

"The key thing was that Bauman did not talk at or down to his audience — 
when he was talking he was listening, when he was teaching he was 
learning. His books and seminars were places where we could come 
together and explore together how to be human," Keith Tester, co-author 
of "Conversations with Zygmunt Bauman" and a former student of Bauman's, 
told The Associated Press on Monday.

Bauman was born Nov. 19, 1925, in Poznan, Poland, into a Polish-Jewish 
family that had suffered poverty and anti-Semitism, something that 
inspired his lifelong belief in tolerance and social justice. Speaking 
decades later of how he became a communist, he recalled his family's 
poverty, the "blows and kicks" inflicted on him by non-Jewish children 
on the playground and "the humiliations which my father, a man of 
impeccable honesty, had to suffer from his bosses to feed his family."

He was not yet 14 when Germany invaded Poland in September 1939 and 
World War II began. His family survived the Holocaust by fleeing to the 
Soviet Union. There, Bauman, still a teenager, joined a Polish army unit 
that was formed under Soviet command, earning Poland's Military Cross of 
Valor for his bravery.

After the war, he rose quickly in the military ranks and by the early 
1950s he had become one of the youngest majors in the Polish army. 
During these years he was a communist and a member of the Polish 
Workers' Party.

In 1953, he was abruptly fired from his army job, apparently the victim 
of the communist regime's anti-Israel stance — Bauman's father had been 
seen making inquiries at the Israeli Embassy about emigrating.

Bauman studied sociology, then philosophy, at the University of Warsaw, 
and was teaching there when the communist regime waged an anti-Semitic 
campaign in 1968. He lost his job and he and his family were expelled 
from the country along with thousands of other Polish Jews.

Though he was a vocal critic of Israel's treatment of the Palestinians, 
once likening the West Bank to the Warsaw Ghetto, Bauman lived and 
taught for a short time in Israel. He lectured at universities in Tel 
Aviv and Haifa from 1969 to 1971, before he and his family settled in 
Britain. Bauman headed the Department of Sociology at the University of 
Leeds until his retirement in 1990 but continued to write prolifically 
even after his retirement, often producing a book a year.

Among his numerous honors were the European Amalfi Prize for Sociology 
in 1992, the Theodor W. Adorno Award in 1998 and the Prince of Asturias 
Award in 2010. The University of Leeds also created the Bauman Institute 
in his honor, dedicated to many of his concerns, including ethics, 
consumerism, globalization and modernity.

Bauman's wife of 62 years, Janina Bauman, died in 2009. He is survived 
by his second wife, Aleksandra Jasinska-Kania, the daughter of postwar 
Polish president Boleslaw Bierut, three daughters and several grandchildren.
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