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Zygmunt Bauman, internationally known and revered as the sociologist of postmodernity and of ‘liquid’ society, was for about a decade a serious and dedicated photographer. This book presents his black-and-white photographs from the 1980s, together with a range of essays, by colleagues, friends and family, about his work with images. The importance of his wife, Janina Bauman, in his life and work is acknowledged, with essays on photographs he took of her and also on her work in the film industry in Poland.
Bauman and I were born in Poznan and Melbourne, 1925 and 1953, respectively. These were worlds apart. Yet Melbourne was to become the home for the Budapest School in exile, and for the foundation of the journal Thesis Eleven in 1980. And I was to become a leading publicist for the work of Zygmunt Bauman, this Polish Marxist who found his way into the postmodern via the Holocaust. These Hungarian scholars, along with Zygmunt and Janina Bauman, were to become my friends, and my teachers. Melbourne’s intellectual culture was alive, both because of local innovation and the cultural traffic that also drives the world system. Although I came to do much work on Bauman and his legacy, none of this became so pressing as when he died. I needed to write this out. This memoir emerged as the solution to mourning and depression. I needed to say goodbye, and to move on.
Alongside our annual encounters, Bauman and I were working at a distance between Leeds and Melbourne, first by letter, then by e-mail. I wrote Dialectic of Modernity in Canberra, then collected and edited the materials for The Bauman Reader and the four-volume Zygmunt Bauman and wrote many essays on his work at this distance. This also involved working with Janina Bauman, whose work was indispensable to his own. By the time much of this work was done, Polity Press had emerged as the major promoter of his work, and especially of the idea of Liquid Modernity. I now had to reconsider the status of this idea. It seemed to have more utility than I had imagined, not least with reference to the university system, which was constantly morphing around us.
scratch, though it is also entirely possible that I was by now repeating myself as well. My purpose, however, was to use each fresh opportunity to write about Bauman, to reread and rethink Bauman, for there was inevitably something new to learn or to discover, about me or about him. Call it mimesis, if you will; it involves transfer, learning, and not only repetition. In 2011 I bade farewell to Janina Bauman, together with Sian Supski and others in Thesis Eleven . Our paper followed a line from Janina: what remained after all world-historic hopes had expired was the
process led me to realise that I too belong to a silent survivor family, who, in struggling to make a life in Palestine and then Israel among the ‘new Jews’, who, I argue, were the masculine antithesis of the feminised diaspora and Holocaust, preferred not to speak about ‘there’. The auto/biographical and the intellectual indelibly linked. My work was inspired by Bauman’s seminal Modernity and the Holocaust (1989),’ written in the wake of his wife Janina Bauman’s (1986) memoir of surviving the war, hidden, in the Warsaw ghetto and beyond. Her work helped Bauman see the
later friends, their generational peers, Zygmunt and Janina Bauman. I was too young to be sent to fight in the Vietnam War. I had learned how to live frugally from my parents, but had never wanted. Yet I had become redundant, and I now discovered, on leaving my room, not only that I had to get rid of books but also that I possessed an archive. I was disappearing under a mountain of paper, which now had to go. My professorial suite was stacked with books, but was also dominated by a battery of grey metal filing cabinets. The original, 1970s design of my room included a
specificity or later, path dependence, in which global trends are mediated through local cultures and traditions. Difference always needed to be mediated against similarity. In 2002 I returned to Harvard to act as William Dean Howells Fellow in American literature 1880–1920, in order to conduct research on the work of Edward Bellamy at the Houghton Archive. I took my first trip to Warsaw via Leeds, visiting with Jacek Lewinson, the nephew of Janina Bauman, then to Prague and to Budapest to visit with Ágnes Heller and her son Yuri and his family. Seeing the Palace of
Janina Bauman instead. She makes every word count. There were by now other Baumans also in my life. I had become friends with the twins, especially Lydia. Having worked with the art historian Bernard Smith in the 1990s I had the benefit of a belated and accelerated course of instruction in art. I was happy further to be instructed by Lydia. I found her work and her sense of art history astounding, yet delivered, like her father, with a manner both firm and gentle. There were some good stories from Zygmunt about the pleasures of experiencing your children grow, and
half of those who were exterminated might have been able to save themselves (Arendt 1994: 125). Janina Bauman (1986), in her memoir of experiences as a young girl in Nazi-occupied Warsaw, often refers to the role of Jewish Councils (Judenrate) and the Jewish police who helped the Nazis create order and organise the shipping-out of Jews. Arendt’s view was that Jewish co-operation was an integral and successful part of the Nazi plan of extermination (Arendt 1994: 124), something Bauman himself accepts as being the case (Modernity and the Holocaust: 121–2). Bauman