The gas chambers of Auschwitz were not an irrational aberration, a failure of civilisation or the product of a particular form of German nationalism. Rather, they were the logical product of the Enlightenment, argued Zygmunt Bauman in Modernity and the Holocaust, a contentious thesis published in 1989.
Some felt that he was downplaying the specific nature of German nationalism in the 1930s. Others charged that he was “letting Germany off the hook”; ironically, they said, he seemed to possess the same mentality as those concentration camp bureaucrats in ascribing horrors to impersonal forces rather than demanding individual culpability.
More recently Bauman used the example of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789 — where intentions and practices differed widely — to claim that Theresa May, as home secretary, was wrong to propose in 2014 that Britons suspected of being a threat to national security should be stripped of their citizenship. “Were the proposition to become law, then apart from a small number of politicians hoping to secure another term in parliament through the ploy of ‘being seen to act decisively’ . . . the sole people rubbing their hands with joy are likely to be recruiting officers of the terrorist networks and criminal gangs,” he argued.
Bauman, like Michel Foucault, believed that a central feature of modernity was the urge to dominate, divide and classify. Binary oppositions are solidified between “the self” and “the other”. The Nazis found intolerable the idea of the alien “other” Jew — which scientists had “proven” to be inferior — living within the borders of the “self”, the German Reich. In both its ideology and methods, wrote Bauman, the Holocaust was modern. It was an industrial slaughter that employed modern technology; its victims were rationally classified and logged meticulously. Furthermore, it was carried out by a modern bureaucracy in which the rationalised division of labour ensured that moral responsibility was diluted to the point that it practically vanished: its perpetrators were, so to speak, only obeying orders. The Holocaust had revealed the hidden possibilities of modern society, such as turning normal people into murderers.
Bauman also argued that the way the Holocaust is now remembered is dangerous. “The risk . . . is not that it will be forgotten but that it will be embalmed and surrounded by monuments and used to absolve all future sins,” he said. “When [Dick] Cheney, [Tony] Blair and [Silvio] Berlusconi go to celebrate the memory of the Holocaust, it acts in such a way that it allows them to say, ‘Whatever we do is against evil’.”
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With his charming and reclusive manner, overhanging eyebrows and habit of interrogating journalistic interviewers like undergraduates in a tutorial, Bauman was a fascinating and formidable intellect. Sitting in his sun-dappled living room in his comfortable home in a leafy suburb just off Leeds ring road, he enjoyed posing bracing questions to visitors and blowing puffs of smoke from his professor’s pipe.
He was renowned for his eclecticism and for his critical but never carping assessments of western civilisation in the age of advanced capitalism. He also had a profound mistrust of the values of the Enlightenment. “Modernity”, the manifestation of the Enlightenment that came to realisation in the age of reason in the 18th century and the industrial age in the 19th century, strove to establish order, certainty and absolute truth. However, in doing so, he asserted, it sought to eradicate ambivalence and difference.
“He said social media was a trap, giving an illusion of community
Zygmunt Bauman was born in 1925 in Poznan, western Poland, to Jewish parents, Moritz, an accountant, and Sophia (née Cohn), although his upbringing was secular. “My mother was a woman of great ambition, inventiveness and imagination, but we were relatively poor and she was confined to the housewife role,” he said.
He narrowly escaped being a victim of the Holocaust when the family fled on the last train east to Russia in 1939 — instead they almost lost their lives to German bombers because his ever-honest father was running round the station trying to find someone who would accept payment for their tickets.
As a teenager he joined the Polish army in exile, receiving military honours, reading Marx, studying physics and writing political pamphlets for soldiers. This inspired him to join the Communist Party and in 1954 he took a post at the University of Warsaw. His party membership came back to haunt him in 2007 when evidence emerged that he had also worked for the Polish secret service. “I bear full responsibility,” he said, a response that was in keeping with his thoughts in Modernity and the Holocaust on the need to take personal responsibility for one’s actions.
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However, the invasion of Hungary in 1956 sparked a growing disillusionment with Soviet communism and by the 1960s he was one of a coterie of revisionists who came to champion “humanistic Marxism”. Now, he claimed, the secret service was spying on him. “I was reported on, my flat bugged, my telephone bugged, and so on,” he said. In 1968 he was a victim of an antisemitic purge at the university.
He joined the University of Tel Aviv, but never felt comfortable. “It was a nationalistic country and we had just run away from nationalism,” his wife said. He moved to the University of Leeds in 1970 from where he could have moved on, but was content to stay in West Yorkshire, where he enjoyed encounters with students on the busy campus.
At Leeds his first publication was Between Class and Elite, The Evolution of the British Labour Movement (1972), a subject that he had studied at Warsaw. Subsequent work included Socialism: The Active Utopia (1976), Memories of Class: The Pre-history and After-life of Class (1982) and Legislators and Interpreters — On Modernity, Post-Modernity and Intellectuals (1987). It was not until Modernity and the Holocaust that he came to wider attention with prose marked by bracing elegance — quite an achievement for someone for whom English was his third language.
Inverting Freud’s thesis that we have traded freedom for security, Bauman maintained that we have traded security for freedom, which has thrown up new problems. In Liquid Love (2003) he investigated our age of anxiety and rootlessness. We seek security, but are not prepared to sacrifice our freedoms to attain it. We are constantly speaking on our mobile phones, sending text messages. Social media is a trap, he argued, and the constant flow of messages gives the illusion of community.
Even the concepts of love and sex have been rendered problematic in that being so accustomed to exercising “choice”, we demand to find perfect partners who will give us, like any other commodity, instant satisfaction.
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While his diagnosis was gloomy, he did not resign himself to political quietism, continuing to call himself a socialist. “I was left wing. I am left wing, and I will die left wing — hopefully,” he said.
In 1948 he married Janina Lewinson, whom he met at Warsaw University, proposing after a nine-day romance. She provided visitors with home-baked goodies and him with inspiration. It was her book Winter in the Morning (1985), based on her suffering in the Warsaw ghetto, that turned his attention to the Holocaust. “I write to alert people that we are still living in a society where the potential to repeat this exists,” he told The Jewish Chronicle in 2004. Janina died in 2009 and in 2015 he married Aleksandra Jasinska-Kania, who survives him with three daughters: Anna, a professor of mathematics; Lydia, an artist; and her twin Irena, an architect.
Bauman was still writing long into retirement. Hobbies, he once said, “are for people who find mainstream life uninteresting.” Asked who were his greatest influences, he replied Antonio Gramsci, Georg Simmel and his wife. “Gramsci told me what, Simmel how, and Janina what for.” Gramsci, he said, had liberated him from the determinism of Hegelian Marxism, Simmel gave him direction as to what methods to employ, and his wife taught him that sociology could make a difference.
Professor Zygmunt Bauman, sociologist, was born on November 19, 1925. He died on January 9, 2017, aged 91