Zygmunt Bauman is known worldwide as a sociologist who wrote groundbreaking works during his time at the University of Leeds. But few know Bauman's life before Great Britain: as a Polish Jew, he survived the Holocaust in the Soviet Union, became a soldier, an employee of the Ministry of Public Security, a scholar and once again: a refugee. We will follow the eventful lives of Zygmunt and his wife Janina Bauman in a lecture and discussion with sociologist Izabela Wagner. The focus here will be on Bauman's life, experiences and self-reflections with regard to his multiple belongings – not on his academic work.

Izabela Wagner published the comprehensive study »Bauman. A Biography« in 2020. As a distinguished sociologist and intellectual historian she tells Bauman’s life through the fundamental problem of his Jewish-Polish belongings. While working on the biography, Wagner learned about unpublished texts, which Bauman himself had written autobiographically in Polish and English. The texts were published in German in 2023 in the volume »Fragmente meines Lebens«, edited by Izabela Wagner. In the discussion, we will explore the differences between the text variants and the reasons for this and explore how to deal with this as an editor.